Author Description

Winner of the 1998 National Jewish Book Award <br>"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" <br>Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Leon Wieseltier, a diligent but doubting son, recites the Jewish prayer of mourning at his father's grave, and then embarks on the traditional year of saying the kaddish daily. <br>Wieseltier's highly acclaimed Kaddish is the spiritual and thoughtful journal of one of America's most brilliant intellectuals. Driven to explore th origins of the kaddish, from the ancient legend of a wayeard ghost to a 17th-century Ukranian pogrom, he offers as well a mourner's response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred up in death's wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Kaddish>/b> is suffused with love: a son's embracing of the traditon bequethed to him by his father, a scholar's savoring of its beauty, and a writer's revealing it, proudly unadorned, to the reader.