As a young man, Larry, bridles at having to sit shiva for his father and absolutely refuses to say kaddish for him for the year after his death. Instead, he arranged for someone in Jerusalem, whom he reached via kaddish.com, to be his substitute in saying kaddish for his father morning, noon, and night over the 11-month time period. Oh, Larry, the only son, had loved his father deeply, but he was in a period of his life when he was in revolt against Orthodox Judaism and its traditions.
That revolt did not last, and some 20 years later, Larry was no longer “Larry” but “Reb Shuli,” a teacher at an Orthodox yeshiva in Brooklyn. A student who was clearly upset confided in Shuli that his father had recently died, and that his mother had broken a promise to let him have anything of his father’s that he wanted. The boy said he had wanted a kiddush cup that had been in the family for generations, but his mother said that the cup rightfully should go to an older brother.
For Shuli, the story was an epiphany. Even as Esau had sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of pottage, so had Shuli given away his birthright to some stranger in Jerusalem, whom he knew only by the name Chemi. Thereupon, with the help of the student, who knew far more about computers and Internet searches than did his teacher, Shuli set out to locate Chemi and to somehow reclaim his birthright.
Nathan Englander brilliantly tells this modern folk tale, and, honestly, I could not put the book down until I had read it completely. It is a fast reader and will keep you wondering, “what next?” until its conclusion.
The novel has many lighter moments, but beneath the humor, there is the pain of a grown son’s feelings of guilt. We also can see how a man’s obsession with doing teshuvah and righting a wrong can lead to other wrongs.
Englander has become a well-known author with such titles to his credit as For the Relief of Unbearable Urges; What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank; The Ministry of Special Cases; and Dinner at the Center of the Earth.
The San Diego Center for Jewish Culture is bringing Englander to the Lawrence Family JCC for a Shabbat dinner at 6:30 p.m., Friday, April 5 in which he will engage in discussion with Barry Edelstein, the artistic director of the Old Globe Theater. Englander’s play The Twenty-Seventh Man had its West Coast premiere at the Old Globe in 2015. A ticket for the JCC dinner costs $45 (JCC members $40) and with an additional $17 payment, Kaddish.com also may be purchased via the San Diego Center for Jewish Culture website, accessible by clicking here.
Republished from San Diego Jewish World