On her seventy-fifth birthday, the author's mother confessed to an affair more than three decades past. His father's response was unforgiving. Her need to confess met his limitless rage. She acted out of love; he sought revenge. Their battle consumed everything and everyone around them. In the middle of this struggle, she was diagnosed with cancer. Two years later, she died.
Testimony is a son's memoir of this struggle. Paul Kahn finds here a story of the twentieth century, beginning with poverty in the Depression and immigration from Hitler's Germany. He follows his father's experience of the war and his return with PTSD. He traces his parents' movement through the turbulent 60s. More than a study of twentieth-century culture, Testimony is a philosophical inquiry into the possibility of faith in a secular age. History, philosophy, and theology flow together as Kahn finds in his parents' lives the resources for a series of essays on the nature of truth, memory, death, and faith. Testimony is most of all a meditation on love in a time in which the very possibility of faith is constantly put to the test.
Industry Reviews
“Beautifully written, extraordinarily insightful, unsparing, relentless, and radical in its furious desire to lay bare the truth of a family tragedy.”
—Michael Ignatieff, historian, novelist, past leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, currently Rector and President of Central European University
“Warning: Kahn’s searing honesty about his family’s pathologies forces the reader to examine the illusions we harbor in the name of love. Kahn writes from no confessional stance, but this is a book that should be required reading for those who think religious convictions matter for being truthful. For it turns out that truth requires the acknowledgment of our inability to face the hells we create in the name of being a family. This is philosophy that matters.”
—Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University
“Testimony is an extraordinary book. It is at once a devastatingly honest account of the unraveling of a family late in its collective life and a political theology of the secular soul more convincing than almost anything you’ll read. Kahn’s prose is as lucid as it is deep and makes a very dark story nonetheless spellbinding. Great writing is necessary writing, and it’s clear on every page that this book is exactly that.”
—Adam Haslett, two-time Pulitzer Finalist in fiction for Imagine Me Gone and You Are Not a Stranger Here
“This is a book that you will start to read and be unable to put down—until you are wrenched through its agonies to the end. The terrible saga of Kahn’s parents’ last years, and their inability to resolve his father’s ferocious anger at an ancient marital betrayal, presses once more the dilemma of how to choose forgiveness over retribution. Ultimately the author can only hint at what his answer is; his faithfulness is revealed more searingly in how he stayed with his parents up to the end.”
—Sarah Coakley, author of God, Sexuality, and the Self
“Paul Kahn bears Testimony to the pain and helplessness of dealing with a loved one whose psyche is damaged and whose inner world is intractably hardened against persuasion. This thoughtful saga of frustration and vulnerability is an honest and vivid depiction of suffering which affects not only the sufferer but everyone who loves, and thus is unable either to help or to flee a relentless cycle of illusory hope and crushing despair. Testimony advocates no traditional remedies, yet faith is crucially important. For Kahn, who lacks religious rituals, faith ‘without myth is love,’ a way of being in the world expressed, not by arguments but by actions. Kahn writes persuasively and beautifully, ‘I call my faith love.’”
—Margaret R. Miles, author of Recollections and Reconsiderations
“Paul Kahn’s Testimony is an extraordinary and profound meditation on the fundamental questions of human existence—trauma, rage, memory, love, faith, and care—drawn from a shattering struggle of a son with his father’s life. It is a testimony as well to Kahn’s unique combination of philosophical brilliance and astute human understanding.”
—Moshe Halbertal, New York University School of Law
“War and trauma, sex and betrayal, memory and truth, faith and authenticity—Kahn’s struggle to make sense of his mother’s late-life confession of adultery and his father’s endless rage lead him on a journey into the marrow of existence. This is not merely a memoir, but an offering, one that is unfailingly honest but not brutally so, probing but never voyeuristic; Kahn redeems the tragedy of his parents’ lives by attending to them in both their high drama and their prosaic mundanity, by affirming that they matt
