Imre Kertesz won the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature 2002 "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". He was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1929 and experienced all of the horrors of the Nazi system when the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944 and began exterminating Jews. Kertesz was deported together with seven thousand Hungarian Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald. "I am a nonbelieving Jew", Kertesz once said in an interview. "Yet as a Jew I was taken to Auschwitz." Thus there is nothing one can do to avoid being killed. The mere fact of "being" is enough. In the factory of death Kertesz realized that he could be killed anywhere at any time. This existentialist moment became crucial for him as a writer.

Kaddish for a Child Not Born by Imre Kertesz was first published in Hungary in 1990, and translated into English in 1997, by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson. This is the book I own but another translation by Tim Wilkinson (retitled Kaddish for an Unborn Child) was published in 2004. It is a short book comprising only around a hundred pages and is in the form of an intense monologue which seeks an answer to a question, and is also an explanation to the child who has not been born and will never be born because he/she cannot be allowed to be born into a world where anyone, (any Jew), can be killed at any time. It is a thematic view of the Germans as the "ever embodied shadow of death" always around the corner.

In the Jewish tradition it is the deeds of the child that can redeem the life of the parent and therefore, as the children live, so shall the parent live. Further the wicked soul is said to undergo judgement for a full year but the reverent child ends this by saying the Kaddish at eleven months after the death has taken place in order to bear witness to the goodness of those who bore him/her. Therefore, to refuse to give life to a child , to refuse to agree to the conception of your potential child in this framework carries important implications not only for the unborn child but for the childless "parent". This idea, this refusal underlines the title of this novel and underlines the actions and the thoughts of the central character.