Here I Am: A Novel

“I’m joking around. It’s an interesting name, that’s all. Not a judgment. You know you were named for a great-great-uncle who perished in Birkenau. With Jews there always has to be some significance attached.” “Some suffering, you mean.” “Gentiles pick names that sound nice. Or they just make them up.” “Billie was named after Billie Holiday.” “So s

“Here’s the deal: the world population of Jews falls within the margin of error of the Chinese census, and everyone hates us.”

“Bull-merde. You know he had a bottle of Château Sang de Juif 1942 airing out backstage to toast France’s missing piece. The English, the Spanish, the Italians. These people live to make us die.” He stuck his head out the window and hollered at the honking driver: “I’m an asshole, asshole! I’m not deaf!” And then back to Jacob: “Our only reliable f

“Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.”

“Judaism has a special relationship with words. Giving a word to a thing is to give it life. ‘Let there be light,’ God said, and there was light. No magic. No raised hands and thunder. The articulation made it possible. It is perhaps the most powerful of all Jewish ideas: expression is generative.

Because the Jewish Bible, whose purpose is to delineate and transmit Jewish values, makes it abundantly clear that life itself is not the loftiest ambition. Righteousness is.

“My mother is why Kurt Cobain killed himself,”

“Anyway, Grandpa Irv used to do this thing where he’d give Max and me five bucks if we made a speech that convinced him of something. Anytime, anything.

But now that something had happened between them—it was entirely possible they’d already fucked—his mind was released. It’s not that the fantasy was suddenly too painful; it suddenly wasn’t painful enough.