It's hard to say what exactly Nathan Englander's short story "Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother's Side" is all about. It's got something to do with hard cider, a woman fondly dubbed "Bean," the Freedom of Information Act, and a Jewish-Ukranian butcher who—one can only infer—gets smote by vengeful Old Testament God when he falls into a vat of boiling hams.
As if its title weren't already a mouthful, "Everything I Know about My Family on My Mother's Side" manages to squeeze 30-something characters and a wholly unnecessary shift from a first-person plural perspective to a first-person singular perspective into a mere 20 pages. It's the fourth short story in Englander's latest collection, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," and a work of puerile conceit. The narrative structure—a numbered list of facts, observations, anecdotes, and replies to those anecdotes—is contrived, and it's unclear whether these facts and anecdotes are autobiographical. If these are, in fact, episodes from the author's life and those of his relatives, one might expect that the larger emotional significance of these events must have hit Englander too close to home for him to be able to express them articulately.
That's not to say that "Everything" has no thematic relevance to the collection's primary concern—that is, how the pain and misfortune of modern-day Orthodox Jews has been inherited from their ancestors. It chronicles what the other stories do, but where many of these appear to be engaged in a larger social project, "Everything" is pompous. Englander, an Orthodox Jew himself, writes stories here that tend to read like parables, but "Everything" has little to offer. It's only made worse by numerous instances where its language becomes histrionic.
Reviews of "What We Talk about When We Talk About Anne Frank" in the New York Times Sunday Book Review and on Amazon have generally ranged from positive to raving. Perhaps it's because the anthology revolves so heavily around a minority culture that many were reluctant to say anything too critical about it.
Aside from "The Reader" and its puzzling inclusion in this collection, Englander's other stories—like "Peep Show" and "Free Fruit for Young Widows"—are more mature in style and conservative in structure. It appears that these pieces describe events that never actually happened, but they nonetheless derive a certain weight from how easily they might actually be true. Based loosely on Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," Englander's eponymous story owes more to its predecessor than just its title; it borrows Carver's precision of language and the spiritual transformations of stories like "Neighbors" and "Errand." And the question with which it concludes is one that readers would never think to ask themselves otherwise. In this way, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" turns out to be incredibly affecting.
In "How We Avenged the Blums," a group of Jewish middle schoolers take on a bully only known as "the anti-Semite." Insofar as this story may be trying to confront prejudices about Jews that still run rampant today, its jokes—humorist that Englander is—might actually be perpetuating stereotypes. With characters like Shlomo, Zvi Blum, Barry Pearlman, Larry Lipschitz, and the uneducated Russian Jewish "refusenik" who offers ungrammatical self-defense axioms like, "Worst cases, raise hand like in defeat and kick for ball," it's obvious that Englander is trying to draw an excessively caricatured sketch of Jewish culture. One can assume that he is trying to undermine these biases by incorporating such material, but it's problematic how "the biggest Jew in town"—the only character in the entire story who doesn't play into these stereotypes—is the one that saves the day. The story's helpless younger characters, by contrast, stand idly by. For an otherwise sound story like "How We Avenged the Blums," the stereotypes get away from Englander a bit here. In this way, the story could be interpreted in such a way that suggests that it's the exception, not the rule, when a Jew proves capable of defending himself.
In stories like "Camp Sundown," however, Englander seems to exercise near-complete authorial control. When a number of Jewish campers at an Elderhostel in New Jersey accuse a fellow camper of having been a Nazi, a camp director is forced to take charge of an escalating series of conflicts. Although the narrative follows a somewhat predictable course, it daringly draws parallels between the Holocaust and what it depicts evolving on the campground. It also incorporates imagery that seems perfectly fitting for the action at hand. Taken as a whole, "Camp Sundown" raises questions about the lengths and limits of man's desire for righteousness.
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" runs the gamut from narcissistic and angsty tales, to haunting yet belabored works, to streamlined philosophical pieces entrenched in social reality.
The best stories in Englander's collection feature characters who experience their very existence as uncanny in light of the anti-Semitism their people have weathered over the course of the last century. No stories speak better to this condition than "Sister Hills and "Camp Sunshine." If any of the pieces in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" deserve to be read, it's these two.