Nathan Englander's 'Talk About Anne Frank'

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK, by Nathan Englander. Alfred A. Knopf, 207 pp., $24.95.

Give Nathan Englander credit for chutzpah. The title of his new book of short fiction, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," draws on two iconic antecedents: the young diarist killed at Bergen-Belsen and the Raymond Carver story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." Each, in its way, informs the collection; each helps to set the terms. And what are those terms? The tension between the religious and the secular, between the American setting of much of this work and the more elusive textures of Jewish life.

For Englander -- a self-proclaimed "apostate," raised in an Orthodox community in West Hempstead, now living in Brooklyn by way of Jerusalem -- this tension is a defining issue.

The triumph of the collection is Englander's ability to find, even as he's calling it unfindable, the deeper story, the more nuanced narrative. Take "Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother's Side." Broken into 63 numbered sections, it is a story about the narrator's search for a viable story. Did his grandfather's brother die of a brain tumor or was it an infection after being struck by a car? Did his cousin-in-law Theo really shoot a dog with a .22 handgun when he was 3 years old?

The answer is that it doesn't really matter, that the myth bears more meaning if it resonates with the weight of truth.

For Englander, this weight of truth is significant, since he can tilt toward the magical realist or, more precisely, toward the tradition of Jewish fable writing as embodied by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem. Several stories in his first collection, 1999's "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges," are marked by such an aesthetic, and here, he returns to it with "The Reader," about a once-famous novelist who reads every night to the same diminished audience of one, or "Peep Show," in which a lawyer goes to a Times Square sex club, only to find his childhood rabbis, his wife and his mother posing before his confused and guilty gaze.

The best stories here function as fables of their own. "Sister Hills" describes a West Bank settlement, founded before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which even as it develops into a city cannot get out from under the shadow of a deal made between its two original families. In "How We Avenged the Blums," yeshiva boys learn to defend themselves against a bully known only as "the anti-Semite."

"Do you know which countries have no anti-Semite?" the boys' self-defense instructor, a Soviet refusenik named Boris, asks them. "The country with no Jew."

Nowhere is this evoked more vividly than in the title story. Built around two couples, one secular and the other Hasidic, it takes place, like the Carver story before it, around a kitchen table, as they drink and smoke dope and talk.

The couples here are very different, linked because the wives were high school friends, but over the course of a long afternoon, the distance between them waxes and wanes, as they argue over identity. "Judaism is a religion," declares Mark, now Yerucham. "And with religion comes ritual. Culture is nothing. Culture is some construction of the modern world."

And yet it is he who must confront his limitations as the couples play "the Anne Frank game," wondering who will hide them -- and who might betray them -- were a second Holocaust to come. There's no escaping history, although there's no certainty either about what any of it means. Who will hide us? Who are we, really? How do ritual and culture intersect?

Such questions exist at the heart of this accomplished collection, in which stories are what make us who we are.

Nathan Englander shares five favorite short stories

1. THE NOSE by Nikolai Gogol, in "Collected Tales" (Everyman's Library)

2. THE STORY OF MY DOVECOTE by Isaac Babel, in "Collected Stories" (Norton)

3. GOODBYE, MY BROTHER by John Cheever, in "The Stories of John Cheever" (Vintage)

4. THE CONVERSION OF THE JEWS by Philip Roth, in "Goodbye, Columbus" (Vintage)

5. PEOPLE LIKE THAT ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE HERE by Lorrie Moore, in "Birds of America" (Vintage)