A short life of the author
Nathan Englander (b. 1970) was born on 6 June 1970 in New York City and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community on Long Island. He left Orthodoxy and studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lived in Jerusalem for several years.
Life and Career
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999) — nine stories about Jewish life, from an Orthodox man seeking a rabbinical dispensation to visit a prostitute to an elderly Holocaust survivor in Argentina — was one of the most acclaimed debut collections of the 1990s.
The Ministry of Special Cases (2007) was a novel set during Argentina’s Dirty War. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012) — whose title story, about two couples (one Orthodox, one secular) playing a Holocaust parlour game in a South Florida condo, is one of the finest American stories of the twenty-first century — was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Dinner at the Center of the Earth (2017) — a spy novel about an American prisoner held in secret by Israeli intelligence — was his sharpest political work. kaddish.com (2019) — about a secular son who outsources the saying of Kaddish for his dead father to a website — was darkly comic.
Major Works and Themes
Englander writes about the collision between Jewish tradition and secular modernity — and about the Holocaust as an inheritance that shapes Jewish identity even for those born decades after the event. His fiction’s great strength is its ability to find comedy in the most serious subjects without trivialising them. “The Twenty-Seventh Man” — about Yiddish writers summoned to Stalin’s prison — is simultaneously funny, terrifying, and deeply moving. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” uses a parlour game (“Would you hide us?”) to expose the fault lines in Jewish-American identity with devastating precision.
His departure from Orthodoxy is the biographical fact that shapes his fiction most directly: he writes about Jewish religious life with the intimate knowledge of an insider and the critical distance of someone who has left.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Englander is consistently named among the most important American Jewish writers of his generation, alongside Nicole Krauss, Gary Shteyngart, and Jonathan Safran Foer. His story collections are the stronger half of his bibliography — the novels, while ambitious, have not achieved the same concentrated power.
Key Works
- For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999, stories)
- The Ministry of Special Cases (2007)
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012, stories) — Pulitzer finalist
- Dinner at the Center of the Earth (2017)
- kaddish.com (2019)
Collecting Englander
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999, Alfred A. Knopf) — his acclaimed debut — brings $15–$50 for fine first editions. The buzz around the collection’s publication makes uncorrected proofs and advance copies particularly sought.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012, Knopf) brings $10–$30. Englander signs at events and readings. Knopf first editions are the standard collected form.