Living with Our Dead

On Loss and Consolation

De: Delphine Horvilleur, Lisa Appignanesi

Narrado por: Jenna Rose Stein

A MAJOR INTERNATIONAL BEST-SELLER

A timely, powerful reflection on our relationship to death and an invitation to accept loss and vulnerability as essential and enriching parts of life, from France’s most prominent female rabbi and a leading intellectual.

The New York Times describes Delphine Horvilleur as “the rare intellectual to bring religious texts into the public square,” and, as one of only five female rabbis in France, unique in that she “calls for a plurality of religious voices in interpreting holy texts.”

Living with Our Dead is a profoundly humanist, universal, and hopeful book that celebrates life, love, memory, and the power of storytelling to inspire and sustain us.

In this moving book by the leader of France’s Liberal Jewish Movement, Delphine Horvilleur recounts eleven stories of loss, mourning, and consolation, collected during the years she has spent caring for the dying and their loved ones.

From Elsa Cayat, the psychologist and Charlie Hebdo columnist killed in the 2015 terrorist attack, to Simone Veil and Marceline Loridan, “the girls of Birkenau”; from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated in 1995, to Myriam, a New Yorker obsessed with planning her own funeral, to the author friend’s Ariane and her struggle with terminal illness. In telling these stories and her own relationship to them, Horvilleur addresses death and dying with intelligence, humor, and compassion. Rejecting the contemporary tendency to banish death from our thoughts and discourse, she encourages us to embrace its presence as a fundamental part of life.

©2024 Delphine Horvilleur (P)2024 Europa Editions

Reseñas de la Crítica

WINNER OF THE 2021 BABELIO PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

“Horvilleur shows how it is possible to find language even for that which seems indescribable. Her deep reflections on mortality remind us that ‘in death a place can be left for the living.’”—Kirkus Reviews

“The French intellectual...presents a non-male perspective we need in mainstream Jewish literature."—Heyalma

“Moving…Delphine Horvilleur finds the right words to describe our time and its ghosts.”—ELLE Magazine (France)

Meaningful book

Beautiful book by Rabbi Horvilleur, artfully translated from the French. The narration is mostly good. However, when languages other than English frequently appear in terms in the book—in this case French and Hebrew—the narrator needs to know how to pronounce those languages well. This one does that in French, but not Hebrew.