For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Nathan Englander
- First Published: 1999
- Type of Work: Short fiction
- Time of Work: The end of the twentieth century
- Setting: Europe, the United States, and Israel
- Principal Characters: Y. Zunser, Moishe Bretzky, Pinchas Pelovits, Yochoved, Marty, Ruchama, Shlomi, Charles Morton Luger, Sue, Rabbi Zalman Meintz, Dr. Birnbaum, Reb Yitzhak, Gitta, Berel, Lili, Dov Binyamin
- Genres: Short fiction
- Subjects: United States or Americans, Twentieth century, Europe or Europeans, Jews or Jewish life, Holocaust, Jewish, Israel or Israelis, Soviet Union or Soviets
- Locales: Europe, United States, Israel
Nathan Englander is a young American writer, brought up as an Orthodox Jew in West Hempstead, New York, who moved to Jerusalem. This, his first book, consists of nine short stories, six of them previously published in Story, The New Yorker, Atlantic, and American Short Fiction, mostly about Orthodox Jews in a secular environment.
In “The Twenty-seventh Man,” Joseph Stalin determines in 1952 to purge twenty-six Jewish writers, all of whom are suspected of being anti-Soviet. Unaccountably, one more becomes a victim, an unknown writer who has never...
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