What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander, places him, once again, among the finest Jewish-American writers of our time. Like Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Joseph Epstein, he captures the essence of living as a secular Jew under the shadow of the Holocaust. And he does so using allegory, magic realism in the spirit of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the comic elements found in the films of Woody Allen.
The title story is a case in point. In it, two couples--one of whom is Hasidic--play "the Righteous Gentile Game." The object of the game is to analyze personal relationships and guess which people would save us should another Shoah occur.
To better understand the rationale for this story, it is helpful to refer to an NPR interview with Englander. In it, the author indicates that his orthodox, fifth-generation American family actually played this game. So poisonous was such a mind game that he reflects on it even today.
"We really were raised with the idea of a looming second Holocaust, and we would play this game wondering who would hide us," he says. "I remember my sister saying about a couple we knew, 'He would hide us, and she would turn us in.' And it struck me so deeply, and I just couldn't shake that thought for all these years, because it's true." (NPR, Fresh Air, February 15, 2012)