Kaddish.com

Larry is the loutish, atheist son of Orthodox Jewish parents. When his father dies in 1999, he is tasked with saying the Kaddish – a prayer for the dead – every day for a year. However, Larry refuses the call and instead secretly uses the Web site kaddish.com to contract with Chemi, an Israeli student, to pray in his stead. Twenty years later, Larry (now going by Shuli) has returned to his faith and is a rabbi teaching at a religious school. A chance encounter with a student fills him with dread over his earlier shirking of filial duty, and he embarks on a desperate quest to track down Chemi and reclaim his birthright.

Part satire and part affirmation of faith, Kaddish.com is an odd duck of a novel that captivates while falling short of its ambition. Nathan Englander remains a talented writer well-versed in Orthodox practices and culture, and as with his short story collections, he is able to navigate them with a deft blend of humor (Shuli, furtively browsing a school computer, is stunned by how fast technology has become since he abandoned it) and sincerity (the burning desire to right a wrong). But even those skills cannot mask the absurdity of Shuli’s obsessive odyssey, which is wife, speaking for the audience, rightly condemns.

Kaddish.com continues a long tradition of exploring intersections and divergences between what is Halakhic and what is by other measures right and tries to update it for the digital age. However, that is an issue that needs more than the book’s 200 pages allow.