What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

Holocaust survivors, Israeli settlers, affluent Americanized Jews, and bullied children grapple with faith, guilt, morality, history, cultural identity, and more in Nathan Englander’s 2012 short story collection.

Much like Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander can both be called a “Jewish writer” and so much more than that. But while Chabon uses ingenious settings (the Khazar Empire, an alt-history Alaska, etc.) to explore Jewish themes, the Long Island-born, Orthodox-raised Englander takes a more straightforward approach. The results aren’t always as entertaining, but they at least try to be enlightening.

In Englander’s latest collection, there are successes and failures both. The strongest offering here is the title story. Named in homage to Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (in which two middle-aged couples exchange uninhibited banter while drunk on cheap gin), “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” features an awkward rendezvous between secular Jews and Hassidim that takes on new dimensions when an intoxicant is brought into play. The piece is as quirky and slyly humorous as it is weighty and tense, and if the whole collection was as well put-together, the copious amount of blurbs on the book’s outer jacket would be considerably more understandable.

Strangely enough for the U.S.-born Englander, the two other stories that stand out here are set in Israel. “Sister Hills” features a resolute settler woman who has lost both husband and sons and clings fiercely to what she has left. The juxtaposition of her attitude with the views of those around her offers some insight into the fragmented nature of Israeli society. The final story in the collection, “Free Fruit for Young Widows,” leaves a war veteran to explain to his son his deference to a seemingly callous colleague who survived the Holocaust. Here, Englander gives us a stark accounting of just how much the Holocaust sucked the humanity from all that it affected.

The remainder of the collection falters for a variety of reasons. “How We Avenged the Blums” is a humorous take on underdogs fighting back, but it feels slight. “Peep Show” goes for shock value: a gentrified Jew confronts the ghosts of his past (in the form of rabbis) in a nudie booth. It’s original, but not particularly coherent. “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side" tries to tell a family’s history in list form, a gimmick that never seems justified here. “Camp Sundown” has probably the best premise of the lot – a group of elderly Jews at a summer camp suspect one of their own of being a concentration camp guard – but squanders it by hitching the narrative to a weak protagonist and vacillating between humor and horror with little finesse.  

Though there is thematic overlap between all of the stories here, it would not be fair to dismiss Englander as a one-note writer. However, there is something to be said for broadening one’s focus instead of trying different, only partly successful permutations of the same ideas.

7.25/10