When Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2002, I was twenty-two and deep in one of those unfortunate periods during which a young writer wants to be serious but doesn’t quite know what that means. The young writer may, in such a phase, try to have strong, and usually negative, opinions about big prizewinners, aligning himself instead with more overlooked authors. But, when a new translation of Kertész’s “Kaddish for an Unborn Child” was published a couple of years later, I picked it up. The narrator of the book, a novella-length lament, is a Holocaust survivor, as Kertész was. The prose is manic and unpleasant, like a raw and unedited rant; I found it both galling and thrilling. Even after years had passed, I couldn’t shake its central question: should we bring children into a violent, genocidal world? The book answers with a famous repeating line: “No!”
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