Nathan Englander Speaks At Renbrook Oct. 3

For Marcel Proust, all it took was a whiff of a madeleine cookie to remind him of his childhood.

For Nathan Englander, it’s the distinctive scent he notices in New England basements that takes him back to the days when he visited his grandparents’ home in West Hartford.

“I have happy memories of that house” on Miamis Road where his mother, Merle, and her parents, Oscar and Irene Tilton, lived, Englander says in a phone conversation.

The best-selling author, who was named one of 20 Writers for the 21st Century by The New Yorker, along with many other honors, will give a free talk Wednesday, Oct. 3, moderated by radio personality and Courant columnist Colin McEnroe at Renbrook School in West Hartford.

Englander grew up on Long Island and came to West Hartford often as a child.

“My grandfather had a huge garden and we’d go to the Crown Market for kosher food and drive up the hill to Avon to the Pie Plate,” he recalls.

Remembering his childhood, Englander jokes about the tendency of anxiety-ridden Jewish mothers to overprotect their kids — “don’t go out, don’t play sports, you’ll get hurt” — something he finds both stereotypical and true.

“It’s Darwinism on a cellular level,” he says. From centuries of persecution, Jewish people have learned “it’s hard enough surviving” without taking undue risks. I write from this universe.”

He and his sister, Sarah, teasingly call such mothers “the danger police” and he says they regularly receive “danger updates” from their mom: “Be careful of pistachios!”

Englander’s mother was raised in a Reform Jewish household and his father’s family was Modern Orthodox, a far stricter branch of Judaism. Englander eventually became a secular Jew, after years of an Orthodox upbringing.

“I was a questioning kid,” he says. “We act like history happens in an instant, but some things are inevitable. My break was years in the making.”

Englander’s most recent book, a collection titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” (Knopf, $24.95) is a group of brilliantly conceived and exquisitely executed stories set in New York and Israel that deal specifically with Jewish concerns but are universal in scope.

The title is a play on the famous short story by Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” about two couples sitting in a kitchen, drinking and talking and revealing themselves.

“That title is the genesis of my book,” Englander says, “which is about the ownership of identity, about who ‘owns’ the Bible, the territory, the Holocaust.

“As it took shape, I thought of the Carver story and pictured it. It became a memory — the light of the day changing, the table, the gin.

“That’s what writing does in the most beautiful way: it becomes yours. I committed to marrying the two stories. You have to own the story and the book and acknowledge what you are doing and stand behind it.

“I tied it to Carver’s legendary story,” and later learned that Carver had based his tale on a story by Chekov.

“So now it’s part of a tradition,” Englander says.

While the Carver characters were talking about love, the Englander characters — an American Jewish couple and their visitors, old friends who immigrated to Israel and became ultra-Orthodox Jews — are talking about survival. After an afternoon of memories – the wives had been classmates at an American yeshiva – and after many drinks and not a little sampling of the hosts’ son’s stash of pot, they wonder, if another Holocaust ever happened, which of their gentile neighbors would be willing to shelter them the way Anne Frank’s family was hidden by Dutch friends. The story, which seamlessly blends ironic humor with grim themes, ends with uncomfortable revelations about love and self-preservation.

Englander says he and his sister would often have that discussion, but “it was not a game, not playing. We were raised in a world of worry, with the memory of the Holocaust. Could it happen again? Who would hide us? Oh my God, it’s really something to be explored.

Such questioning “is dark and cross-cultural,” he says, and could be applied to such horrors as slavery and even the grimness of some fairy tales.

“It’s real, and it gets back to morals,” he says.

Morals are explored throughout the eight stories in the book, his third after the collection “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges” and the novel “The Ministry of Special Cases.” Englander, who for a time lived in Israel, also has also done a new translation of the Passover Haggadah and collaborated on a translation of Israeli author and filmmaker Etgar Keret’s “Suddenly A Knock on the Door.”

Keret, a close friend of Englander, will speak Nov. 18 at the Mandell Jewish Community Center in West Hartford. In “What We Talk About,” Englander gives a character in the story “Free Fruit For Young Widows” the name Etgar.

That story, about the Holocaust, its aftermath and a bitter revenge, is one of many that examines the concept of mercy and asks whether children can be held responsible for future acts they might commit. Another story, the fable-like “Two Hills,” told in a kind of biblical cadence, recaps the history of Israel through the experiences of two women, one of whom makes brilliant use of complex Jewish law to get her way but loses her sense of mercy in the process.

“I’m studying the space between the law and real life,” Englander says.

“When you make a book of stories,” he adds, “it’s like writing a novel. Each story is a world in an ordered universe, and the order in which they appear is important.”

Other stories in the book are laced with dark humor. In “How We Avenged the Blums,” a group of adolescent American yeshiva students confront a bully, with unexpected results. “Peep Show” is a surreal story about a married man who faces the pull and panic of desire. “Camp Sundown” offers a comic yet deathly serious account of Nazi hunters at an Elderhostel in the Berkshires. “Everything I Know About My Family On My Mother’s Side” is confessional and shows Englander’s tender side, as does “The Reader,” about an author who finds his ideal fan even as his work falls out of fashion.

“My humor is not intentional,” Englander says. “It’s the way I believe in reality. No matter how dark it is, even at the darkest time, you can see some ray of light.

Even when writing about family history, he says, “things alter. It’s very hard to remember, and sometimes a story needs changes to get remembered. It’s fictional but based on reality — truer than truth.”

“I’m not a structured writer,” Englander adds. “Even if I know the whole story and its ending before I begin writing, I have an obligation as a writer when building a reality to have to listen to things. It’s a process, and once it gets momentum I have to be willing to listen to find out what I think.”

Englander’s latest project is a dramatized version of his earlier story, “The Twenty-Seventh Man,” about a group of distinguished writers of Yiddish literature — and one unknown author — imprisoned by Stalin’s police for alleged crimes against the Soviet state. Their travails and personal and literary feuds make for a bittersweet and comic story. The play will run from Nov. 7 to Dec. 9 at the Public Theater in Manhattan.

It was the author and producer Nora Ephron who persuaded Englander to adapt his story for the stage and helped him through the process.

“I had a wonderful experience with her,” he says. “She believed in my story. She changed my life. She found it and read it and optioned it and shepherded me and helped me learn the rules of drama.”

Ephron died June 26 at age 71 of a form of leukemia. “”I wish she were still here,” he says. “She was so generous with her time and mentored me.”

Another mentor was novelist Marilynne Robinson, with whom Englander studied at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop.

“She gave me her time and wisdom and showed me how to live the writing life. Just to witness that would have been enough. She is a modest person who lives the life of the mind and is so dedicated to her craft.”

The production of his play, Englander says, “has given me a whole new focus on life. I know my next play, my next stories and novel, and I am so excited.

“I’m 42,” Englander says. “That’s old for sports, but it’s young for writing.”

NATHAN ENGLANDER will give a free talk Wednesday, Oct.3, at 7 p.m. at Renbrook School, 2865 Albany Ave., West Hartford. Colin McEnroe will be moderator. Admission and parking are free. Reservations: pa@renbrook.org. Information: 860-236-1661.

Carole Goldberg is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.