'What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank' explores tensions between religious and secular
admin | March 5, 2012
For Englander - a self-proclaimed "apostate," raised in an Orthodox community on Long Island and now living in Brooklyn by way of Jerusalem - this is a defining issue. "But what do you do," he (or a character very much like him) asks in a story called "Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother's Side," "if you're American and have no family history and all your most vivid childhood memories are only the plots of sitcoms, if even your dreams, when pieced together, are the snippets of movies that played in your ear while you slept?" The triumph of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is Englander's ability to balance one against the other, to find, even as he's calling it unfindable, the deeper story, the more nuanced narrative. "Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother's Side" is a perfect case in point: Broken into 63 numbered sections, it is a story about the search for a viable story, in which the disconnected pieces come together to make a kind of sense.
