A National Jewish Book Award-winning autobiography that's "an astonishing fusion of learning and psychic intensity; its poignance and lucidity should be an authentic benefit to readers, Jewish and gentile" (The New York Times Book Review).Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Beside his fatherโs grave, a diligent but doubtin ...Full description
A National Jewish Book Award-winning autobiography that's "an astonishing fusion of learning and psychic intensity; its poignance and lucidity should be an authentic benefit to readers, Jewish and gentile" (The New York Times Book Review).Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Beside his fatherโs grave, a diligent but doubting son begins the mournerโs kaddish and realizes he needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So begins Leon Wieseltierโs National Jewish Book Awardโwinning autobiography, Kaddish, the spiritual journal of a man commanded by Jewish law to recite a prayer three times daily for a year and driven, by ardor of inquiry, to explore its origins. Here is one manโs urgent exploration of Jewish liturgy and law, from the 10th-century legend of a wayward ghost to the speculations of medieval scholars on the grief of God to the perplexities of a modern rabbi in the Kovno ghetto. Here too is a mournerโs unmannered response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in deathโs wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Wieseltierโs Kaddish is a narrative suffused with love: a sonโs embracing the tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholarโs savoring they beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writerโs revealing it, proudly, unadorned, to the reader.