Shalom, Stranger

Auslander's American Life

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, December 28, 2009

A nine-year-old boy goes to a swimming pool Snack Shack and orders a Slim Jim. No biggie. Unless, of course, he’s an Orthodox Jew.


Auslander grew up in Monsey, an ultra-orthodox enclave in Rockland County. He’s a frequent contributor to NPR’s “This American Life,” reading short fiction from his collection Beware of God (Picador, 2006) and essays about an upbringing he likens to that of a veal calf. From Foreskin’s Lament: “The people of Monsey were terrified of God, and they taught me to be terrified of Him, too—they taught me about a woman named Sarah who would giggle, so He made her barren; about a man named Job who was sad and asked,—Why?, so God came down to Earth, grabbed Job by the collar, and howled,—Who the fuck do you think you are?”

If this raging authority figure was omnipresent, he also came in a scaled-down model for home use: Auslander’s punitive, hot-tempered father. The family dynamic was also burdened by the mysterious death of a two-year-old son, whom young Shalom sometimes envied for getting out early.

Auslander got out too, at least physically; he still fears God’s wrath so acutely that his preternaturally understanding wife Orli calls him a victim of “theological abuse.” Though the poolside Slim Jim was a gateway drug to other rebellions (shoplifting, pornography, pot), he didn’t escape Orthodoxy without a fight. Early in their marriage, he and Orli moved to a community in New Jersey where they kept kosher and observed Sabbath prohibitions against work or driving, once going so far as to walk 14 miles to a Rangers game at Madison Square Garden. They now live outside Woodstock with their two young sons, Paix and Lux, and two much-walked dogs.

It’s easy to spot Auslander at Bread Alone in Woodstock—he’s bent over a notebook, frowning. He’s just come from the writing office he rented on Tinker Street a few weeks after Paix was born, where he’s been wrestling with a novel tentatively titled Leopold Against the World. “It’s about a genocide, but funny,” he says. “It’s really about the family it’s happening to. It’s not the first genocide they’ve been through. They have terrible luck.”
Today’s wrestling match did not go well. “I’ve basically wasted two years,” he says grimly. “I’m throwing it out.” Asked if he’s really abandoning the novel, or just in a cycle of beating himself up, he says without missing a beat, “That’s a 40-year cycle.”