Volume 46, Number 2 · February 4, 1999
Good Grief
By Rosemary Dinnage
Kaddish
by Leon Wieseltier
Knopf, 585 pp., $10.01 (paper)
Christian ignorance of Judaism, Leon Wieseltier says, is 'one of the great tragicomedies of history' (as is, he implies elsewhere, Jewish-American ignorance of it). His long, dense, fascinating account of a year of Orthodox mourning for his father is therefore an education for this ex-Christian, for by the end of it—exhausted, as he was himself—one can feel that the essence of Judaism has somehow been crammed into the subject of just one tradition in its fullness.
Review, 3220 words
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