what we talk about when we talk about anne frank by nathan englander

At the conclusion of the title story, the couples play round after round of the game, afraid “to open the door and let out what we’ve locked inside.” The very stories the narrator mocked Deb for wanting to hear - persecution narratives bursting at the seams with coincidences and heavy-handed symbolism - are precisely the stories Englander seems most inclined to write.Ĭonsider “Peep Show,” in which the married protagonist sneaks into a strip joint one afternoon and enters a world he has never “broached before - the world of dreams cracked open.” The story wants to play against stereotypical Jewish neuroses, but mostly reinforces those stereotypes: the delusional protagonist sees the dancers turning into the rabbis of his youth, then into his wife and his mother, and then, suddenly, it is him up on stage, “an object of desire” undressing for the audience.

He builds the momentum of his narratives and fleshes out his characters with humorous, incisive prose, but the last few pages of his stories always give way to a grim, moralistic end. Throughout What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank he frequently and forcefully transitions between the comic and melodramatic. That it’s dead serious.”Įnglander is fascinated with this shift from irreverence to dead seriousness. “And I’m happy to hear her say that, as that’s what I’ve been trying to get her to admit for years,” the narrator says. While the game amuses the rest of the group, Deb insists that it isn’t really a game at all. And at the end of the war, a Righteous Gentile comes out all joyous and fires him through a hoop and into a tub of water, where he discovers his lost son breathing through a straw.Īt the end of the story the Righteous Gentile resurfaces as the couples, now drunk and stoned, play the “Anne Frank Game.” Pick a non-Jew you know and decide, in the event of a second Holocaust, whether that person would hide you or turn you in. When the visiting husband, Yerucham, begins a story about his father, a Holocaust survivor, the narrator’s wife, Deb, listens rapt:Īnd I can see in her eyes that she wants it to be one of those stories of a guy who spent three years hiding inside one of those cannons they use for the circus. The hosts are American Jews, the guests ultra-Orthodox visiting from Jerusalem. Two couples gather in a suburban home in the title story that opens Nathan Englander’s new collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

What we talk about when we talk about anne frank by nathan englander