kaddish.com
A novel
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3.2 • 18 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
When his father dies, it falls to Larry—the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews—to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. But to the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses, imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, he hires a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to say the prayer instead—a decision that will have profound, and very personal, repercussions. Irreverent, hilarious, and wholly irresistible, Nathan Englander’s tale of a son who makes a diabolical compromise brilliantly captures the tensions between tradition and modernity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Englander's excellent comic dissection of Jewish-American life (following Dinner at the Center of the Earth), Larry is a secular Jew living in a goyish neighborhood in Brooklyn. When his father dies, Larry flies to Memphis to sit shivah with his Orthodox sister, Dina. She resents the fact that he doesn't plan to spend the next year saying Kaddish the Jewish prayer for the dead every day to ease their father's way into heaven. Instead, Larry goes to kaddish.com and hires someone who will do the job for him: Chemi, a religious student. But then, inspired by Chemi's example, Larry undergoes a transformation. Changing his name to Shuli, he moves back to the Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn where he grew up and becomes a teacher of Hebrew studies. Twenty years pass. Shuli feels guilty about his previous deception and decides to track down Chemi. With the help of Gavriel, a 12-year-old computer whiz, Shuli locates Chemi in Jerusalem and, after saying goodbye to his wife and children, flies to Israel to confront the stand-in of two decades past. This novel reads like Chaim Potok filtered through the sensibility of Mel Brooks. Englander writes cogently about Jewish-American assimilation, and, in his practiced hands, he makes Shuli's journey, both outer and inner, a simultaneously humorous and deeply moving one.
