In his new memoir, Feh, which was published last Tuesday from Penguin Random House, Haredi misfit author Shalom Auslander looks back at his time as a child at Yeshiva of Spring Valley in the 1970s. 

Auslander, whose previous memoir Foreskin’s Lament also explored his Orthodox background, centers his new book around the idea of “feh.” This Yiddish interpolation stands for Auslander as the story, which he says he first heard as a child, that says everyone sucks, especially himself. 

He first learned feh at the age of 6, from yeshiva educator “Rabbi Hammer” (part of a satirized duo along with “Rabbi Scold”), who, in his interpretation of the creation story, told the students that when God created Adam and showed him to the angels, the angel Gabriel said: “Feh.”

The rest of the memoir follows Auslander’s decades-long journey of trying to look at himself without seeing feh. Looking at himself in the way that Gabriel had looked at man was so dangerous that at one point it drove him to take life-threatening weight loss medications. He often imagines God and Gabriel gossiping about him, joking at his expense for thinking he can sell out. “Auslander's an idiot,” he imagines Gabriel saying when he takes a break from writing books to go and work in Hollywood.

For Auslander, who is known for his dark humor, these comic depictions accord with his approach to religion. “I wasn't an atheist,” he writes. “The idea that there was no God was a bit optimistic for me. I was a misotheist; there is a God, and He's an asshole.”

The “feh” Auslander says he learned as a child often was accompanied with a dose of sexism and homophobia. In this memoir, one rabbi teaches students that God destroyed Sodom, a biblical city known for vice, “because the men who lived there were feigeles,” an offensive Yiddish term for gay men. Auslander’s classmates all laughed, teaching Auslander to equate self-esteem with sanctioned expressions of masculinity, which do not include his habit of trying on women’s clothes.

But most of the book takes place far beyond the borders of Monsey, where Auslander meets others from different backgrounds who are also infected with feh. Feh comes not just from the Haredi yeshivas where he found it, he concludes, but from the Bible itself, and from non-religious sources, such as news media outlets that excessively cover negative stories. 

The word feh might come from Yiddish origins — but the concept, according to Auslander? That’s universal.