Publication

1998 - Knopf, New York, New York (State)

Language

English

Word Count

147,000 words, Guess

Page Count

588 pages

Identifiers

and 2 more
  • Goodreads47179
  • LibraryThing43814

Classifications

  • DDC296.4/45
  • LCCBM670.K3 W54 1998

Description

Winner of the 1998 National Jewish Book Award"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 ReviewChildren have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Leon Wieseltier, a diligent but doubting son, recites the Jewish prayer of mourning at his father's grave, and then embarks on the traditional year of saying the kaddish daily.Wieseltier's highly acclaimed Kaddish is the spiritual and thoughtful journal of one of America's most brilliant intellectuals. Driven to explore th origins of the kaddish, from the ancient legend of a wayeard ghost to a 17th-century Ukranian pogrom, he offers as well a mourner's response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred up in death's wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Kaddish>/b> is suffused with love: a son's embracing of the traditon bequethed to him by his father, a scholar's savoring of its beauty, and a writer's revealing it, proudly unadorned, to the reader. From the Trade Paperback edition.

First Sentence

Everything struck hard.

Description

When Leon Wieseltier's father died in March 1996, he began to observe the rituals of the traditional year of mourning, going daily to the synagogue to recite the kaddish. Between his prayers and his everyday responsibilities, he sought out ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish texts in pursuit of the kaddish's history and meaning. And every day he studied, translated, and wrote his own reflections on the obscure texts that he found, punctuating his journal with stories about life in his synagogue and about his family's progress through grief. In reflecting upon the fate of his father and of his people, he wrestles with problems of loss and faith, the meaning of tradition, freedom and determinism, and the perplexity of rational religion.

Subjects

Other Editions

  • KaddishKnopf1998-01-01
Show 1 more editions

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