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 father's grave, a diligent but doubting son begins the mourner's kaddish and realizes he needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So begins Leon Wieseltier's National Jewish Book Award-winning 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 man's 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 mourner's unmannered response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in death's wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Wieseltier's Kaddish is a narrative suffused with love: a son's embracing the tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholar's savoring they beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writer's revealing it, proudly, unadorned, to the reader.
Author: Leon Wieseltier
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 02/08/2000
Pages: 608
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.02h x 5.22w x 0.99d
ISBN13: 9780375703621
ISBN10: 0375703624
BISAC Categories:
- Religion | Judaism | Rituals & Practice
Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Beside his father's grave, a diligent but doubting son begins the mourner's kaddish and realizes he needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So begins Leon Wieseltier's National Jewish Book Award-winning 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 man's 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 mourner's unmannered response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in death's wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Wieseltier's Kaddish is a narrative suffused with love: a son's embracing the tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholar's savoring they beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writer's revealing it, proudly, unadorned, to the reader.
Author: Leon Wieseltier
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 02/08/2000
Pages: 608
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.02h x 5.22w x 0.99d
ISBN13: 9780375703621
ISBN10: 0375703624
BISAC Categories:
- Religion | Judaism | Rituals & Practice
About the Author
LEON WIESELTIER was born in Brooklyn in 1952. He is the literary editor of The New Republic. He has published several books, including A Passion for Waiting, Jewish Historiography, and Kaddish, winner of the 1998 National Jewish Book Award. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.