Shalom auslander biography of martin lewis

Home— Woodstock, NY. Shalom Auslander drew on his childhood in an Orthodox Jewish family and his subsequent rejection of that culture for his first book of short stories, Beware of God. It was a combination of being in something of a stereotypical but also rather dysfunctional family, combined with a religion, or a form of a religion, that allowed for nothing.

The fourteen stories in Beware of God are surrealist satires of devout Jewish belief that "investigate the meaning of faith and spirituality while making the reader laugh out loud," Megan Walton stated in a review for the Web site Bookslut. In "God Is a Big Happy Chicken," the late Yankel Morgenstern enters heaven and finds that, as the title suggests, God is a thirty-foot-tall, perfectly content chicken.

A modern man is commanded to build an ark in "Prophet's Dilemma," and to his surprise, he finds the project much easier than it seems. Home Depot sells everything he needs, and "there was absolutely nothing you could tell Home Depot Man you were building that would surprise him, that would get any reaction from him at all, for that matter, aside from the usual skepticism about your choice of building materials.

Other stories focus on what would happen if members of the animal kingdom found religion. For the title character of "Bobo the Self-Hating Chimp," the realization that he feels shame totally shatters him. In "Waiting for Joe," two pious hamsters believe that their owner will return and take care of them if they worship him the right way, but they are unable to agree on what the right way is.

This theme of religious strife reappears in "It Ain't Easy Bein' Supremey," about two golems who, instead of making their creator's life easier as he had intended, fight constantly about the true meaning of his commands to them. One of the most remarked-upon tales in Beware of God is "Holocaust Tips for Kids," written from the perspective of a modern-day child who is frightened that the Nazis will return but who resolutely plans how to escape and survive if they do.

Its three plot threads follow Gomez as a divorcee, a happily married family man, and husband whose life is going off the rails—each aware of.

A Kirkus Reviews contributor described this piece as "a marvelously twisted catalogue of grisly historical facts mixed with juvenile naivete and fear," and Onion A. In his better stories, he clearly illustrates how people let beliefs get in the way of their understanding, and at his absolute best, he shows how much emotional harm that lack of understanding can cause.

Although many of Auslander's tales are likely to be disquieting to devout believers, Auslander insists that he is not as anti-God as the title of his book might indicate. I have a hard time believing the opposite, believing that me and my wife finding each other and our love and our child are accidents. It would be hard to live thinking that things are that random.