When 30-year-old Brooklyn, N.Y., resident Larry's father dies in Memphis, Tenn., in 1999, he returns to his sister Dina's home for the funeral and the traditional week of mourning known as shiva. As that ritual ends, Larry devastates Dina with the news that he won't recite the Kaddish, the mourning prayer whose repetition at three services each day for 10 months ensures their deceased father a blessed afterlife. Instead, he registers on the titular website, "like a JDate for the dead," where, for a fee, a yeshiva student in Jerusalem will recite the prayer in his place.
Just when it appears Englander will be satirizing the conflict between the seductions of modernity and the demands of Orthodox belief and practice, he upends that expectation and turns right, onto a more serious path. Fast-forward 20 years, and Larry--now Reb Shuli, a married father of two, teaching Talmud to seventh graders at a yeshiva--has abandoned his upscale Brooklyn neighborhood for one in the same borough amid his fellow pious Jews. A troubled 12-year-old student has lost his father, but is too young to have the obligation of reciting the Kaddish imposed on him. This triggers Shuli's urgent need to connect with the devout Jew he believes has been reciting that prayer in his place, in order to reclaim the sacred duty he forsook so casually.
In kaddish.com, Nathan Englander (What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank) portrays that frantic quest--one that jeopardizes Shuli's marriage, his job, even his sanity--with curiosity and deep sympathy, evoking a response that transcends the boundaries of any particular faith. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer