Rating: 
Summary: New Age of Jewish Writers
Review: One group of writers I learned to love, as a reader and a Jew, were the great Jewish fiction writers. If I want to get closer to my roots and learn more about the joy and pain of being a Jew, I read the great stories and novels by Malamud or Potok or one of the other great Jewish authors. Unfortunately, they're of a generation who are dying out. I asked God, who am I going to read of this group when that great generation has finally expired. He answered Nathan Englander and Unbearable Urges. God bless you, Mr. Englander
Rating: 
Summary: Revenge for an unhappy childhood?
Review: Englander was raised in a strictly Orthodox Jewish, insular community. Almost all of the stories present an exaggerated version of the dark hypocrisy and closed-mindedness such communities. Englander today is a secular Jew who seems to feel lucky that he escaped his childhood prison. His characters are uniformly pathetic and foolish and Englander imagines that all of them would be happier if they would just cast off their archaic lifestyle, grow their hair long and stop obeying their ignorant rabbis. The stories would have been more believeable if there was at least one sympathetic character, but I waited in vain for one to emerge. Englander has been compared to great Jewish writers of the past. Rather he seems like Tolstoy with his eye for hypocrisy but lacking Tolstoy's insight in what really makes people tick.The only story I liked was the final story. It's the only one that that does not involve Orthodox characters and it is the only one with true emotional force as it not a mean-spirited fantasy but a protrayal of truely human responses to actual events. I encourage Englander to leave his unhappy past behind and write more abnout the struggles of the secular world in which he now lives.
Rating: 
Summary: Vividly Imagined, Sometimes Disturbingly Brilliant, Stories
Review: There is a place where ordinary everyday events intersect with the transcendent. This place is ineffable; Rudolf Otto, in his memorable book, "The Idea of the Holy", referred to it as the "numinous". Nathan Englander, in his collection of stories, "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges", captures this place in the best of his stories. In "The Tumblers", a band of Hasidim escape a train to the death camps, ending up instead on a train of circus performers. While "clumsy as Jews", they improvise a tumbling act which leads to a magical and redemptive outcome that leaves the reader breathless and disturbed. In "The Twenty-seventh Man", Englander tells the tale of Pinchas Pelovits, a writer who has never published--a writer known only to himself. That is, until the day Pinchas is rounded up with "an eminent selection of Europe's surviving Yiddish literary community" as part of Stalin's purges. In this setting, in a room no bigger than a closet, Pinchas Pelovits encounters the numinous, finds an audience, and generates meaning for the desperate situation of his cellmates. These are only two of the nine stories, perhaps the two best. Each story in this vividly imagined and often disturbingly brilliant collection seeks to capture the meeting of the ordinary with the extraordinary, the ineffable. Each story seeks to provide a locus where religious belief (in this case, Orthodox Judaism) inscribes meaning in the mundane, and sometimes desperate, lives of its characters. While Englander doesn't always succeed, and there are as many mediocre stories in this collection as there are remarkable ones, "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges" is, at its best, the work of nascent literary genius, perhaps the beginning of a remarkable career.
Rating:
Summary: Yes, He IS A Dudestud!
Review: I went to High School with Nathan when he was growing up on Long Island. He was into his Hard Rock period then, running around in skin-tight black leather pants and stud boots. Most of his time was spent chasing women - successfully, I might add! But it was apparent even then that he had literary talent. Well, that talent has come to fruition in this volume. It's perhaps the finest debut collection of fiction I can remember, and I have read many. As an extremely devout Orthodox Jew, I can tell you that Nathan's depiction of our lives is right-on-the-money and is handled with sensitivity and aplomb. And as another reviewer wrote, he IS one gorgeous dudestud! So let's celebrate the arrival of a major new arrival on the scene - Nathan Englander!
Rating: 
Summary: Hilarious and sad
Review: I have to admit: I was prejudiced. O no, not another book on Jewish culture. O no, not short stories. Yes, it is a book on Jewish culture and yes, it is a book with short stories. But the main thing is: it is extremely well written, it is at times funny (the Protestant guy who suddenly knows for certain that he is Jewish, the orthodox man who for once is allowed to visit a prostitute and ends up with a venereal disease) and at times deeply sad (the group of Polish Jews who accidently escape transport to the concentration camp and have to survive by pretending they are the acrobats they are not, the "accidental writer" murdered by Stalin). Every story in the book is a little gem, every story forces you to think. I look forward to Nathan Englander's next book.
Rating:
Summary: admirable but not all that likable
Review: It's easy to overstate the value of the Internet, but here's one instance where it comes in really handy. You don't have to take my word about this book and you don't have to buy it or check it out of the library; three of the better stories are actually available online : The Twenty-Seventh Man; The Gilgul of Park Avenue; and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. Take a look for yourself, for free, and draw your own conclusions. Of these, I would particularly recommend Twenty-Seventh Man, which I thought was the best in this collection. Personally, I think that these three stories demonstrate both the considerable strength and the significant weakness of Englander's style. Each of the stories is built up around a clever idea : a group of writers is taken away to be executed, but an unpublished writer, accidentally included, authors their final tale; a WASP has an epiphany in a New York City taxi cab and realizes he has a Jewish soul, much to his wife's chagrin; and, an Orthodox Israeli whose wife won't sleep with him gets a dispensation from his rabbi to visit a prostitute, "for the relief of unbearable urges." These are all engaging situations, but as the stories progress, the author seems intent on torturing the characters. He writes with great humor and wit about the collision between traditional religiosity and the modern world, but in the end, each tale is pretty depressing. Now, from what the profiles say, and what Englander says himself in interviews, I take it that he was raised an Orthodox Jew, but has abandoned his beliefs. That's all well and good, but it seems a mistake to me to draw the conclusion from his own experience that piety and reality are incompatible. I was left admiring Englander's talent, but not much liking his stories. GRADE : C
Rating:
Summary: Boldly Brilliant!
Review: In an age of sugar coating, Nathan Englander presents readers with a refreshingly straightforward appraoch to the Jewish world. His stories, while they do carry with them a certain lighthearted feel, at the same time manage to bring to the surface ... Jewish ideals of the most serious nature. This book is a must read!
Rating:
Summary: brilliant, mordant, touching
Review: I have never been a big fan of short stories. Once in a while something makes me read a book of them and with only rare exceptions the genre doesn't do much for me. Well, something made me read this book and I loved every single story.I can't rave enough to people about this book and I can't wait for Mr. Englander's next offering. I will rush to read anything he ever writes. This is a terrific book! While it is a realistic depiction of various aspects of the Jewish condition, all the stories are set into imaginatively far-fetched and amusing vehicles, in differing locales and eras, and all are brilliant renditions wrought with a delicious mixture of both humor and pathos. There isn't a weak link in the entire collection of nine stories.
Rating:
Summary: a magic daydream
Review: Nine short stories, surprising for the beauty of the language and for the very particular style, always suspended between the magic atmsophere of Yiddish fables and the realistic concreteness which characterizes most of North American novelists.
A really beautiful book, whose deep suggestion reminds some paintings by Marc Chagall (see especially the second tale).
It is a pity that the Italian translation is not adequate.
Rating:
Summary: Astonishing work of fiction
Review: Nathan Englander's book, "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges," is perhaps one of the best short story collections I have ever read, and certainly the best since Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried." Englanders characters are complete and complex, his prose is elegant, and his plots manage to be both comic and tragic. Englander's characters are orthodox Jews, and he places their ancient culture and tradition in modern situations, revealing character in the conflict of faith versus horror, tradition versus modernity, and faith versus need. The conflicts evoke mirth and pathos: a fake troupe of Jewish tumblers in WW2-era Europe, an orthodox department Santa Claus, the insane brother of the rabbi. But they reveal something deep about not only faith in the modern world, or the state of the Jewish "soul," but something about humanity too deep for anything short of poetry to describe. Amazing stuff.
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