Readers of Shalom Auslander’s 2007 memoir, “Foreskin’s Lament,” already know that the one-time yeshiva student long ago turned his back on his Orthodox upbringing. In his new novel, “Hope: A Tragedy,” he takes on two more Jewish orthodoxies.
The first, as the book title suggests, is hope, something so valued in the Jewish world that the Israeli national anthem is named for it (“Hatikvah” means “the hope” in Hebrew).
The other is the person who probably comes closest to being a latter-day Jewish saint: Anne Frank.
The seed for the novel “started with an idea about a guy whose character flaw was hope,” Auslander, 41, said from his home in Woodstock, N.Y. “I thought that was funny. In the end, that’s a bigger sacred cow than Anne Frank. Everything is predicated on the idea that things will get better.”
Auslander will talk about his new book during an appearance on Wednesday, Jan. 25 at the JCC of San Francisco.
The novel does play havoc with the image of Anne Frank, who in Auslander’s novel occupies the attic of one Solomon Kugel, a stressed-out compost salesman who lives with his wife, young son and demented mother in their newly purchased rural New York home.
Kugel eventually discovers Anne, a disheveled, 80-something-year-old hag living in his attic. She’d been hiding there for years, typing away at a follow-up to the bestselling diary that made her famous. Somehow, as she explains it, she escaped the death camps, moved to America and settled into the only environment in which she felt safe: an attic.
Auslander packs his story with loony comedy, including a serial arsonist who burns down local homes, and Kugel’s mother, who wakes up screaming every morning from Holocaust trauma (even though she never lived in Europe and was born after World War II ended).
But at its heart, the story zeroes in on the misappropriation of hope.
“Which is why it’s so much fun,” said Auslander, who peppers his speech with as many expletives as he puts down on paper. “It’s something that comes from part of me, perhaps my stifled or suffocating childhood in Orthodoxy, but it’s a desperate need to ask: What if [optimists] are wrong.”
He argues that hope is a dangerous thing. Hitler, he suggested, in his own twisted way thought he was making the world a better place. President George W. Bush, according to Auslander, likewise believed he was making Iraq a better place by invading it.
“And we see the results of that,” he noted. “Things should be a little better, but let’s strive for mediocrity first.”
Though he takes on sacred cows in his book, Auslander stresses that he had no intention of “minimizing or denying the Holocaust.”
Rather, he simply thought it would make for an interesting plotline to have Anne Frank alive, if not so well, crouched in an attic, living on matzah and rodents, vainly trying to write.
“Survival isn’t always pretty,” he said. “ But wouldn’t it be interesting if she becomes more sympathetic for having lived? Like prisoners who don’t know how to deal with freedom, she thinks back to the time in the attic as the safest time of all.”
Auslander thinks of himself as a survivor of Orthodox Judaism. He grew up in Monsey, N.Y., a town with a majority Orthodox population. He rebelled early on, developing an adolescent taste for skin mags, pot and non-kosher food.
Though he left traditional observance behind, he drew on his past in his short stories (most notably his 2006 collection, “Beware of God”) and “Foreskin’s Lament.” He also writes a column for Tablet (an online Jewish magazine) and has contributed to GQ, the New York Times and the Jewish Quarterly.
Auslander does not keep in touch with his still-observant family, noting that he “likes it that way.” He does note that there is at least one thing about the Jews he really likes.
“It’s that we have a good history of being s**t-stirrers,” he said. “There are huge swatches of history when Jews tried to squash that, but I like the notion of s**t-stirring.”
Shalom Auslander will be in conversation with Eli Horowitz at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 25, at the JCC of San Francisco, 3200 California St., S.F. $10-$20. www.jccsf.org or (415) 292-1200.
“Hope: A Tragedy” by Shalom Auslander (292 pages, Riverhead Books, $26.95)