Sublime

Dreyfus was the French Jewish army officer whose persecution made Herzl fear the nightmare that awaited the Jews of twentieth-century Europe.

my father was not a threatening figure, merely an inconvenient one, but it now occurred to me that he must have been unhappy. He was in a position to register his deterioration; his one good eye was sharp, and he knew that he was now a clumsy elderly man, whose wife’s relative youth disturbed him, as if he had not sought it in the first place.

If he had a regret, it might have been that he did not raise his children as Jews. Here was a man who lived every aspect of the Jewish experience in America. He came with the great influx from Eastern Europe, prospered with his times, was devastated by the war. He married a Jewish woman, belonged to a synagogue, said Kaddish for his dead. He was a

Werner looks at the blue of the walls and thinks of Birds of America, yellow-crowned night heron, Kentucky warbler, scarlet tanager, bird after glorious bird, and Frederick’s gaze remains stuck in some terrible middle ground, each eye a stagnant pool into which Werner cannot bear to look.

“I think we all know from our research that the stuff you hear about U-boats coming up on the beaches and the crewmen attending costume balls and buying bread at the local market are bullshit fantasy,” Kohler said, pacing the room and using his triangular pepperoni slice like a professor’s pointer. “But I’m going to confess something. You know the

But Ant was no longer a kid, and his eyes reminded Sam of his own. They had the patina of a person who had felt pain and expected to feel it again.