Delphine Horvilleur is one of five female rabbis in France and co-leader of the Liberal Jewish Movement of France. Living with Our Dead: On Loss and Consolation, winner of the 2021 Babelio Prize for nonfiction, is an astute essay collection exploring attitudes toward death by way of family history, Jewish traditions and teachings, and funerals Horvilleur has conducted.
The collection's 11 case studies include the legendary (Azrael, the angel of death; Moses, denied a glimpse of the Promised Land), the high profile (psychoanalyst Elsa Cayat, killed in the 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack; French politician Simone Veil; assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin), and the personal (a friend who died of cancer; an uncle buried in a cemetery that was desecrated in 2019).
Horvilleur likens her role to a storyteller's because she narrates lives and relays ancient wisdom to "accompany the grieving." Death rituals are important even for people who are not devout, she insists. For instance, in "Sarah and Sarah," a man requests a Kaddish for his mother, an Auschwitz survivor, even though he feels they have not been "good Jews."
A paradox has occupied the author since childhood: facing death can be life-affirming. The essay titled "Miriam" is an apt illustration: the subject was obsessed with planning her own funeral until her family surprised her with a living funeral, which freed her from her obsession. "Isaac's Brother" confronts the existential question of where the dead go. Ironically, the Hebrew term for cemetery means "the house of life." "We actually take our dead everywhere with us," Horvilleur concludes.
These frank, humane essays are rooted in Jewish history and theology yet capture universal truths. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck