In his new book, The Pater: My Father, My Judaism, My Childlessness, Elliot Jager engages in a deeply personal exploration of the subjects listed in the title, buttressed by observations gleaned from interviews with other childless men. Varda Epstein writes in her review:
What is it like to be childless as a Jew, when the very first Jewish commandment is to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28) and Scripture likens the childless to the dead? What is it like to be childless in Israel, a country that values children above all, as a supreme value? . . . Jager frames these questions from his perspective as having been abandoned as a young child by his father—the “Pater” as Jager has come to call him in his mind. What does it mean to be a father, he ponders. Was he robbed of a chance to prove himself a better man, a better father? Would he have been a better parent than his own father?
We hear of his loneliness, having no one to talk to about being childless, his isolation. Many of the men Jager interviewed felt the same sense of being alone, being different, being unmanned somehow, and how no one in their circles quite knew what to do with them.
[Throughout, Jager’s] writing is just superb. Take the breathtaking ending of the prologue:
Like some kind of metaphysical fog, the reality of my childlessness lightly blankets my soul. On a sunny day it gets burned off by life’s routine. It doesn’t hang oppressively, incessantly, unremittingly over my being.
And yet it changes everything.
Read more on Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/varda-epstein/the-pater-exploring-child_b_8276392.html