Here I Am: A Novel

Just because we’re smarter than those lunatics doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on insanity. The Arabs have to understand that we’ve got some stones, too, but our slingshot’s in Dimona, and the finger on the button is connected to an arm with a string of numbers tattooed on it!”

‘There are two things that everybody needs. The first is to feel that he is adding to the world. Do you agree?’ I told him I did. ‘The second,’ he said, ‘is toilet paper.’”

“You had a talk? You think talk got us out of Egypt or Entebbe? Uh-uh. Plagues and Uzis. Talk gets you a good place in line for a shower that isn’t a shower.”

(Unlike Jacob, she never gave an ostensible explanation for moving away from him, she never “forgot something.”

“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

As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.’ We are made worthy, made righteous, by expression.”

“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

“In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world.”

Julia liked calculators that printed—the Jews of the office store, having stubbornly out-survived so many more-promising business machines—and while the kids assembled school supplies, she would tap out feet of numbers. Once, she calculated the minutes until Benjy went to college. She left it there, as evidence.