For the relief of unbearable urges
By: Nathan Englander.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: A.A. Knopf
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 205
Subjects: Jews -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Jews -- Persecutions -- Fiction; Orthodox Judaism -- Fiction
Description: In Englander's taut and ambitious "The Twenty-seventh Man," a clerical error lands earnest, unpublished Pinchas Pelovits in prison with twenty-six writers slated for execution at Stalin's command, and in the grip of torture Pinchas composes a mini-masterpiece, which he recites in one glorious moment before author and audience are simultaneously annihilated. In "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," a Protestant has a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi.

In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man incensed by his wife's interminable menstrual cycle gets a dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute.

The stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges are powerfully inventive and often haunting, steeped in the weight of Jewish history and in the customs of Orthodox life. But it is in the largeness of their spirit - a spirit that finds in doubt a doorway to faith, that sees in despair a chance for the heart to deepen - and in the wisdom that so prodigiously transcends the author's twenty-eight years, that these stories are truly remarkable.

Again and again, Englander does what feels impossible: he finds, wherever he looks, a province beyond death's dominion.