Book Review: For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
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Nathan Englander’s short story collection is a look at modern Judaism across a variety of characters, and spanning multiple continents, with a multitude of sobering endings - but always through the lens of reincarnation and rebirth.
Naturally, it is the most exceptional story, The Gilgul, which clarifies this focus on the soul. In this story, a perfectly average middle-aged WASP discovers one evening that he is the bearer of a Jewish soul. And therefore he undertakes the oddest sort of conversion imaginable - over and above the strenuous objections of his wife. It’s not really the most captivating story, but its placement within the collection is thematically interesting - after all it’s a story about spiritual reincarnation which appears in the middle of the book, but is especially concerned with endings, beginnings, and the cyclical nature of life.
The first story, The Twenty Seventh Man, is easily the most memorable. Here we examine a group of writers, each sentenced to death in Stalin’s Russia. One of the writers is in fact a total unknown, a voracious reader but as yet unpublished outside the confines of his own journal. And it’s that write, of course, who experiences his own reincarnation, after a fashion. The ending is clever and stunning, and certainly makes this collection worth reading by itself.
Other stories follow on this motif, though they don’t shine quite as brightly. The Tumblers follows a group of Hasidic Jews who are recast, in Hitler’s Germany, as a troupe of gymnasts who literally turn circles in order to save their own lives. The Last One Way concerns the birth and agonizing death of a marriage. It is in turn complemented by the title story, For the Relief of Unberable Urges, which concerns the death and agonizing rebirth of a different marriage. Perhaps most poignantly, Reunions attempts to revive two different families by bringing the title characters together, adorned in new clothes. The last story is a very strange rejoinder to the first: instead of looking to stories and the inner world as the cure for mortality, In This Way We Are Wise attempts to use routine and the performance of normalcy with the outside world as a cure for the recognition of our own mortality. I think it’s my least favorite story in the collection.
On the whole I found these stories to be a bit uncomfortable, like a scratchy woolen suit. Perhaps the characters were too unlikable, perhaps their circumstances a bit too desparate, the landscape a little too bleak - it’s some combination of all of that, I’m sure. In any event it was the sort of discomfort that’s probably good for you in the long run, since these stories are quite striking despite themselves. I think that is because the first story is such a perfect story of reincarnation, and in the others that theme of cyclicality and revival is only attempted, never fully completed.
The collection is obsessed with numbers and their significance, and that is what makes it so distinctly Jewish, over and above the trappings of the characters’ lives. Most obviously there is the story of the marriage in The Last One Way: the wife was married at 18, the marriage lasted for 18 years, and she has been separated from her husband for 18 years. The number 18 plays a key role in the Jewish tradition because of its numerological connection with the Hebrew word for “life” - it is though the wife has lived three lives, and yet she is still in a sort of purgatory. Elsewhere the numerology is a little less obvious. Twenty-seven, the number of writers sentenced to die in The Twenty-Seventh Man, is a number stuck between two numbers with tremendous significance, 26 signifying the holy name and 28 signifying strength. The Wig is especially concerned with the tremendous sum of money spent to buy the hair for the wig - four thousand dollars, a number which may allude to forty years spent wandering in the desert after liberation from Egypt. Most intriguingly, in the last story, In This Way We Are Wise, a bomb explodes at precisely 3:16 in the afternoon. It’s possible to read that as an incongruous allusion to John 3:16, or perhaps more obscurely as a jumbling of 613, the number of commandments in the Torah. The significance of these numbers is not remotely clear-cut - they can be discussed, questioned, and re-thought, fitting snugly within the long tradition of Talmudic gematria studies.
On the whole I’m glad I read these stories - they are provocative and memorable, if perhaps a bit uncomfortable. And they are certainly worth thinking and re-thinking.