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Kaddish For An Unborn Child
  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784872175
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

Kaddish For An Unborn Child

Formats & editions
EBook
15 Sept 2010
Paperback
15 Sept 2017
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A moving, mesmerising novel about the dilemma involved in bringing a child into a world in which the evil to create Auschwitz exists.

‘A fine and powerful piece of work… Dark, at times cryptic, and hugely energetic’ Irish Times

\"No!\" is the first word of this haunting novel. It is how a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child, and it is how he answered his wife years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between these two 'No!'s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As Kertész's narrator addresses the child he couldn't bear to bring into the world, he takes readers on a mesmerising, lyrical journey through his life, from his childhood to Auschwitz to his failed marriage.
  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784872175
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

About the author

Imre Kertész

Imre Kertesz was born in Budapest in 1929. At age 15 he was deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, and finally to a subcamp at Zeitz, to labor in a factory where Nazi scientists were trying to convert coal into motor fuel. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to the Communist party doctrine. After a brief service in the Hungarian Army, he devoted himself to writing, although as a dissident he was forced to live under Spartan circumstances. Nonetheless he stayed in Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising, continuing to write plays and fiction in near–anonymity and supporting himself by translating from the German writers such as Joseph Roth, Freud, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. He remained little–known until 1975, when he published his first book, Fatelesseness, a novel about a teenage boy sent to a concentration camp. It became the first book of a trilogy that eventually included The Failure and Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Subsequent titles include Liquidation, Union Jack, and, most recently, a memoir, The File on K. In 2002, Kertesz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Budapest and Berlin.
portrait photo of Imre Kertész

Also by Imre Kertész

Fiasco
The Union Jack
Detective Story
Liquidation
Fateless
See all

Praise for Kaddish For An Unborn Child

Condenses a lifetime into a story told in a single night...exhilarating for [its] creative energy

World Literature

Stunning... resembles such other memorably declamatory fictions as Camus' The Fall and Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground

Kirkus Reviews

Tim Wilkinson is a seriously good translator...I may have given the impression that this is harrowing, and it is; but it has its moments of great, consoling insight, is about far more than just the Holocaust and in its own haunting way provides comfort for the afflicted

Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Tim Wilkinson's translation... is a fine and powerful piece of work. ... Dark, at times cryptic, and hugely energetic, this is a phenomenal piece of writing, showing the depth and breadth of the effects of war on its survivors

Nora Mahony, Irish Times

While the average reader cannot pretend truly to understand the reality of those who suffered in concentration camps, Kertész draws us one step closer

Observer

For taking us somewhere no other writer has, Kertész fully deserved his Nobel Prize

Independent