kaddish.com Read online

  “Six months,” she says. “Six payments.”

  “Hadas!” the man calls from the back, for the first time using the woman’s name.

  “You get back to working,” she yells to him. “I’ll worry about who gets paid.”

  Again the machine in the backroom hums.

  “Don’t make me a fool in front of this one,” she says to Shuli, tilting her head toward the archway and the silversmith beyond. “Honestly, it’s not worth it if I have to hear about you for the rest of my life.”

  “I will pay,” Shuli says. “Debts, in this world, I no longer let sit.”

  XXVIII

  Toward repaying those debts, Shuli sets to work as soon as he’s back at Chemi’s apartment. He breaks only to put on tefillin and say Minchah and Maariv down at the yeshiva, praying along with the students and Rav Katz, who—a man of great heart—welcomes Shuli even now.

  When they sing Aleinu, Shuli grabs his knapsack and duffel and ducks out, dashing back to the files. He starts right in on a new name, reading the application, memorizing personal information, and reviewing each page with real kavanah. So focused is Shuli, it’s well after midnight when he next notices the time.

  He rubs at his eyes. He stretches and sighs his way through a creaky deep-knee bend. And then he appraises what he’d already accomplished. At this point there’s no denying it. Like Nachshon at the Red Sea, Shuli thinks he’s waded far enough into the waters to show he means business.

  Fetching Chemi’s phone, he steps out to pace nervously on the balcony and dials Miri.

  Shuli knows he’s been lax in reaching out during the madness of the last days and Miri, rightfully, sits silent on the other end when she hears his voice. Without prompt or cue, he slowly and carefully fills her in, explaining how he’d found Chemi and reclaimed his rights, how he’d uncovered the hoax and then dreamt his edifying dream.

  Shuli winces as he waits on her reply. What Miri says, tender and serene, is, “What of us, Shuli? When will you make your way home?”

  He couldn’t ask for more.

  Loving wife. Understanding wife. He feels, by her companionship, lifted up and blessed. “It’s not about returning to a specific place,” Shuli says. “It’s about us being together. What if you three were to join me to build a new home here.”

  “There?” she says. “In Israel?”

  “In Jerusalem,” he says. “The Holy City.”

  “You really have gone mad,” she says. “Our life is in Brooklyn. Our house is in Brooklyn. What would we even do over there—how would the family survive?”

  “By God’s grace,” he says. “And, because grace won’t feed us, I have, for that too, a plan.”

  “Is that supposed to calm me? Your plans unravel, Shuli. Your plans unwind.”

  But this plan had unwound its way to Jerusalem. And as much as Miri has Shuli’s number, he knows a thing or two about her. He knows how deep her faith runs, and how strong within it is the desire to live in the earthly city that mirrors the one in Heaven.

  “We can have a great life here,” Shuli says. “I’ve already seen our future, pictured our new beginning.”

  “Now you’re a seer? I’d rather be married to a wise man than a prophet,” Miri says, borrowing a line from Bava Batra.

  “Wisdom I can try for too. If you want logic, if you want proof,” and Shuli looks down on the yeshiva’s dome, and thinks of all his collected learning. “The chachamim say that to live in Eretz Yisrael is equal to doing all the other mitzvot of the Torah combined. And the Ramban makes clear, to live as we do in America, it’s as if one is worshipping idols.”

  “Now we’re all sinners? Every one of us, faithful from afar?”

  “I did not say ‘sinner,’ God forbid. I said only that the Ramban writes ‘k’ilu’—that it is ‘as if’ one were living that way.”

  “And that’s why you want your children to join you? To spare them from sin?”

  “I want them here because I miss them and can’t live without them—and because I miss you,” Shuli says. “Because I love you, and love the children, and because I’ve found a way to take all this terrible deception and turn it back into truth.”

  “Please!” Miri says, her patience gone. “Enough already! You got your kinyan, you got your rights. You can’t go on this way, shoveling things into an emptiness that never gets filled.”

  “No, no,” Shuli says, “a misunderstanding.” He actually laughs out loud, feeling lighthearted. “It’s not about me anymore—that’s the wonder. It’s the others, less fortunate, that I’m here to serve.”

  There is a worrying silence. He presses the phone to his ear and can hear a siren on Miri’s end and the raucous sounds of Hayim and Nava at play.

  When she finally speaks, Miri says, “So you’re whole now, my husband?”

  “Like never before. Except in my love for you, and in my fatherly pride, where there’s never been, for even a moment, any doubt.”

  Shuli holds his breath and thinks he might explode with delight when Miri says, “I’ve always imagined what it would be like for our children to live in the Holy City.”

  “Then you’ll think about it?”

  “Yes, my husband, I’ll think.”

  Miracles atop miracles. How quickly a life can turn around.

  * * *

  —

  Invigorated, Shuli pokes through the files, his attention never lagging. He never feels tired during his inquiry, and is bothered by neither hunger nor thirst. By the time the sun rises, Shuli has a partial list committed to memory, and a physical pile to make it manifest. When he shuts his eyes, the names slowly come.

  Shuli decides he’s sufficiently well versed in the first thirteen—not just in his command of the names but with the essence of the people behind them. A baker’s dozen under his belt. And a not-unlucky number where Jews are concerned.

  As Shuli finalizes that first solid stack of files, he thinks he might manage to finish another that day if his memory holds out. Before moving on, he texts Chemi’s wife, saying only, “Tell your husband his friend Shuli found his phone and would like to return it.” Shuli thinks that’ll do the trick, and waits for Chemi to come back.

  As concerns Chemi’s wife, let him find his own way to honesty and amends.

  When Chemi arrives, Shuli is at the railing reciting his list aloud and checking it against the sheet of paper where he’d written it. To hold a full hundred in his head, he’d need a while longer, that was certain.

  “Six people,” Shuli says to Chemi. “Six a year. And on some, seven.”

  “Six a year, what?”

  “New customers. At a new, fairer rate. If you give me the passwords and show me how to do the site,” Shuli says. “So I can make it real. So I can make the money and also pray. I’ve done the math. I know the numbers. If my wife will come and teach. And if I teach some. Plus, with our house in Royal Hills. If we flip it, we should be all right.”

  Shuli leads Chemi into the apartment and shows him the shifting drifts of papers, the freshly organized piles, pointing him to the stack set apart.

  “There will be ninety-four in that one when it’s done,” Shuli says. “Ninety-four seems best, for the first year, to start.”

  Chemi opens the top folder. “This one is very old. One of the first.”

  “Yes,” Shuli says. “I’m doing my best to maintain a kind of order. That is, the ones still under Divine judgment will, of course, go first. And then the very oldest will go, along with the newest. That makes the most sense.”

  “Who does it make sense for?”

  “For me. And for you. And for the families. And for the dead,” Shuli says. “I’ll pray. I’ll say every Kaddish missed, for every soul forgotten. If I do ninety-four this year, and take on six new customers, paying—that makes a hundred. A hundred names a year to start
.”

  “Then it would take—” Chemi stares off, starting to tally in his head.

  “Thirty years,” Shuli says. “At a hundred a year, thirty years to put things right. I’ll be eighty then. A nice number!”

  Shuli shifts his weight nervously from foot to foot, as if he were interviewing for the job. As if the two, in cahoots, were working on a deal.

  To further plead his case, Shuli says, “In such an instance, it’s absolutely not a sin to say Kaddish for more than one person at a time.”

  While Chemi processes, a pained expression on his face, Shuli goes over it for himself once again. As long as he goes through each name, each time, in his prayers. As long as his thoughts are with the dead, individually, in each instance, against this part of the process he can think of no prohibition.

  As for those for whom the prayers come so very late, a merciful God must surely consider extenuating circumstances now and again. And anyway, back to Shuli’s dream, and his fasting father, what is it to be late by a few years when set against an eternity? In the everlastingness of Heaven, with infinity stretching as far back before the beginning as it does out into the future past the end, a mourning delayed by even a thousand, thousand years is nothing but a blink against time.

  “I’d thought it would be over with, this torment,” Chemi says. “But this—”

  “Yes,” Shuli says, speaking with something like compassion. “I imagine it’s a bit of a shock.”

  Chemi scratches at his nose, aghast.

  “Come now, don’t look so sad,” Shuli says. “Would prison really be better? You paying with yourself for what you can’t in any other way repay? This is a much more attractive offer. For you, for your wife, for your kids—you said you had kids, yes?”

  “Five,” Chemi says. “There are five.”

  “How much better for them! And the sooner you help me start chipping away at it, the sooner this will all be forgotten. The first twenty years went by so fast. Think of how quick the next thirty can be.”

  “Yes,” Chemi says, reaching for a different file.

  “The passwords,” Shuli says. “I don’t mean to rush you. But there are still many names for me to practice, and they’ll be starting Shacharit soon.”

  Chemi leads Shuli to the crate with the router and pulls a little notebook out from underneath the device. “Everything’s in here. The bank numbers, the passwords, all that you need.”

  Shuli takes it and extends a hand, which Chemi shakes.

  Then Chemi turns away with the face of a man whose life has just been burdened out into the future. As he walks off, he drops the keys onto the table and picks up his phone. “Rav Katz has the number,” he says, and steps out onto the balcony and through the metal door.

  Shuli watches him go. He then heads right to one of the piles and pores over a daughter’s reminiscences about a mother who was said to extract true joy from the small things in life.

  How long until he could hold a hundred people in his thoughts while he prayed?

  Shuli doesn’t let the worry slow him. He pushes toward the practical and the positive in his mind.

  If they get a good price on the Royal Hills house? If Rav Katz helps him find some teaching in the neighborhood? He seems to like Shuli’s style.

  Shuli will figure it out. He’ll remember the names. And when Miri comes around—he knows she will—Shuli can make room for the family right where he is. That balcony could be enclosed. A tin roof and some cinder block. He and Miri could live in the addition while the children sleep within. They could take their time finding an apartment to fit.

  Shuli puts down the papers and grabs his tallis bag from Nava’s knapsack and the keys from the table, and, as if he’s been doing it forever, he locks the apartment, and the door to the stairs, as he heads to the study hall for minyan.

  Gilad is already waiting, and Shuli takes his place across from the boy. He puts on his tallis and wraps his tefillin, and then they both turn eastward toward the Temple Mount.

  Shuli moves through the blessings, rote and second nature, practicing instead the names on his list. He can do it, he knows. He can take on a hundred lives each year. He can keep them in his thoughts, and learn to daven at the same time with a whole heart. Shuli believes this more and more as each second passes by.

  And when the first Kaddish comes, Shuli takes to his feet.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank my editor, Jordan Pavlin, and my agent, Nicole Aragi, for getting me, and the novel, to this point. I wouldn’t be here without either of them, very literally. I want to thank Jordan Rodman, Gracie Dietshe, and Nicholas Thomson, and all the amazing folk at Knopf and Team Aragi. I’m indebted to Deborah Landau and NYU for their continued support, and to John Wray for my hideout. I’ve turned to many friends with fact-related questions, often hyper-specific and wholly neurotic. JJ fielded the sunflower seeds, David H2 tackled Memphis, my brother-in-law counted Kaddishes, and on and on. Joel Weiss was an extraordinary resource and counsel, as always. Chris Adrian read the manuscript early. And Merle Englander never fails to catch a typo before we go to press. As for Lauren Holmes, there are no words—it defies dedication. But I’ll go with thank you, thank you for your support. And to my wife, Rachel, and my daughter, Olivia, there is thanks, and there is love.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an international best seller, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the novels The Ministry of Special Cases and Dinner at the Center of the Earth. His books have been translated into twenty-two languages. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. His play, The Twenty-Seventh Man, premiered at the Public Theater in 2012. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.

  An Alfred A. Knopf Reading Guide

  kaddish.com

  The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s conversation about kaddish.com, the brilliant new novel from Nathan Englander, author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth and The Ministry of Special Cases.

  Discuss the theme of faith as it is portrayed in the novel. How does each character’s faith manifest itself? Does faith always manifest itself in the same way? Do you feel that any one character’s faith is more “legitimate” than others? Why or why not?

  While Larry is staying at his sister’s house for his father’s shiva, he decides to watch pornography on his laptop and immediately feels guilty. He is haunted by the image of a particular actress in one of the videos for years to come. To what do you attribute this woman’s staying power in Larry’s conscience? What does she come to represent to him?

  When Larry looks at the photo of Chemi, he thinks to himself, “See how this young man, alone in the beit midrash, struggles to assimilate some Talmudic idea” (this page). Shortly after, he begins to weep, and he later identifies this moment as the one in which he chose to return to Judaism. Why does Chemi’s photograph have such a profound effect on Larry? Why is his choice of the word “assimilate” significant?

  Consider Larry’s decision to take on Shuli as his new name. What does this name symbolize to him? Is it his intention to leave his life as Larry behind forever? Is he successful? Why or why not?

  Explore the novel’s depiction of the interplay between technology and religion (Judaism, in particular). Are the two at odds with one another? Has Judaism been, in any way, enriched by technology?

  Why is Shuli so affected by the news of Gavriel’s father’s death—and by the boy’s refusal to say Kaddish at school? To what extent does he identify with Gavr
iel? Why does this boy’s story inspire Shuli to try and make contact with Chemi?

  Compare and contrast Shuli and Miri’s observance of Jewish law. How does Miri make sense of Chemi’s guilt? His past? Does she agree that Shuli’s search for Chemi is justified? To what do you attribute any key differences in their understanding?

  What does the Internet represent to Shuli? Why is it simultaneously so alluring and so repulsive to him? As you answer this question, consider Shuli’s beliefs about where knowledge comes from.

  Explore the dream Shuli has about his father in the hotel in Jerusalem. How do you interpret the absence of each man’s elbows? How does this dream deepen our understanding of Shuli’s connection to his father? Of his sense of guilt?

  On this page, Englander alludes to the biblical narrative of Jacob’s ladder: “Reb Shuli lies down, with a bag under his head for a pillow, better off than Jacob and his stones.” He again references this story on this page, writing, “Shuli knows just when to turn and when to go straight, when to climb or descend a staircase.” In what ways is this allusion significant?

  Examine the dream Shuli has after he discovers the truth about Chemi. Which rituals does he perform at the beginning of the dream, and what do they signify? Who appears to him in the dream? How does each person present himself or herself, and how would you characterize the interactions Shuli has with each of them? What is the Heavenly Tribunal, and why does Shuli suspect that the three individuals he encounters constitute the Tribunal? How do you interpret the conclusion of this dream sequence?

  Why do you think Shuli decides to spend the last of his money on an elaborate Kiddush cup for Gavriel? What does he hope to communicate with this gift? Do you think his message will come across to Gavriel? Why or why not?