“What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank”

Author Nathan Englander to speak in West Hartford Oct. 3

By Cindy Mindell

Nathan Englander

Nathan Englander is the author of the internationally best-selling short-story collection, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges”, and the novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases”. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post, as well as The O. Henry Prize Stories and numerous editions of The Best American Short Stories. He is also translator of “The New American Haggadah” by Jonathan Safran Foer and author of a play based on “The Twenty-Seventh Man,” a story included in “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.”

Englander will discuss his latest book, the short-story collection, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” on Wednesday, Oct. 3 at Renbrook School in West Hartford. The conversation will be moderated by author and journalist Colin McEnroe. Admission is free.

Englander was raised in a modern Orthodox community on Long Island in the ‘80s. His mother, Merle Tilton, grew up in West Hartford. The family would make monthly visits to her parents, Irene and Oscar Tilton, when Englander was young. “I have many happy childhood memories from West Hartford,” he says. I really love that town.”

His Jewish background did and didn’t form him as a writer. “My upbringing didn’t affect the decision to be a writer; there is no such job description in my community,” he says. “I can think of religious writers, but it’s a very rare concept, a person who writes fiction for others as a modern Orthodox Jew. It wasn’t an idea I or my community held. There was a framed set of aspirations based on our education and set of beliefs, which were more about making a Jewish family and raising your kids a certain way. So it was not an impetus toward writing in any way.”

Englander earned a degree in Judaic studies from Binghamton University and spent his junior year in Jerusalem. He would return to that city in 1996, living as an Israeli for five years before relocating to Brooklyn mere days ahead of the 9/11 attacks.

In his writing, Englander straddles many Jewish worlds, and he likes chewing over how much his Jewish experience and identity influence his writing.

“On the outside you can say I’ve lived many different angles of Jewish experience – Orthodox, Israeli, radically secular; urban, and suburban and ex-pat.” he says. “My experience has many angles and it’s ever-changing. Where the answer gets metaphysical is that, growing up in a closed world, I also grew up in a complete world, though I knew there were other worlds out there. My writing is not about growing up as a specific kind of Jew but about my experience of being alive. So the answer is that I end up being a more complex writer than a ‘Jewish writer.’ My characters and subject matter are Jewish but that’s not lesser or other, and it’s not a conscious choice of subject matter. My whole world is a complete Jewish universe in so many ways. When I write about characters and situations, I’m not writing about the other; I’m talking about my own experience. Nobody asks an Italian writer why they write about Italians or an American Christian writer how their upbringing affects their characters or plot.”

As an adult looking back on his childhood, Englander says that he is grateful for the world of stories he had access to. “So much of my education and belief is about stories told passionately,” he says. “History and bible were taught as story. That had a great effect on the way my brain works.”

Englander’s tone and content have been compared by critics and other authors to the likes of Isaac Bashevis Singer. But it is the Philip Roth generation of writers whom Englander most identifies with.

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