On Maple Avenue he came to the Yeshiva of Spring Valley, where he went to school for a time. "Do you see that Hebrew lettering?" he said. "It says: 'Please join us for a reading by Shalom Auslander. Bring your bags of rocks.'" Auslander grew up on the other end of town, which used to be less religious, and looping around his own street, a cul-de-sac called Arrowhead Lane, he was astonished to find, next to his old house, a holdout: a ranch house with a John 3:16 sign on the lawn. Nearby was a landmark he calls the Stone of Pornography in Foreskin's Lament: a boulder behind which he used to find a seemingly inexhaustible store of skin magazines, ditched presumably by a guilty commuter heading home. No porn this time, but there was a discarded box of non-kosher cookies.
Pornography, which Auslander eventually imported by the sackful, was part of his secret life in Monsey, both an escape and a source of anxiety. So were marijuana, orgies of non-kosher fast food and shoplifting expeditions. To a certain extent, he always felt like an outsider in the Orthodox world, he says now, but his escape proceeded by fits and starts, in spurts of rebellion and then periods of appeasement.
"The big discovery for me was that there's a whole world out there," he said. "That there's no reason to be terrified of the Nanuet Mall and, even worse, no reason to be scornful of it." But it took him years, including a stint as a bearded, fedora-wearing student in Israel and a subsequent gig as a weed-puffing shomer, or ritual corpse watcher, in New York, to arrive at his current, uneasy state of truce.
He tried ignoring God, and also compromising with him. As a teenager, he writes in Foreskin's Lament, which goes on sale this week, he once rode his bike to Caldors on Saturday but then found himself unable to further violate the Sabbath by activating the electric-eye door opener. In the early 1990s he was married and living in Teaneck, New Jersey, working in an ad agency and just getting started as a writer. One Saturday he walked all the way to Madison Square Garden to see a game during the Stanley Cup playoffs. God punished him by making the Rangers lose.
"It's ridiculous that I feel the way I do," he said at the end of his drive in Monsey. "That I have this cartoonish view of God as someone who rewards and punishes. I feel like a fool when I read someone like Richard Dawkins," he said, referring to the British atheist and evolutionary biologist. "But let's trade childhoods." Intellectually, he said, he understood Dawkins, but "emotionally I'm not there at all."
He went on to compare himself, jokingly, to Moses. "There are two ways you can look at that story," he said. "Moses makes one mistake and God shoots him in the head - he'll never get to the Promised Land. But you can also say that he almost makes it and that his children will. I like finding the dark upside, and that's why I ended the book with my son's first birthday. I didn't get free, but maybe he does."
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