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Shalom Auslander was raised like a veal in a dysfunctional family in the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York: the son of an alcoholic father; a guilt-wielding mother; and an overbearing God. Now, as he reaches middle age, Auslander begins to suspect that what plagues him is something worse, something he can't so easily escape: a story. The story. One implanted in him at an early age, a story that told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting, a story we have all been told for thousands of years, and continue to be told by the religious and secular alike, a story called "Feh."

Foreskin's Lament reveals Auslander's youth in a strict, socially isolated Orthodox community, and recounts his rebellion and efforts to make a new life apart from it. Auslander remembers his youthful attempt to win the "blessing bee" (the Orthodox version of a spelling bee), his exile to an Orthodox-style reform school in Israel after he's caught shoplifting Union Bay jeans from the mall, and his 14-mile hike to watch the New York Rangers play in Madison Square Garden without violating the Sabbath.

The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: No one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any historical import at all has ever happened there, which is why Solomon Kugel, like other urbanites fleeing their pasts and histories, decided to move his wife and young son there. To begin again. To start anew. But it isn't quite working out that way.

Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother's last moments he is drawn back into the life he left behind. At her deathbed, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: "Eat me." This is not unusual, as the Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans, a once proud and thriving ethnic group, but for Seventh, it raises some serious questions, both practical and emotional.

Shalom Auslanders Jugend ist geprägt von einem schrecklichen Respekt vor Gott...

Sie heißen Chaim Yankel Rosenberg, Stanley Fisher oder Rabbi Pearlstein. Sie leben in Brooklyn oder in der Upper West Side von Manhattan, genau 5693 Meilen entfernt von Jerusalem und Tel Aviv. Und sie alle haben ein Problem mit Gott. Oder er mit ihnen, je nachdem. Bloom zum Beispiel hätte bei einem Autounfall ums Leben kommen sollen, aber sein Volvo war sicherer als der Plan, den Gott für ihn vorgesehen hatte.

Hear writers Shalom Auslander and A. J. Jacobs on this edition of Fresh Air. Auslander is the author of the memoir Foreskin's Lament, about growing up in a strict, socially isolated Orthodox Jewish community and his attempt to break free of it. Tom Perrotta (author of Little Children) describes the book as a "scathing theological rant, a funny, oddly moving coming-of-age memoir."