Shalom Auslander’s 2007 memoir, Foreskin’s Lament, narrates his struggle to break from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Monsey, New York. The various traumas Auslander endured growing up in a physically and verbally abusive family filled him with debilitating shame and self-hatred. The cost of going OTD (“off the derech,” or “way”) resulted in him feeling utterly alone. At the end of his first memoir, in a rare moment of hope, Auslander dreams of a community of fellow “foreskins,” a homeland for the detached and discarded to call home.
Feh both revisits and expands on Auslander’s lament about the emotional wounds inflicted by any extreme religious ideology that presumes mankind to be fallen by nature. “I am still possessed,” he admitted in a recent NPR interview. “Feh,” Auslander explains in the book, is a Yiddish term denoting disgust, a thing without worth, a judgment by God, an object of contempt. Auslander remains haunted by Monsey’s dark view of human nature. “I go through life as if beneath a shroud,” he writes. Indeed, he continues to feel “the tumult around and within me.”
This feh-induced tumult overwhelmed his already wounded, diminished self, producing shame and dangerous self-hatred. In harrowing detail, Auslander recounts his near-fatal experiences taking toxic weight-loss drugs and surviving a horrific car accident. “Feh,” Auslander told NPR, “had me close to the edge.” Like the enslaved Jews of Pharaoh’s Egypt, Auslander will never be delivered from his bondage so long as he remains afflicted by the pathologies of religious orthodoxy. And, sadly, Auslander is feh’s helpless emissary: “I darken all.”
Feh charts Auslander’s efforts to soften the debilitating self-hatred and shame that continue to plague him as he approaches middle age and longs for material success as a writer and television showrunner. The most moving, indeed enlightening sections of the book reveal how Auslander slowly begins to break out of the dark. He explores the treyf literary world, encountering the deeply ironic voices of Kafka and Beckett and the blistering routines of the late Bill Hicks, the latter of whom skewered all forms of religious belief. Auslander feels a profound kinship with these fellow fehs. “I felt Kafka knew me,” Auslander writes, responding to the accusing son in Kafka’s Letter to His Father. Auslander sees Kafka as an awe-inspiring example of Jewish filial resistance who did not “succumb to feh.”
Even more inspiring are Auslander’s relationships. He had a soul-nourishing, life-saving connection with his psychiatrist, Ike. He also enjoyed a brief but indelible friendship with the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, a complex life force who agreed to star in Auslander’s short-lived television series, Happyish (2015). (Auslander identified with Hoffman’s irony-inflected, Irish Catholic worldview: “Feh knows Feh,” he writes.). Above all, Auslander credits his survival to his clear-thinking, green-eyed, artist wife, Orli, who never fails to make him laugh. For in the end, the psychological pain caused by feh can be eased only through laughter.
In his online column, “A Word to the Unwise,” Auslander confesses that “at fifty-three, I’m just as unwise as ever. I don’t feel like I’ve found any answers.… I still stumble about, trying to find the light.” At the end of Feh, Auslander begins to glimpse that light, reflected in the glittering eyes of Orli and his two sons. He discovers an alternative community, a tribe of feh outcasts who survive by joking away their shame.
Donald Weber writes about Jewish American literature and popular culture. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Mohegan Lake, NY.
