I can’t fathom the horrors of having the Holocaust in my past, I won’t even begin to pretend to imagine the ramifications. I’m a shiksa-a French-Canadian/German/NH bred-Shiksa. Okay, I’ve admitted it before and will again and again. When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks “What does it remember like?” It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks-when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain-that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and see memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger.
Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing….memory. What I loved most, what I clung to after I finished the book, was this: I love the humor and the tragedies and the friendships. I love the awakenings and the not-truths. The story of the would-be ‘Augustine’ and her house with its many labeled boxes ( ‘Silver/Perfume/Pinwheels’, ‘Watches/Winter’, ‘Darkness’, ‘Pillowcases’, ‘Poetry/Nails/Pisces’, ‘Dust’, 'Menorahs/Inks/Keys', 'Death of a Firstborn', 'In Case') The story of Brod, Jonathan’s great great great great great grandmother and her struggle with loving the idea of love and her 613 sadnesses ( “Mirror Sadness”, “Sadness of not knowing if your body is normal”, “Beauty Sadness”, “Sadness of Hands”, “Sadness of knowing that your body is normal”, “Kissing Sadness”, “Sadness of wanting sadness”, “Sadness of feeling the need to create beautiful things”, What if? Sadness”, “Sadness”, “Secret Sadness.”) There is the story of Grandfather and Herschel (copious amounts of tears during that one).Īnd then there are the stories within the stories. There is the story of Alex and Jonathan and their journey to find out Who is Augustine? And to thank her for saving Jonathan’s lineage. There is the story about the people of Trachimbrod, which might be Trochenbrod, a city in western Ukraine that was decimated during WWII by a Nazi Invasion. The story is fragmented, told through letters and hodgepodges of writings that might or might not be parts of a novel.
(I still wish you weren’t so freaking young, though)
They can read their Anderson and their Coetzee and leave us dreamers alone. Why, Jonathan Safran Foer? Why? Why do you do this to me? And why the hell are you so young? I know that some call you gimmicky and think that you are just a phosphoresce in the pannikin (yes, I, too, have access to ) but I just…just… spleen them.
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