Kaddish.com by Nathan Englander.(Alfred Knopf. 2019)
When Larry’s Orthodox father passes away, his religious sister Dina insists that he take on the responsibility of saying Kaddish for the year to come. Larry, however, has ceased to be religious. He doesn’t want to attend daily minyans for a year, so he trolls the internet until he happens on a website called “kaddish.com” where he can hire Orthodox scholar Chemi to recite the Kaddish for his father.
What happens next is that Larry recovers his orthodoxy and becomes a rabbi and a teacher in a religious school in New York. He marries Mira, an Orthodox woman, has two children, and life is going along well until he become involved with a troubled student Gavriel, who is suffering the recent loss of his own father. To help Gavriel, Larry, now known as Shuli, tries to locate Kaddish.com online. He receives no responses to his inquiries, so he takes a leave of absence from his job and flies to Israel to find the organization.
There in Jerusalem, Shuli cannot locate the organization, but he finds a small Yeshiva and eventually discovers the mysterious Chemi, who is now a rich man making money from the Kaddish requests which he does not fulfill. How Shuli solves all the problems is the finale of the novel. Englander’s focus on the need for Kaddish is not the first time he focuses on the issue. In his first collection of short stories, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” his story “The Twenty-Seventh Man” describes a group of Russian Jewish authors who are about to be murdered by Stalin, one of whom is concerned about who will be left to say Kaddish. His latest novel is another way to look at the need for Kaddish and is well worth the time.
Andrea Kempf is a retired librarian and an award winning book reviewer.