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kaddish.com: A novel - Softcover

Englander, Nathan

 
9781984883254: kaddish.com: A novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1984883259 ISBN 13: 9781984883254
Verlag: Random House Large Print, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

The celebrated Pulitzer finalist and prize-winning author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank delivers his best work yet, a streamlined comic masterpiece about a son’s failure to say Kaddish for his father.
Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews.  When his father dies, it’s his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months.  To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses—imperiling the fate of his father’s soul.  To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father’s soul safely to rest.
Sharp, irreverent, hilarious, and wholly irresistible, Englander’s tale of a son who makes a diabolical compromise ingeniously captures the tensions between tradition and modernity—a book to be devoured in a single sitting whose pleasures and provocations will be savored long after.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an international best seller, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the novels The Ministry of Special Cases and Dinner at the Center of the Earth.  His books have been translated into twenty-two languages, and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Frank O'Connor Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at the Public Theater in 2012. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.

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1


Mirrors covered and front door ajar, collar torn and sporting a shadow of beard, Larry leans against the granite top of his sister’s fancy kitchen island. He says, “Everyone’s staring at me. All of your friends.”

“That’s what people do,” Dina tells him. “They come, they say kind things, they feel uncomfortable, and they stare.”

It’s only hours after the funeral and, honestly, Larry hates himself for bringing it up. He really thought nothing could add to the despair of his father’s loss. But this, this quiet, muttering stream of well-wishers has made it, for Larry, all the worse.

What he’s taking issue with is the look that he’s getting. It’s not the usual pained nod one naturally offers. Larry’s convinced there’s a bite to it—condemning.

He doesn’t know how he’ll survive a week trapped in his sister’s home, in his sister’s community, when every time one of the visitors glances over, Larry feels himself appraised.

And so he keeps raising his hand to the top of his head, check­ing for the yarmulke, sitting there like a hubcap for all its emo­tional weight. Its absence at his own father’s shivah would be the same as standing naked before them.

Sneaked off into the kitchen with his sister, their first moment alone, Larry unloads his complaints in a hiss.

“Tell them,” he says, “to stop looking my way.”

“At a condolence call? You want them not to look at the—” Dina pauses. “What are we, the condoled? The aggrieved?”

“We are the grievances.”

“The mourners!” she says. “You want them not to show that they care?”

“I want them not to judge me just because I left their stupid world.”

Dina laughs, her first since they put their father into the ground.

“This is so like you,” his sister tells him. “To make it negative, to complicate what can’t be any more simple. This bitterness in the face of what is pure niceness is on you.”

“On me? Are you kidding? Are you really saying that—today?”

“You know that I am, little brother. I love you, Larry, but if you choose, even, yes, today, to throw one of your fits—”

“My fits!”

“Don’t yell, Larry. People can hear.”

“Fuck the people.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“I mean it,” Larry says, thinking that “fit” may not be a com­pletely inappropriate word.

“Go on then. Curse at the terrible people who will cook for us, and feed us, and drive carpool for me all week, and make sure that we don’t mourn alone. Yes, curse at the nice men who washed our father’s body and prepared the shroud, and laid the shards atop his eyes, and now come to make a minyan in this house.”

“Spare me, Dina. It’s my mourning too, and I should get to feel at home, in your home, as much as them.”

“Who’s saying different? But you have to understand, they aren’t used to it, Larry. Used to what you do.” Dina takes a breath, reorganizing her thoughts. “Memphis Jews are even more conservative than the ones we grew up with. In Brooklyn, even the edgeless have an edge. Here, if you’re going to be radi­cal, people may, a little bit, stare.”

Larry is now the one staring. He stands before his older sister, giving her the best of his blank looks. About what he was doing that anyone could think radical, Larry has no clue.

“Tell me you don’t know,” she says. “Honestly, tell me it’s not on purpose. That you’ve actually forgotten so much.”

“Honestly, honestly, I don’t. I”—and here Larry was going to swear, which Orthodox Jews are forbidden to do. In defer­ence not so much to his sister, but to the opportunity to prove his innocence (that he is not as odd a duck as they think him, that he isn’t doing anything anyone could consider wrong), Larry rights his sentence and, with a stutter, ends it on the word “promise”—“I promise,” he says.

“You really need me to tell you?”

“I do.”

Dina rolls her eyes as she has since Larry was old enough to understand what it meant, and likely before. She explains what she’s sure he knows and is—without a doubt—doing on purpose.

“You step out into the yard. You read a book,” she says, with true sisterly fury. “You sit, like it’s nothing, on a regular chair.”

Larry straightens up at that, pushing with his hands against the counter, stepping back into the radius of his offense.

He gives himself a moment, letting the blood flow to his cheeks, his face reddening, as if, like a chameleon, he can change color at will.

“It’s no reason to treat me like a freak,” he says. “They’re just stupid rules.”

But even as he says it, rebellious little brother that he is, black sheep, and, yes, apostate, Larry understands that for Dina, they’re much more than that.

For him to step out of the house. To read a page for pleasure. And, above all, to reject that special shivah perch—the low chair, the wooden box, a couch with the cushions removed. It is too much. That ancient pose, the mourner sitting slope shouldered, ashen faced, and close to the ground, it represents for Dina pure sorrow.

“A stupid chair isn’t what makes it mourning,” Larry says, doubling down.

Though he knows, for his sister, a chair absolutely did.

***

There lies Larry, wedged in his nephew’s narrow bed, in his nephew’s narrow room, freezing under a thin polyester comforter in Dina’s arctically over-air-conditioned house.

Sleep does not come on the first night of mourning, when Larry, mustering all his Zazen-based mindfulness, cannot disen­gage from the shock of his own thoughts.

He wants to scream “Daddy.” And he wants to scream “Mommy.” And it’s that pure regression, on top of the grief, that has him so alarmed. A grown man, frustrated with his frus­tration, wrestling to keep his hurt pent up.

If Larry wasn’t already headed there on his own, Dina had nudged him the rest of the way back to childhood by sticking him in an eleven-year-old’s lair, instead of settling her thirty-year-old brother in the more uncle-worthy den.

But the den is where their father had taken sick during his Passover visit. It’s where he’d convalesced between the many trips to the hospital, until his final, fateful admittance. That room was blocked off in Dina’s mind.

And so this skinny bed for Larry, on which he flips to face the glow of his nephew’s aquarium.

Its watery light bathes him while illuminating the wall oppo­site, the fish gliding before a shelf of giant trophies, the likes of which Larry—in his sporting years—had never won.

And now he does not want to yell for his parents, but yell at his sister, furious over what, he couldn’t exactly say. Maybe it’s the light of the tank, turned blinding, keeping a sleepless man awake? Maybe it’s because, in their already tiny family, his big sister hadn’t been able to make their father not die? Or because, when he was his nephew’s tender age, Dina, older, wiser, hadn’t been able to stop their flaky...

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Verlag
Random House Large Print
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1984883259
ISBN 13 
9781984883254
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
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