Kaddish for a Child Not Born Author:Imre Kertesz, Christopher C. Wilson (Translator), Katharina M. Wilson (Translator) This mesmerizing novel is a tale of identity and memory -- the story of a middle-aged man taking stock of his life in the ever-present shadow of the Holocaust. The story unfolds at a writers' retreat as the narrator, a survivor of the Holocaust, explains to a friend that he cannot bring a child into a world where the Holocaust occurred and c... more »ould occur again. In an intricate narrative, we learn of the narrator's myriad disappointments: his unsuccessful literary career, his failed marriage, his ex-wife's new family and children -- children that could have been his own. Kaddish for a Child Not Born is a deeply introspective, poetic, yet unsentimental work.
Imre Kertesz, born in Hungary in 1929, is one of that country's most success postwar writers. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history."« less