Customer Reviews

Kaddish for a Child Not Born

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Due to my close personal ties to the author, I am unable to provide an objective review of this book. However, readers should be warned that the English translation of Kertesz's book does not live up to the standards worthy of a Nobel Prize (as evidenced by the review listed below!) The poor translation is one of the reasons why Kertesz has remained obscure in the world of English literature. Anyone truly interested should refer to the original language (Hungarian), or to the German version (Kertesz is fluent in German and was able to proofread the translation). The Swedish version was translated by a close friend and is also true to the original text (if I am correct, this is the version reviewed by the Nobel committee). For those locked into English, do not despair: a new translation will be released hopefully within the next year.

I read "Kaddish" today, and I am left with many questions. I rated it five stars not due to comprehension, but the fact that I was intrigued and sensed the depth of the book without being able to explore as much as I would like. I had read excerpts in "The New Hungarian Quarterly" in the early 90's (probably 1993) and was taken enough to recognize the title in the book store (the K section usually holds many Hungarian authors.) The book is written as a stream of consciousness monologue that repeats/re-explores various themes. Stories, events are hinted at early on and revisited throughout, though perhaps not related in full until late in the novel. This requires patience, as many times I felt like I had missed something, but in reality had only been offered a partial telling. Also, much of the monologue is philosophical and the mere syntax required several readings to understand. These may sound like criticisms, but they are not. The voice is! consistent and intriguing; I wanted to know where each thought/recollection was leading, and I was fascinated even when I didn't understand. I don't want to relate specifics of the book-- they would only be superficial as the structure of the novel is complicated. I am very interested in hearing from others who have read "Kaddish for a Child Not Born." If you have read it and feel motivated to type, please contact me.

A poignant, dramatic stream of self-counsciousness narrative of a middle age man, who in view of his Spartan upbringing and experience as a concentration camp survivor refuses to beget a child in a world where atrocities such as Auschwitz can take place. Although claimed by the author not to be autobiographical, there are instances where it becomes impossible to draw the line between fiction and reality. His Kaddish (Jewish prayer for the dead)is being said not only in the name of his unborn child but also as a prayer for all of those who were not able to survive.
The nameless character feels disconnected to reality, life, and everyone, his obsessive writing is his only tool to deal with his bitterness, and in a compulsive burst of introspection he develops a monologue rich in philosophical and political connotations. Auschwitz for him is not a problem between the Jews and the Germans, but a catastrophe in European history, the ultimate truth in human degradation. In the true spirit of Kaddish, he accepts his fate and divine will as as man who cannnot decide against his destiny.

The Rebbe would say: "God creates things he does not desire,
things about which we scream, some-
times in horror, sometimes in
indignant outrage, Why did you do
this? How could you? and all we
receive is a silent tear from heaven,
yet even the things He does not desire
they do have a purpose."

The narrator struggles to accept the consequences of his Jewish identity, as an individual being punished for a crime he did not commit. He is conscious of the prejudice that existed, exists, and will forever exist against the Jews, and the fear of genocide is ever present. Life is an illusion in which we are not able to become conscious of our own consciousness, probably because our individual consciousness belongs to a whole (maybe God).
Because the narrator is victim of a disease called Auschwitz (for which there is no cure), he is not able to cut himself from the past; consequently, he feels he is unable to be happy or make anyone happy, his marriage ends in failure, and he is destined to dig his grave with a pen. His creative power feeds itself through solitude, suffering and pain. The result is a slim book with an enormous intensity of despair, and a syntax that represents a reading challenge. By all means... a work of art!

My four stars aren't meant to detract from this novella's favorable reviews. Rather, I'd like to suggest that readers tackle this work after they read "Fateless." There's allusions to this more accessible novel in the novella; the latter seems to me more the interest of a philosophically inclined reader's group. While "Fateless" can be read on one's own and grasped, I believe that "Kaddish" would be better suited for collective study and discussion.

It offers few of the pleasures of fiction. Rather, with its considerations of Adorno, Hegel, and Bernhard, and with its nods to the prose of Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and perhaps Kafka, it's more a meditation/fulmination than a novel with an easy plot trajectory. It offers food for thought, but may be rather indigestible if gulped in one sitting. This is more the type of work that Nobel laureates get rewarded for late in their careers; the popular acclaim granted "Fearless" by contrast would first gain an audience for this author, in my estimation.

Again, this is not to detract from Kertesz' achievement, but simply to point out that (at least in English), this compressed, concentrated message may better be shared if taken in smaller, diluted portions among like-minded friends. (My impression is that in the original Hungarian, the agglutinative nature of that language would make this an even heavier, more weighty lump of prose.) It would serve as a fitting challenge after you've all read and discussed "Fateless." As I suggest, this novel can be contemplated with profit by one's self; this smaller work is best divided, nibbled, and ruminated over bite by bitter bite.

People are vaguely aware that Adorno said that art after Auschwitz is impossible. But writing in his essay "Commitment," Adorno criticized the way that the victims could be turned into works of art, that we could find pleasure from their suffering and death. Moreover there is something false in pointing out that humanity can bloom in "so-called extreme situations." In searching for the "authenticitity" of the victim, the line between victim and executioner is muddled. And while one may point out with Primo Levi that the camp survivors existed in a grey zone, Adorno points out that such blurring is "something generally, of course, more bearable for the executioners." That is the challenge that Holocaust literature has to face. How does this short, but dense novella of the Hungarian Imre Kertesz deal with the problem? One way such literature can is to emphasize the humanity of the victims by showing the whole sickening ambiguity of their complexity. In Aharon Appelfeld this is shown by delineating the moral compromisings of their characters, a complexity linked to, but also independent of, their death camp experience. For Kertesz it is shown in his narrator's solipsism.

The narrator survived the Holocaust as a child. Before beginning his monologue he married another Jew, who was born after the war, but later divorced her. This book was originally published in 1990, the year of Hungary's first fully free elections. It is actually quite representative of the atmosphere of eighties Hungary in that the slowly dissolving Communist regime does not make much of an appearance. Instead there is a certain atmosphere of aimless apolitical consumerist hedonism (at one point the narrator dithers over whether to get a house or not). Nor is there much discussion of the history of Hungarian anti-semitism. Indeed the perpetrators do not make much of an appearance, which is one way of meeting Adorno's objections. The title is intriguing. The Kaddish is the prayer to remember the dead, but the child in the title not only never existed, he or she was never really imagined. But it is not other people that the narrator is so concerned about, but the memory. It is a signpost of the narrator's solipsism.

The novella consists of long sentences that make up long paragraphs over many pages. In their style, in their pessimistic content and of the failure of the characters to connect with other people, they are reminiscent of the late Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, whom the narrator mentions in passing. The narrator circles around and around the sources of his isolation--his unsuccessful attempts to find "meaning" about the Holocaust, his inability to come to terms with his father, his apartness from his wife, his inability to express his thoughts. The vital point of his marriage, he "realizes" is that he cannot live in a marriage. He writes that he and his wife came together on his plans to try to understand the Holocaust, but he "realizes" that he should never have let his wife enter this private sphere. His life's work, he decides, is continual digging, digging a grave that others have already started.

This is not an easy book to read, and indeed it demands rereading, but one should make the effort. Kertesz shows a strong talent for metaphor, though his use of it is sparse and sublte. Writing of the mediocre academic who irritates the narrator by talking to him, he notes "The wrinkles of his cynical, happy smile completely swallowed up his narrow eyes." Speaking of he and his wife's enjoyment in their holocaust discussion the narrator notes that they spoiled it like a child. Remembering his childhood in a boarding school he speaks of how milk bottles were as fragile as pearls of dew. There is also a certain wit in the book. The narrator is told as a child that his parents are divorcing because they do not understand one another. He finds this confusing, since they both understand Hungarian. At another point he and his wife discuss what it means to be Jewish, since none of them have any religious beliefs. He suggests at one point that a Jew is someone who was NOT sent to Auschwitz.

In the end the narrator gives a most peculiar harangue to his wife, that causes his divorce. At one point he suggest that having a child would show him to be "a perverse race-preserver." Throughout he screams and shouts his complex and meandering sentences. He links the question of assimilation to his refusal to assimiliate to reality and life itself. And he shouts that he could not care whether he was a Jew or not, the only thing that matters is the "experience" he had in the camps. After that he ponders and makes his final decision. It is an understandable one in the circumstances, and one presented with great integrity. If the message of much of Appelfeld's work is to remind us that suffering does not make us a better person, Kertesz reminds us that remembrance itself can be a certain trap, and certainly offers no guaranteed salvation.

Definition: Kaddish -- A prayer recited in the daily synagogue services and by mourners after the death of a close relative.

In this novel, or more appropriately novella (it's less than 100 pages), the narrator, a failed writer and a holocaust survivor, writes what is ultimately a love letter to his unborn child, his child not born. He begins by reflecting on a night some time ago at a writer's retreat in Soviet-era Hungary when perhaps he first started pondering the context of his existence with one obsessive question in mind -- "my life in the context of the potentiality of your existence" with "your" referring to his unborn child. This is not a question the narrator necessarily wanted to address, but he had little choice as if being pulled by his unborn child, being "dragged. . . by this fragile little hand . . . down this path." What has led to this point in life where he will never see the "dark eyes" of his own little girl or the "gay and hard eyes like silver-blue gravel" of his own little boy.

This is not a nice, linear narrative. Instead we enter a dense story full of stream-of-consciousness with all of the narrator's philosophies, emotions, obsessions, fears and contradictions. We learn about his failed writing career, his school experiences, his relationship with his father and, most importantly, his relationship with his wife (now his ex-wife), the backbone of the narrative. Of interest to note, the author's concentration camp is never addressed in detail but is only referred to indirectly. The effect is intensifying as the holocaust becomes an evil lurking in the darkness, driving the narrator in ways only partially observable.

Ultimately, the narrator evolves his obsessive question from questioning his existence the context of his unborn child's potentiality to "your nonexistence in the context of the necessary and fundamental liquidation of my existence." And while his wife has her theories on what is going on with the narrator's retreat into darkness, the narrator can only leave us with the facts as they are and the conclusion there is an inscrutable survival instinct in us that drives us to survive even when we want to die. And the results of our survival instincts can make for a messy life, including the inward retreating, the severed relationships and, in this case, a divorce and a child not to be..

And then the heart-breaking realization may come to the reader of all that could be in our world. But in the end, sometimes we need to say Kaddish for both our children who die and our children never meant to be.

Long lament and defence by the author why he didn't become a father.
First, there is the incurable Auschwitz illness - I.K. was imprisoned there at the age of fifteen.
But for him, Auschwitz was the emanation of a bigger system, that he calls totalitarianism.
From his childhood on, his family and the people around him began destroying his life through their education and religion - the 'virtues' of his youth. God as an almighty father revealed himself in the image of Auschwitz.
For the author, surviving in this system was already supporting it. But why did he continue to live in it : to write 'My pencil is my shovel'.
Powerful flowing elliptic writing like a musical symphony. A masterpiece.

Anyone who reads the poor first translation of Fateless and the shamefully bad translation of Kaddish cannot even get close to the true spirit of the original works.
Thanks to Tim Wilkinson English speakers can finally enjoy these excellent books.
Look for the titles "Fatelessness" and "Kaddish for an Unborn Child", both translated by Wilkinson. These new editions are at last worthy of the originals and the Nobel Prize.
(See also October 16, 2002 review by Marton Sass)
A movie based on the novel Fateless is also out with English subtitles; don't miss it, if you have a chance. Beautiful work.

Sometime, last year, an article appeared in local newspaper listing few of the most influential European intellectuals of the times to come. One of them was Kertész. I was rahter sceptic about it, but that scepticism came from the lack of knowledge of Kertész's work. Up to that time I only read his short story that was, in my country, published together with Peter Esterhazy's, under the title "Same Story" which didn't impressed me much, at least not in the ammount necessary to confirm newspaper writings.

Some time has passed and I finally got hold of Fateless, then Liquidation and now time came for Kaddish...Suffice it to say that with each reading of Fateless, my oppinion of Kertész as a writer and intellectual changed. And it only grew higher.

Continuing his tetralogy which began with "Fateless" Kertész introduced a character (much of his own resemblance) of a writer/translator who, for the first time, tried to explain to his wife, why he cannot make himself to be part of the creation of another human being, and be responsible for bringing him into this world, giving him, automatically, so painful stigmata of Jewishness.

You should be warned that there is no story line in this book, at least not in the manner of Fateless or Liquidation. Kertész wrote Proustian kind of monolouge, almost stream of consciousnes which flows and flows as the lamentation goes by. But, since the times of Camus and his Siziphus there has been no greater existentialist work, though Kertész wouldn't call it like that. Questioning possibilites of existance, what of individual, what of the collective, Kertész has written major work of art, corresponding with poetry, philosophy, and sad fates of Holocaust survivors.

Questions presented in this book are the questions of our generation, that should be answered before we should be allowed to venture further into field of rational understanding and emphatic social life.

An unbroken cry of despair strongly reminiscent of Bernhard, who in his turn bore the impress of Beckett and through him ultimately Proust(? - discuss). I enjoyed, if that is the word, K's Benigniesque Fateless (K? aha! another link) but this goes deeper. The world without god in which we all live (some in denial) is truly terrifying - and uniquely precious. The inner monologue is reminiscent in tone of the prose and poetry of Frank Kuppner, a favourite of mine. And it is worth pointing out that all these works have humour (except Proust? though there is a work on the subject) unlike something more straightforwardly sentimental (but deeply, deeply moving) like Joseph Skibell's A Blessing on the Moon. As to these translations being superseded, no comment (so far).