Kaddish for a Child Not Born

The narrator of this novel is a Holocaust survivor who refuses his wife’s efforts to start a family. This decision causes his marriage to dissolve and drives the narrator to write constantly to survive. In this entry’s stream-of-consciousness narrative, the author glimpses the psychological trauma of survivors. For instance, the narrator recounts his own memory of the disgust he felt when staying with his “real Jewish” relatives as a young adult. Yet, regardless of his own alienation from Jewish practices, he later recognizes that once the war started he too was seen as precisely the same type of Jew.