Kaddish for a Child Not Born

Imre Kertész

1990

[…] [S]he departed from there and passed over a blue-green carpet as if over the sea, leaving behind her the cut-open body of a dolphin, and she walked victoriously yet shyly toward me, and I thought immediately and spontaneously to myself: “What a beautiful Jewess!”—and I still do it, even nowadays, when, very infrequently and almost invariably on…

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From the Curator

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.

Discussion Questions

Why does sustaining a dialogue with other people take on such an important role for the narrator?
How does the narrator remember his own life as a boy in Budapest before and even during the early years of the war?
What considerations might a Holocaust survivor grapple with before starting a family after the war?

Creator Bio

Imre Kertész

1929–2016

Imre Kertész, a Hungarian writer and 2002 Nobel Laureate in Literature born in Budapest, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. After liberation from Buchenwald, he returned to Hungary as a translator before writing his own novels, which were strongly influenced by his experiences in the concentration camps. In 2005 his novel Sorstalanság (Fateless) was adapted into a film.

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Kaddish for a Child Not Born

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