Written by Jason Diamond
Illustrations by Hana Iqbal

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Nobody wants to have to read the Kaddish. If you’re Jewish and you’re reciting the Aramaic prayer, it’s probably because somebody you love is dead. I was 12 the first time I recall people mumbling it out loud around me. They were saying the hymn for my grandfather who had just passed. It was early spring and about 200 people attended the funeral. Most of those people are also dead now, and the Kaddish was likely recited over their graves in Aramaic, Hebrew, or English, too.

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About a year after my grandfather passed, I was searching for CDs and books of subcultures that had come and gone before my time. I found a little black and white book with the word “Kaddish” on it, by Allen Ginsberg. I’d read about beatniks and punks and was familiar with his name. But I’d never read any of his poetry. I looked around, saw nobody in the Borders bookstore, and slipped the book into the baggy pants that I had tucked into my shoe. I skateboarded a mile or so from the mall, then sat down at a playground to read Kaddish and Other Poems, about Ginsberg’s late mother Naomi. 

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I started with the title poem. I don’t recall if the edition I had carried the “For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956” dedication with it. It probably did, but my eyes went right to the poem, to the lines:

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 “as I walk toward the Lower East Side—where you walked 50 years ago, little girl—from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes of

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America—frightened on the dock—

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then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?”

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It felt so familiar. My grandfather had grown up in Patterson, one of New Jersey’s “Big Six” cities. His Jewish parents came from Russia and roamed the Lower East Side, great-grandparents I only recall as old and frail, with Yiddish-affected accents.  

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To me, it feels like Ginsberg—who was raised Jewish but was on his way towards Buddhism by the time he started writing the poem—was trying to make sense not so much his mother Naomi's death, but her life. She’s gone. He knows that. But it feels like there’s so much unanswered. 

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When Ginsberg’s poem is read aloud, it doesn’t have the same rhythm a typical Kaddish read by a congregation would. And Ginsberg’s is far longer.

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“Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers—and my

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own imagination of a withered leaf—at dawn—”

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I can still remember why it spoke to me. My understanding of the language the original Kaddish is read in is minimal, the stuff I’d been taught in Hebrew school and forgot once I started smoking weed not long after my bar mitzvah.

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But Ginsberg’s Kaddish managed to do what the Mourner’s couldn’t. It felt more personal than the Mourner’s Kaddish itself. How he borrowed the title of the old, holy hymn, and fashioned it into a meditation more William Blake than Old Testament as a way to cope with his mother Naomi’s passing a few years earlier. What comes after the first dozen or so lines was what took me away from my grief.

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You'll often read that Ginsberg’s mother Naomi was troubled. It’s mentioned throughout the poem, which traces her life from Russia to New York and then New Jersey, her attempt to live in the United States even though English wasn’t her first language, and the communist beliefs that placed her at odds with the capitalist-driven American Dream. 

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“Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream—what is this life?”

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She suffered from schizophrenia, and her repeated suicide attempts and paranoid delusions had her in and out of psychiatric hospitals throughout her son’s life. And yet, there's often context missing when Naomi's life is discussed.

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Naomi was an immigrant. While there isn’t much to be found about her life as a young Jewish girl in Russia, given that she was born in 1896, it’s almost certain she was told that life was going to be dramatically better once she made it to the United States, that she wouldn’t have to be afraid the way she was in Eastern Europe, where pogroms and hatred towards Jews were all too familiar. But when Naomi got to the United States, she was met with a different sort of hell, one of continued poverty and conditions perhaps worse and more unsanitary than the ones she faced back in Russia. Here, she was a stranger in a strange land. English wasn’t her first language.

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“Naomi reading patiently, story out of a Communist fairy book—Tale of the Sudden Sweetness of the Dictator—Forgiveness of Warlocks—Armies Kissing—”

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She suffered from mental illness, at a time when we understood even less than we do now about our brains. Kaddish details how her husband and Allen’s father, Louis, divorced her in 1950. Naomi had few options.

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The only justifiable solutions seemed to be to lobotomize her, give her shock treatment, or send her to one mental institution after another, until she finally died in Pilgrim State Hospital in 1956. At her funeral, it is said that she was buried without anybody reciting the Kaddish—as her son once told some friends, too few men attended the funeral to make the necessary minyan of 10 Jewish men. 

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If you read enough interviews with novelists, you’ll find a question posed about how much memoir ends up in their fiction. I find that novelists hate this question. Poets, meanwhile, tend to escape being asked about it. I always think that’s a shame. 

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Poetry is often the most beautiful sort of memoir. Rimbaud had his Morning of Drunkenness more than once, Gwendolyn Brooks heard young boys using slang that she turned into We Real Cool, and it’s easy to imagine Anne Sexton up at 3 in the morning, drinking hot cocoa and yearning for the simple life she writes about in The Ambition Bird. 

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And of course, there’s Naomi. Her whole story, as Allen saw it, is contained in his Kaddish. Thousands of words, some presented as chants, the way someone in a synagogue might recite a prayer, others mixed up in Ginsberg’s strange blend of cosmic weirdness of fact and poetry.

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You have to read it a few times to let it all sink in. Once it does, you can’t forget Naomi. I never have. 

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Poetry is often the most beautiful sort of memoir.

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She was a Jewish woman from Eastern Europe, like all my ancestors. But my family didn’t talk about the past. I didn’t know the stories of their lives over there or many of the things they faced when they came to America. It was only when I read Kaddish that I started to understand that the stories of my family were not that different from Naomi’s.

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I've been thinking more about the immigrant experience in America, of Naomi's experience. How terrifying it must be to have this hope that things will be better when you make it over, and then to face the cold reality of a strange place that is historically hostile to outsiders. Whether he meant to or not, her son wrote her biography; within it, he gave us a guide to what she and countless others go through when the United States is the last, best option, when the United States isn’t what they hoped it would be.

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Jason Diamond is the author of Searching for John Hughes and The Sprawl, a contributor at GQ and New York Mag’s Grub Street, and a writer, editor, and guy who probably owns too many books, records, and shirts. He runs a newsletter called The Melt.

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