How a father’s struggle to understand
his daughter’s sudden
death becomes an inspiring
exploration of life.
The sudden death of a child. A personal
tragedy beyond description. The permanent presence of an
absence. What can come from it? Raw wisdom and defiant hope.
Leonard Fein probes life’s painful
injustices in this remarkable personal story. He exposes
emotional truths that are revealed when we’re forced to
confront one of the toughest questions there is: How can we
pick up the pieces of our lives and go on to laugh and to love
in the aftermath of grievous loss?
Ruthlessly honest, lyrical and wise, Against the Dying of the Light takes the experience of loss beyond the confines
of the personal, illuminating the universal meaning and the
hope that can be found in the details of grief.
“Few have written more lyrically
than Leonard Fein about the tension between loving and letting
go that defines a parent’s relationship with a grown-up
child. No one has written more poignantly about that final,
unimaginable letting go demanded by a child’s
death—or how the loving continues, immortalized in
memory.”
—Letty
Cottin Pogrebin, author of Deborah, Golda, and Me:
Being Female and
Jewish in America
“Leonard Fein’s grimly glowing
book is an exemplary Jewish accomplishment: it transforms an
unspeakable pain into a speakable pain. His lucidity is itself
a variety of consolation.”
—Leon
Wieseltier, author of Kaddish
“I have rarely been as moved by a
personal memoir as I am by this one. Writing with great
simplicity and depth, and not without wisdom, faced with the
death of his daughter, Leonard Fein shares with the reader his
helplessness and his quasi-mystical urge to overcome it.”
—Elie
Wiesel
“I will recommend this unique book
to those who cannot accept the words of conventional comfort
but would look unsquintingly at the Angel of Death…. An
avowedly secular Jew, Leonard Fein has written a profoundly
religious book.”
—Rabbi
Harold M. Schulweis, Congregation
Valley Beth Shalom, Encino, California, author of Godliness: Translating God
Leonard Fein is
a passionate and gifted writer, teacher and veteran social
activist. He is the author of Where
Are We? The Inner Life of America’s Jews, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and Israel: Politics and People. He was deputy director of the M.I.T./Harvard Joint
Center for Urban Studies, served as director of the Commission
on Social Action of Reform Judaism, and is founder of Moment magazine;
Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger; and the National Jewish
Coalition for Literacy. He lives in Boston.
