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URIEL HEILMAN:
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A journalist and a Jew

For pretty much all his life, Ari Goldman has been in search of something: a journalistic mentor, a moderate middle, a father, a rabbi, a guide.

A journalist for 20 years at The New York Times and now a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York, Goldman has conducted this quest in large part by telling other people’s stories.

But Goldman has also told his own stories, first in a memoir about a year he spent at Harvard’s Divinity School, and now in a new book about saying kaddish for his father, who died in 1999.

This latest book is Goldman’s most personal, and it is about a son’s struggle coming to terms with a world without his parents.

"I like to think that this is really a continuation of the spiritual journey that I started in The Search for God at Harvard,‘ Goldman told The Jerusalem Post, referring to his first book. ’This is the same person 15 years later."

This is not Goldman’s first kaddish journal. After his mother died eight years ago, Goldman, an obsessive diarist, kept a journal of that year, but at the time he couldn’t bring himself to turn it into a book. The memories were too fresh, too painful.

But when his father died four years ago, Goldman turned to the Jewish ritual of kaddish, and his own more personal and familiar ritual of writing and reporting, as a way of making sense of a world bereft of his parents.

Living a Year of Kaddish is the result.

In the literature of the Jewish bereaved — if there is such a thing — Goldman’s book is the third in a series of recent kaddish-related books by bereaved sons. The first, Leon Wieseltier’s Kaddish (1999), is an exploration of the history and meaning of the kaddish prayer. This book, by the literary editor of The New Republic, is interspersed with personal anecdotes about his father and rituals surrounding the recitation of kaddish during the year of mourning.

The second, When a Jew Dies (2001), by sociologist Samuel C. Heilman, is a sociological examination of the ethnographic roots of Jewish customs regarding the dead, the burial process and mourning, in addition to the recitation of kaddish. This book, too, straddles the line between the scholarly and the personal.

Goldman clearly is more comfortable in the realm of personal narrative, and his book is as much about the community of kaddish-sayers and minyan-goers he encountered during his year of mourning as it is about his own experiences.

"I needed somehow to find meaning in what I was doing," Goldman says.

In a sense, that has been the defining characteristic of Goldman’s career.

BORN TO an Orthodox family in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1949, the young Ari moved to New York City with his brothers when he was six, after his parents’ divorce. He spent his formative years in Jewish day schools during the week and shuttled on weekends between his mother’s house in Queens, and his father’s home in Connecticut.

To this day, Goldman still regards his parents’ divorce as one of the seminal events of his life and says the divorce prepared him to be a journalist. "Divorce made me a specialist in entertaining different points of view without having to make judgments about them," Goldman writes in his first book.

Goldman’s zeal for journalism was not long in coming. The young Goldman found himself on the subway for long stretches of time on the way to and from school with little to do but read the newspapers he found abandoned on the seats. Even though his reading habits earned him rebukes from the Orthodox rabbis at his yeshiva in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Goldman couldn’t shake the habit.

When he started as an undergraduate at Yeshiva University, after two years at a public high school in Connecticut, Goldman began writing for the college newspaper, the Commentator. Even before graduating, Goldman had already begun writing for the newspaper that would be his professional home from 1973 to 1993. His occasional freelance pieces for The Times presaged his later career, many of the stories focusing on Yeshiva University and Orthodox Jewish life in New York.

There was little doubt about where Goldman wanted his career to take him. But his first attempt at getting into Columbia’s prestigious journalism school, where he would later become a tenured professor, failed. He got in on his second attempt, and not long after completing the program he started working at The Times, first as a freelancer of sorts, then on the national and metropolitan desks, as a clerk to Abe Rosenthal, and, finally, as a reporter.

But Goldman found that working for The Times full-time was not nearly as easy as stringing for the paper - especially as an Orthodox Jew.

"When I was in college at Yeshiva University, Orthodoxy never presented a conflict, in an intellectual or practical way,‘ Goldman wrote in his first book. ’But how could I be both an Orthodox Jew and a newspaper reporter? The potential for conflict seemed formidable. An Orthodox Jew is forbidden to work, travel or even pick up the telephone on the Sabbath, but newspapers come out seven days a week.‘ He wrote, ’How could I cover a war, a mobster trial or labor negotiations and know that I would be free from it all when the sun set on Friday night?"

Somehow, Goldman says, he believed both his religious observance and his reporter’s ambition could be accommodated.

"I knew I had two passions — Judaism and journalism - and I was going to hold on to them both."

His career at The Times — and since — has been evidence of that marriage of journalism and Judaism.

Somehow, Goldman turned what had seemed an inevitable clash of worlds and values into a synthesis of both, culminating in his post as The Times’s religion reporter.

His books, too, are evidence of that synthesis. Living a Year of Kaddish is part Jewish journey and part reportage, just as The Search for God at Harvard was. To be sure, during his career at The Times, Goldman made some compromises on the letter of Orthodox law while trying to maintain the spirit of Orthodox observance. Yet he somehow managed to hang onto both his vocation and his lifestyle.

In 1993 Goldman left the rigors of daily reporting for a teaching post at his alma mater. Yet while he won the admiration of countless students and readers, it was notably absent from the man whose approbation Goldman sought most: his father.

"None of it seemed to please him," Goldman writes in Living a Year of Kaddish. Then, in September 1999, his father died. And Goldman turned both to Judaism and journalism to come to terms with his father’s death: He recited kaddish and wrote a book about it.

"Kaddish was the ritual that connected me most to my father," Goldman says.

Eventually, that most omnipresent of mourning rituals became more than a religious observance. "It eventually became the theme to the book.‘ When Goldman went to shul in the morning to recite kaddish, he brought with him both his tefillin and his tape recorder. ’I felt that I had a story to tell that would help me and help other people,‘ he says. ’I’m working a lot of this stuff out still."

THE BIGGEST challenge of the book was making his story resonate for others — as "one son’s story that touches other people,‘ Goldman says. ’I would like to see it transcend people who are just like me. I don’t want it to touch just other observant Jews who say kaddish."

While it’s too early to gauge whether the book will appeal to a broader audience, Goldman already has received feedback from some of the book’s earliest readers — including the family members about whom he wrote.

So far, those reviews have been mixed.

"My father’s widow sent me an e-mail saying that I captured my father in the book and that it was a fair, loving portrait of him. I wrote back to her that that was better than any review in The New York Times," Goldman says.

But the reaction of other family members has not been as positive.

"I have some family members who feel I’ve covered up stuff — I’ve given an unfair version of the truth, I’ve told only one side of the story,‘ Goldman says. ’My mother’s husband doesn’t like what I’ve done." Yet even as he hopes that the book becomes a commercial and critical success, Goldman has mixed feelings about the memoir’s release.

"The same joy that I had in publishing my first two books, I don’t quite have yet. There’s a little sense of guilt that maybe I’m capitalizing on my father’s death,‘ he says. ’The pleasure is muted."

Having written two memoirs among only three books - Goldman’s second book, Being Jewish, is about contemporary Jewish practices — he also realizes that his reliance on his own experience for writing books is "a little worrisome."

"One memoir is legitimate,‘ Goldman says. ’But it’s a little dangerous when you try to milk your own story too much."

For a change, his next book will be a historical novel, which Goldman is co-authoring with a deceased writer who left behind an unfinished work of religious fiction.

"I’m really exploiting the dead," Goldman says with a chuckle, a pile of his kaddish books sitting near his desk.

Why is the veteran journalist suddenly turning to fiction?

"Because I can’t write another memoir," Goldman says with a smile.