A couple of years ago, Richard Dawkins unleashed a storm of protest when he likened the religious education of children to "mental child abuse". Whatever one's feelings about the application of the term "abuse" to raise the temperature of any debate, Shalom Auslander's memoir, Foreskin's Lament, by turns hilarious and devastating on what he calls "theological abuse", will delight the Dawkins camp.
Auslander was raised, "like veal" he says, in the Orthodox Jewish community of Monsey, New York. His mother was unable to move past the death of her first child, while his father (a carpenter in a community that valued education but not creativity) was an abusive alcoholic. But it's God, or rather the belief in a particularly vindictive, vengeful God, that really blighted Auslander's life. Remembering the moment when he heard that God could be addressed as "our Father in heaven", he says: "I shuddered. There's another one? In heaven? That's God? Did He stumble around in His underwear? How big was His fist? As big as a car? As big as a house? What was it like to get punched by a house?"
God, for Auslander, really is ever-watching, and not in a friendly way. Hearing that God punishes parents for the sins their children commit, and hoping to be rid of his father, the young Auslander becomes obsessed with consuming as many nonkosher foods as possible. Having bought some nonkosher sweets, he returns home "terrified the whole way that I would get hit by a car, die, and my mother would find them in my pocket. That would be so God".
His childhood and adolescent journey away from the practice of Orthodox Judaism is punctuated by a present-day narrative: his wife Orli is pregnant with their first child, a boy. Auslander is sure that God will kill both mother and son. His indecision about whether to circumcise his son gives the book its title.
Few books really are laugh-out-loud funny. This one is. The comic timing is perfect and, as with all the best Jewish jokes, the pain behind the humour is apparent. "My family and I are like oil and water," he remarks, "if oil made water depressed and angry and want to kill itself." One is reminded of Freud's notion that jokes have two functions: aggression and exposure. Foreskin's Lament contains ample quantities of both.
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I've been to Monsey, as it happens. I've been a guest in the home of Monsey-dwelling Orthodox Jews, eaten Monsey's lamentable kosher sushi, attended Monsey's eye-popping charity auction. And the part of me that remembers warmly the hospitality I received wants to say that Auslander has got it wrong, that not every Orthodox Jewish home is filled with violence, watched over by a God who is creative only in the forms of his malice. This part protests that Orthodoxy is not like this, or at least not only like this, and I am sure Auslander will be criticised by those who take this view.
But this criticism would miss the point. Auslander's experience is his own, and is important on its own terms. Pace Dawkins, religious education is not in itself abusive - many people find comfort in Orthodox Judaism, as they do in other faiths. But there is a strand of pain and violence in most religions: from the fire-and-brimstone Christian preachers to Qutbist Islam, to whatever sadistic rabbi it was who told Auslander that "when I died and went to Heaven, I would be boiled alive in giant vats filled with all the semen I had wasted during my life".
This hilarious, grim story needs to be told. Accounts of the misuse of authority and the criminal blindness of faith do need relating, and Auslander - for all his anger - does so with panache.
His storytelling is so enjoyable that it would have been fascinating to read his thoughts on the wider issues: if Orthodox Judaism did so badly by him, what does he make of other variants of the religion? If belief in the Orthodox Jewish God has been so painful for him, would any kind of God have been any better? But these questions are outside the scope of his memoir - Auslander's whole thrust is that he is mentally trapped in the belief system he was given as a child - and perhaps wouldn't have supplied such ready material for one-liners.
Auslander's won't be the last word, though. A genre is emerging: memoirs of escape from religious communities. Before long, we might have some home-grown examples. The British Jewish experience is different from Auslander's, of course. The community here is less self-assured, more frightened of telling painful truths lest "the goyim" think badly of us. So we haven't yet heard the stories of escapees from the ultra-Orthodox communities of Golders Green or Gateshead. But, with Auslander's work as inspiration, perhaps we will, God willing.
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FORESKIN'S LAMENT by Shalom Auslander
Picador £12.99 pp320
Naomi Alderman is the author of the novel Disobedience. Foreskin's Lament is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £11.69 (including p&p)