February 1, 2019
A lapsed Jew returns to the fold and becomes obsessed with redeeming a spiritual mistake made 20 years earlier.When Larry's father dies, he must travel from Brooklyn to his sister Dina's house in Memphis, Tennessee, to sit shiva in the style of the Orthodox community from which he has vigorously removed himself. "The second day of shiva is even harder than the first....He lets himself be small-talked and well-wished, nodding politely....One after another, he receives the pathologically tone-deaf tales of everyone else's dead parents....Larry wants to say, in response, 'Thanks for sharing, and fuck your dead dad.' " As his sister and her rabbi clearly understand, there is no way, no how this guy will fulfill his duty as his father's only son to recite the mourner's kaddish daily for 11 months. But without it, his father will be "gathering wood for his own fire" in the World to Come. As a last resort, the rabbi explains that he can find a proxy to do it for him. So Larry does, hitting upon a website that provides just this service at Kaddish.com, "a JDate for the dead." Then, a week or two after the contract ends, Larry receives a note from Chemi, the yeshiva boy with whom he was matched. It includes a photo that somehow shakes loose in Larry all his grief for his father and himself. It leads him to change his life and his name; frankly, the person he becomes, whom we encounter two decades later, seems to have nothing in common with the original Larry. Incidents in his new life lead to his determination to find a way to atone for his long-ago shirking, no matter what it costs in the present. From the title and the tone in the "Larry" part of the book, Englander's (Dinner at the Center of the Earth, 2017, etc.) novel might seem to be a satire, but it ends up feeling more like a straightforward, almost simplistic parable designed to teach a spiritual lesson, one which takes very seriously Orthodox views of the soul and afterlife. On the other hand, it contains what is certainly one of the weirdest sex scenes ever found in a nice Jewish story.Again, Englander demonstrates his skill at placing timeless concerns of Judaism in sharply modern circumstances. This one feels oddly preachy, though.
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January 1, 2019
Larry, a possibly crazy, rogue Jew from Brooklyn, is a jittery, obsessive, angry mess after the death of his beloved father, especially while sitting shiva in the Memphis home of his orthodox sister. She and the rabbi are worried that Larry will fail to say Kaddish over the next 11 months, as Jewish law stipulates. Larry insists that he will do his duty, then wracks his brain for a way out. A computer search delivers kaddish.com. Larry fills out a form, makes a payment, and trusts that a devoted yeshiva student in Jerusalem named Chemi will faithfully say the Mourner's Prayer for Larry's father while Larry resumes his irreligious life. But this is a Nathan Englander novel, and a very polished and provocative one at that, so inevitably troublesome philosophical, moral, and spiritual complications surface and multiply. As his high-strung, stubborn protagonist undergoes surprising metamorphoses, his high-anxiety quandaries embody the practice of deep analysis and interpretation intrinsic to Judaism. Englander is mischievously hilarious, nightmarish, suspenseful, inquisitive, and deliriously tender in this concentrated tale of tradition and improvisation, faith and love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
October 15, 2018
What happens when Larry, an atheist in a family of orthodox Memphis Jews, ducks his responsibility as the eldest son to say the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for 11 months when his father dies? He hires a stranger through a website called Kaddish.com to recite the prayer so that his father's soul finds peace. From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a funny book about serious issues.
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