Last night Shalom Auslander was awarded the 2013 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize for his novel Hope: A Tragedy. The £4000 prize, for “Jewish and non-Jewish writers that explore themes of Jewish concern”, was awarded to Auslander as part of Jewish Book Week, which will run at King’s Place until the end of the week.
During Auslander’s skyped acceptance speech he expressing shock that the prize didn’t go to Juno Diaz or Hilary Mantel, “since she seems to win everything”. He also witheld thanks from God, his editor, the academy and anyone else involved.
Hope: A Tragedy centres on Solomon Kugel, a down-at-heel office jobber and pschotheraphy patient, attempting to protect his family from the horrors of the world, urban and historical. Kugel has bought a house in the country, as did Auslander, while preparing to write the book. “I’ve moved to the country but there’s nowhere to walk after dinner,” he told the New Statesman‘s culture editor Jonathan Derbyshire last year. “Your idea of nature is postcards, nice trees, but it’s fucking violent. I’m on a cliff and the winds from November to March just blast at the house relentlessly. Animals, bears, even the deer, are like fucking gang members where I live. You think, ‘Oh, it’s deer,’ and then they look at you and you think, ‘This thing is going to kill me if I go near the faun.'”
To add to his woes, Kugel finds that a portion of the house is already occupied. Typing and feasting on matzos in the attic is a beleagured and catatonic Anne Frank, tirelessly struggling with the follow-up to her first and only hit: the diary. Auslander recalls visiting his agent shortly after finishing the manuscript. She asked him:
“So is this a comment on Roth?” And I just said, “What are you talking about?” She was like, “You know, in his book where Anne Frank is alive.” My response was: “You have to be fucking kidding me.” When my memoir Foreskin’s Lament came out, it was the same: “Oh, so you’re intentionally doing Portnoy’s Complaint?” And in my head I was like, “If anything, it was Angela’s Ashes.”
Hope: A Tragedy makes a plaything of the darkest moments of the 20th century. Kugel and the house’s former owner, a man of German descent, wrestle the politics of evicting the century’s best-loved innocent victim. “Six million he kills,” Kugel thinks, unthinkably, “and this one gets away.”
Click here to read the interview in full.
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