Review: Kaddish.com: A Novel

Kaddish.com: A Novel by Nathan Englander
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

How has it come to this?

Nathan Englander may well be the finest current practitioner of the Jewish short story. His “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” “How We Avenged the Blums,” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” are all at least minor masterpieces, and I can’t imagine teaching a Jewish-American literature class without at least mentioning him these days.

But someone, maybe him and maybe his agent, has told him he has to turn out a novel in order to be genuinely big time.

His first attempt, The Ministry of Special Cases, had some powerful moments, including its remarkable opening conceit of a character who literally erases history. (His job is to scour grave markers so that the children and grandchildren of the criminal element can deny their ancestors’ crimes.) It goes on too long and descends into an unrelieved darkness, but it’s certainly worthwhile.

His second, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, strikes me as almost a great novel. It has a couple scenes – the one of Ariel Sharon reliving a moment when he was blown sky-high by a mortar – that are masterful, and it asks some brutal and powerful questions about Israeli hopes for peace. It ends on a somewhat unearned note, but I highly recommend it. When it came out two years ago, I assumed our next Englander would finally be a great novel.

But this one, his third, isn’t merely flawed like its predecessors. It’s a flat-out bad book.

For starters, this is a highly contrived story. Our protagonist, whom we meet in the days of his irreligiousity, hires an on-line company to say the Jewish prayer for the dead twice a day for his recently deceased father. Years later, he comes to think of himself as having sold a crucial birthright, and he sets out to buy it back.

I’ll skip the convoluted descriptions of how he comes to track down the people behind the website, but I’ll point out that there’s nothing inherently “modern” about hiring people to say Kaddish. It’s a central plot point in Israel Zangwill’s The King of the Schnorrers, published 125 years ago, and it’s a long and nearly honored practice. There may not be a full transfer of “birthright” as takes place here, but the distinction is so narrow that – without more reflection than Englander offers – it comes across as a particular complaint of a particular individual. It’s not a moral issue, and it isn’t really even an issue of Jewish law. It’s just a man who won’t forgive himself (as his wife repeatedly tells him) and a plot contrived to give him excuses not to do so.

In addition, there’s no substantive character development. Our protagonist is so anti-religious at the start that he – in line with Alexander Portnoy – streams porn on his nephew’s computer right after sitting shiva for his father. Then, without pretense of explanation, he becomes devout, marries, and takes a job teaching at his own childhood religious school. We never see why he’s so transformed and, while there might be intrigue in that omission, it seems as if it’s central to his motivation to track down the people behind the website. That is, the lesser part of his thinking is crucial to what’s happening in the novel while the larger question goes by without giving us opportunity to ponder it.

And, finally, this undermines much of what makes Englander’s short stories so powerful. As someone raised in the Orthodox world, he has always had the capacity to show us Orthodoxy without exoticizing it. His characters are three-dimensional; they take the world as they find it.

Here, though, we’re left to look on the world of the Orthodox as implicitly peculiar. They’re wedded to rituals, well, because. Because they’re wedded to rituals. Their character is less who they are and more how they define themselves through actions. If it had been much blunter, we might have gotten a glossary at the back translating the ‘strange’ conduct of our characters into ‘real and comprehensible’ English.

I’ll acknowledge there’s a residue of serious question here, and there are a couple of scenes where Englander seems within two steps of his best and most sublime work, but I am deeply disappointed on the whole. He’s shown us that he has it in him to be among our very best writers. With this, I have come to doubt it.


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