Everything struck hard. The door slamming behind me in the black car. The shovel stabbing the mound of soil. The wooden box hitting the floor of the pit.<P>Beside his father's grave, a diligent but doubting son begins the mourner's kaddish, and realizes he needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So begins Leon Wieseltier's highly acclaimend Kaddish, the spiritual journal of a man commanded by Jewish law to recite a prayer three times daily for a year and driven, by the ardor of inquiry, to explore its origins. Here is one man's urgent exploration of Jewish lituragy and law, from the 10th-century legend of a wayward ghost to the speculations of medieval scholars on the grief of God to the perplexities of a modern rabbi in the Kovno ghetto. Here too is a mourner's unmannered response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in death's wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, wieseltier's Kaddish is a narrative suffused with love: a son's embracing the tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholar's savoring the beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writer's revealing it, proudly unadorned, to the reader.

"Extraordinary.... [Kaddish] is a fine book, no, more: It may well be destined to become an American Jewish classic." --Forward

"Read this extraordinary book and you will be both intellectually enriched and deeply moved.... [Wieseltier's] Kaddish is not only for his father; it is for all fathers for whom no kaddish has been said." --Elie Wiesel

"An extended meditation on life and death, faith and doubt, freedom and responsibility, modernity and tradition, fathers and sons." --The Washington Post Book World

An extraordinary spiritual journal: a record of the inner life of one of America's most brilliant intellectuals during a year of mourning. "Kaddish" is a work of history, philosophy, and interior autobiography, of moral force and emotional power.

Winner of the 1998 National Jewish Book Award

An astonishing fusion of learning and psychic intensity; its poignance and lucidity should be an authentic benefit to readers, Jewish and gentile. --The New York Times Book Review

Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death. Leon Wieseltier, a diligent but doubting son, recites the Jewish prayer of mourning at his father's grave, and then embarks on the traditional year of saying the kaddish daily.

Wieseltier's highly acclaimed Kaddish is the spiritual and thoughtful journal of one of America's most brilliant intellectuals. Driven to explore th origins of the kaddish, from the ancient legend of a wayeard ghost to a 17th-century Ukranian pogrom, he offers as well a mourner's response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred up in death's wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Kaddish>/b> is suffused with love: a son's embracing of the traditon bequethed to him by his father, a scholar's savoring of its beauty, and a writer's revealing it, proudly unadorned, to the reader.

Leon Wieseltier lives in Washington, D.C.