The word is Yiddish, and is an expression of disgust. A decent translation of it into vernacular English would be ‘yuck’. Shalom Auslander has been feeling feh about himself for pretty much as long as he has been conscious. Born into a strictly religious family, with a mother given to quoting Jeremaiah and a father whose violence and cruelty were almost literally biblical, or at least strongly evocative of the Old Testament, Auslander grew up to be the kind of Jew who, when visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, writes ‘fuck you’ on a piece of paper and shoves it in a crack. It is more traditional for the pious to write a prayer. But that is Auslander’s prayer.
That story came in his previous memoir, Foreskin’s Lament, published in 2007; parts of Feh cover the same ground but do not repeat the earlier book – not that either of them contradict the other very much. The main difference is that Feh, until its final pages, shifts the disgust from God to the author himself. The contempt has become internalised. Having been told for years by priests and parents that he is yuck, Auslander seems to come to accept the assertion at face value.
Indeed, he seems to go out of his way to corroborate it: he steals a pair of his mother’s pantyhose, just so at least the lower half of his body can look good (in doing so he appropriates another Yiddish insult: feigele, or queer).He steals a friend’s parents’ VCR and uses it to watch pornography on his bedroom black-and-white TV. In one of the more distressing passages of the book, he becomes hooked on a bogus elixir containing Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid, more commonly used as a date rape drug, in order to feel at least temporarily good about himself.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in