Kaddish For A Child Not Born
(IMRE KERTESZ)
At a conference, our unnamed narrator takes a walk in the
woods and meets a colleague whose idle question about children sparks a bitter
introspective monologue. In it he looks back over his life, sometimes directly
and sometimes through remembered conversations with his ex-wife.
He wanders back over his childhood ? a broken family, years in a boarding
school ? and his time in Auschwitz and the way that has marked him, both
personally and in the perception of others. He agonizes over what being Jewish
means for a man without faith, over his failure as a writer ? he has become a
literary translator instead ? and over why he won''t have children. And he
repeatedly returns to his first meeting with his ex-wife, with whom he is
clearly still obsessed, and to the failure of his marriage. The mood is dark: Kaddish
for a child Not Born is a questioning of existence, a purposeful digging of a grave in the air, a No! hurled at the
world.
It''s easy to see why Kertesz is never going to be a best-selling author,
Nobel Prize notwithstanding. Kaddish for a Child Not Born offers a
dense, complex stream of consciousness, with ideas spread out in almost
holographic fashion. It also has long sentences and hardly any paragraph breaks,
and makes frequent use of italics for emphasis.
No - something screamed and howled within me, it
is impossible that this, this childhood, should happen to the child - to you -
and to me. Yes, and that was the time when I started to tell my wife about my
childhood, or, perhaps, it was myself, I don''t really know, but I was telling
her with all the generosity of my logorrhea, with all its compulsiveness, I was
telling it uninhibited, for days and for weeks I continued telling it, actually
even now, even though I''m no longer telling it to my wife.
But Kertesz also follows the natural progressions of
thought; his writing is intense rather than obscure or difficult.
Though fewer than one hundred pages long, Kaddish For a Child Not Born
feels much more substantial. It is a powerful work that will bear rereading:
largely autobiographical, it is an honest self-examination without any attempt
at concealment or evasion.
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