Book Review: "Kaddish for an Unborn Child" by Imre Kertész

This book was a brilliant exploration of the Jewish identity in the 20th century. It is beautifully written though it has little punctuation and the sentences are incredibly long. We get these very philosophical viewpoints, passages and quotations in which we are made to confront certain emotions, certain ideologies and we are mostly made to confront ourselves and our beliefs in mortality and identity. I think that one of the most interesting things about this book is that there are passages that are so long with so little punctuation that you cannot help but stop in the middle of a sentence and breathe the last few words in before carrying on. But it shows the nature of the mind never being able to just think about one thing at once. Our minds are constantly racing with a billion ideas at play. It is a perfect reflection of the reality of existence and therefore, when it comes to the characters, we have a very realistic and often incredibly chaotic view of them as people. Though they seem to be together, they are constantly falling apart as their identity becomes more and more marginalised and they are more and more shamed for things that they have never committed. “Kaddish for an Unborn Child” is the story about a man who cannot stand to bring this child into a world so full of hatred, uncertainty and failure. His marriage is declining as we see him through his darkest days all the way to hell and back again.

The quotations on identity are amazing, intense and long in their passages of great exploration and reflection:

“Yes, it was there that I lived for the first time anon Jews, I mean among genuine Jews, not the kind of Jews we were, urban Jews, Budapest Jews, which is to say no kind of Jews, though not Christians either of course, but the king of non-Jewish Jews who still fast on the Day of Atonement, at the very least up to noon; no, the ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ (I no longer remember exactly how we were related, but then why would I remember, they long ago dug their graves in the sky, into which they were sent up in smoke) were genuine Jews, with prayers in the morning, prayers in the evening, prayers before meals, prayers over wine, but for all that decent people albeit unbearably dull of course…”

And then we have the different ways in which the narrator tries to rationalise his own beliefs and reflect on them in comparison to circumstance, which I always find is an interesting way to be on the outside and still look at things very personally:

“Yes, you see and label them as common criminal lunatics, yet from the moment one lays his hands on the orb and sceptre you immediately deify him, reviling him as even as you deify him, listening the objective circumstances, reciting what, objectively, he was right about, but what, subjectively, he was not right about, what objectively can be understood and what subjectively cannot, what sorts of hanky-panky were going on in the background, what sorts of interest played a part and never running short of explanations just so that you can salvage your souls and whatever else is salvageable, just so that you can view commonplace robbery, murder and trafficking in souls in which we all, all of us sitting here, somehow play or have played a part…”

In conclusion I can honestly state that this has been one of the most reflective reading experiences of the year for me. A book purely about how identity and reflection of identity are two entirely different things. It is a short, but pretty incredible work of semi-biography in that stance.