In 1941 the American journalist Dorothy Thompson published an essay called ‘Who Goes Nazi?’ She proposed ‘an interesting and somewhat macabre parlour game’ to be played at dinner parties. The concept is in the name: look around the room and everybody swings one way or the other. She runs through various guests: the sportsman bank vice-president (Nazi); the threadbare editor (not a Nazi); the scientist’s masochist wife (Nazi); the chauffeur’s grandson serving drinks (not a Nazi); the Jewish speculator who doesn’t like Jews (Nazi); the quiet Jewish man from the South (not a Nazi). In Thompson’s calculus the hyper-competitive and the habitually humiliated, ‘those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t’ go Nazi, while ‘kind, good, happy gentlemanly, secure people’ don’t.

Seventy years later there aren’t any Nazis around, at least not like there used to be. Still, a variation on Thompson’s game shows up in the title story of Nathan Englander’s collection What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank. Two Jewish couples drinking and smoking pot one afternoon in Florida call it ‘the Anne Frank game’. If a second Holocaust were to start up, which of their Gentile neighbours would give them a hiding place? Then they ask if their own spouses, if they weren’t Jewish, would shelter them in the same circumstances. The story ends in silence: ‘No one will say what cannot be said – that this wife believes her husband would not hide her.’

The couple in question ‘ran off to Israel twenty years ago and turned Hassidic’. They’re visiting Florida from Jerusalem to see elderly parents for Sukkot. Their hosts are irreligious parents of a teenage son – the pot’s his. The two wives were friends in high school and arranged this reunion on Facebook. They spend the afternoon drinking in the manner of the couples in ‘What We Talk about When We Talk about Love’, the Raymond Carver story that was famously rewritten and retitled (from ‘Beginners’) by his editor, Gordon Lish. Englander’s couples engage in a competitive discussion about ethnic authenticity, and the Anne Frank game is its didactic climax. It’s the Hassidic wife who thinks her husband wouldn’t hide her, and the moral being telegraphed is that even the most thoroughly adopted Jewish identity might not turn you into the sort of person who would risk his life to give others cover from killers, even in the eyes of your wife.

Englander’s collection has not run short of praise: it has been called ‘remarkable’ and ‘courageous’ by James Lasdun in the Guardian; Alison Kelly said in the TLS that it was ‘a wonderful collection: entertaining, profound and gently powerful’; Stacy Schiff in the New York Times Book Review said, ‘a kind of hard-won wisdom spills out on every page.’ And Englander has provided a neat package to garner these positive adjectives. His stories make constant gestures towards history and politics, just enough to be called ‘gently powerful’. He portrays characters from a narrow ethnic spectrum that most Anglophone readers never see from the inside, and he does so from the perspective of the sympathetic and nostalgic apostate. If anxiety about identity too often stands in for actual drama in his fiction, for some it may be a preferable substitute. Dressing all this up in Raymond Carver’s clothes offers the prospect of an accessible synthesis.