For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a collection of several fascinating stories about Jewish history and the Orthodox lifestyle. Nathan Englander has prepared these stories to reveal the beauty and resilience of Jewish/Orthodox people facing troublesome times. Englander also manages to work some humorous situations into this book.
The title story is an example. It tells the struggles of a Hasidic man who becomes enraged by his wife's endless menstrual cycle. This anger leads him to visit a rabbi and receive exemption from the rule against adultery, to relieve himself with a prostitute. A more saddening yet redeeming story is "The Twenty-seventh Man." This man lands himself in prison along with twenty-six other people due to a clerical error he committed as a writer. The others are also writers, and they all face execution ordered by Stalin.
Although faced with such a dreadful fate, the twenty-seventh man, Pinchas Pelovits, manages to write a gripping literary treasure, which he recites before an audience. Pelovits uses his writing talent as an outlet to express his tortured soul before his last breathe. "The Gilgul of Park Avenue" highlights the spiritual enlightenment a Protestant experiences while riding a New York taxi. In moments of isolation and tragedy, Englander guides the reader to a spiritually safe place, providing reassurance that transcends life's woes.
