New fiction: Books of laughter and forgetting Hope: A Tragedy. By Shalom Auslander. Riverhead; 292 pages; $26.95; Picador; £16.99. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. By Nathan Englander. Knopf; 207 pages; $24.95. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £12.99. EVER since Abraham's idol-smashing outburst in the Hebrew Bible, a strain of iconoclasm has run through Jewish literature. There is no shortage of stories that mock righteousness and skewer ritual, that kill the father and masturbate with the sister's underwear. So perhaps it was inevitable that Anne Frank, patron saint of Jewish suffering, would succumb to this heretical tradition. Thankfully her rather tasteless return to fictional life - as a foul-mouthed, matza-munching, horribly disfigured and terribly old woman - takes place in a very funny book. In "Hope: A Tragedy," Shalom Auslander's debut novel, Anne Frank is discovered in an attic in rural New York, wretchedly struggling to write a book that will rival her first; "Thirty-two million copies...that's nothing to sneeze at!" Solomon Kugel finds her stinking up the home he bought to give his family a new start. The premise is so outlandish - and this Anne is so profane - that it is easy to picture Mr Auslander cackling devilishly at his keyboard ("Six million he kills ...and this one gets away"). But while he balances zingers with more thoughtful meditations on martyrdom and history, the jokes wear thin two-thirds in. By then it is clear that Mr Auslander has written a clever set-piece, not a story. Storytelling comes more naturally to Nathan Englander, whose new book of short stories features his finest work yet. He has a rare range; his clean writing feels fresh, but it vibrates with a charming old-world sensibility, much like his first acclaimed collection. For example, there is something about this line that demands a pause: "A little girl, fat and happy. Fat in the ankle, fat in the wrist. A palpable softness, so simply conveyed. There is a melancholic heft to these stories, as if Mr Englander's tales about West Bank pioneers or vengeful geriatric Holocaust survivors are as fragile as memory, as lasting as life. Like Mr Auslander, but more subtle, he captures the mess of feelings provoked by accounts of the Holocaust: the way these stories are often too big and unwieldy to manage; too tragic or melodramatic to comprehend. Humour can be a way to express the absurdity of the horror. The strongest stories are the first and last; with both, Mr Englander reveals his grasp of the small moment, the modest gesture, which can reveal unexpected beauty or something unspeakably dark.