Beautiful and brutal. I liked the beginning and middle, but didn't like the end.
Quotes:
How could anyone live with so much fear?
“Like Papa used t’say, ‘Christ’ll take what nobody else wants.’ ” “And so there is hope, even for pigs like you,” the nun replies.
Schramm pushed himself up from the table and stood there, slump-shouldered and swaying, far away. “You must learn not to be kind,” he told Renzo finally. “Be as blind and as deaf as you have to be. Feel nothing. Only the heartless will survive.”
The last kilometer is as steep as a ladder against a wall: a challenge for the strong, the experienced, the well-equipped. For the desperate, it’s simply necessary.
Broad back against the mountainside, he takes a deep breath of thin air to power a heartfelt oration concerning the height of mountains, the weight of other people’s luggage, the unreasonable ambition of Germans, and the direct involvement of pigs and whores in the parentage of Dwight David Eisenhower,
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he says when he can speak again. “I have murdered 91,867 people.”
Stop seeing real Jews, and it’s easy for people to believe lies.
“Shall I tell you why young men love war?” Schramm offers dreamily. “In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one big question with one right answer.” He pours them each another shot, emptying the bottle. “War smashes all our petty problems and sweeps the shards into one huge, patriotic pile. Going to war makes you a man. It is emotionally exciting and morally restful.”
“Jews are simply members of the human race.” After a thoughtful pause, Renzo adds, “I can think of no worse insult.” “There are plenty of people who can,” Schramm warns. “They never saw you. They don’t know your name. They don’t know anything about you, but they hate you.
“I never understood the logic. You’re Communists to a man, but you own all the banks. You’re subhuman, but you’re running the world.”
Bombs do not drop from God’s hand. Triggers are not pulled by God’s finger. Each of us chooses, one by one, and God’s eye does not turn from those who suffer or from those who inflict suffering. Our choices are weighed. And, thus, the nations are judged.”
Ten percent of any group of human beings are shitheads. Catholics, Jews. Germans, Italians. Pilots, priests. Teachers, doctors, shopkeepers. Ten percent are shitheads. Another ten percent—salt of the earth! Saints! Give you the shirts off their backs. Most people are in the middle, just trying to get by.”
“You are a very dangerous man, Padre. You are an ordinary, decent fellow who aspires to saintliness.”
“I’m paying a debt to a surgeon who was killed in Abyssinia. He can’t collect.”
Slowly devotion to family and community condensed to stubborn determination.
God save us from idealists!” Renzo cries softly. “They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won’t they commit to get it?” Rubbing at his knee with both hands, he mutters, “I swear to God, Mirella, I’d settle for a world with good manners.”
“I’ve sworn off ethics,” Renzo explains to the faint and fading pink puddles. “What’s the point?” he asks. “Too much for me,” he admits, face to the rain. “You sort it out.”
“There’s a saying in Hebrew,” he tells her. “ ‘No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there’s always a thread of grace.’
Claudia Kaplan is yet another casualty of a war that began long before it started, and has not ended yet. Immense, intractable, incomprehensible, that conflict remains the pivot point of two centuries, the event that defines before and after. Hundreds of millions killed, wounded, maimed, displaced. The last survivors are dying now. Their children and grandchildren are fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that the dry bones shall live again, but the poison still seeps down, contaminating generations.
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