A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan)

Wonderfully written, a punk-rock novel of many intertwined lives, with lots of mistakes, growing up, and some redemption thrown in. It's probably good enough that even people who don't like music will like the book.

Read in Glen Arbor, MI

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Quotes:

It began the usual way,

“Don’t you get it, Steph?” Bosco finally exploded. “That’s the whole point. We know the outcome, but we don’t know when, or where, or who will be there when it finally happens. It’s a Suicide Tour.”

Time’s a goon, right?

It was several weeks before the general’s picture appeared again. Now the hat was pushed back and the ties were gone. The headline read: EXTENT OF B’S WAR CRIMES MAY BE EXAGGERATED, NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

Word had gotten out, and Dolly was deluged with offers of work from mass murderers hungry for a fresh start.

“That wasn’t me, in Naples,” she told you, looking out at the crowded bar. “I don’t know who it was. I feel sorry for her.”

“We’re going to meet again in a different place,” Bix says. “Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us.”

Because he never could quite forget that every byte of information he’d posted online (favorite color, vegetable, sexual position) was stored in the databases of multinationals who swore they would never, ever use it—that he was owned, in other words, having sold himself unthinkingly at the very point in his life when he’d felt most subversive?

Her confidence seemed more drastic than the outcome of a happy childhood; it was cellular confidence, as if Lulu were a queen in disguise, without need or wish to be recognized.

“I’m fine. I just get tired of talking.” “Ditto,” Alex said. He felt exhausted. “There are so many ways to go wrong,” Lulu said. “All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can’t ever just Say. The. Thing.”

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words—“friend” and “real” and “story” and “change”—words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity,” “search,” and “cloud,” had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. Whatever

Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I honestly don’t.” Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. “You grew up, Alex,” he said, “just like the rest of us.”

th blu nyt
th stRs u cant c
th hum tht nevr gOs awy

A sound of clicking heels on the pavement punctured the quiet. Alex snapped open his eyes, and he and Bennie both turned—whirled, really, peering for Sasha in the ashy dark. But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

The Tiger (John Vaillant)

Fascinating and exciting ecological thriller, set in an area of the world that is so remote that it might as well be another planet. My only complaint is that the author spends way too many paragraphs telling and explaining just how messed up Russia is. I felt like saying "i get it! Russia is messed up! can we talk about tigers now?"

Read in Glen Arbor, MI

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Quotes:

Between 1992 and 1994, approximately one hundred tigers—roughly one quarter of the country’s wild population—were killed.

In his professional capacity as senior inspector for Inspection Tiger, Trush acted as a medium between the Law of the Jungle and the Law of the State;

Tigers go by several different names here, and one of them is Toyota—because, during the 1990s, that is what you could buy with one.

After studying the files of Stalin’s political prisoners, historian Roy Medvedev concluded that 200,000 people were imprisoned for telling jokes.

In 2008, nineteen of the world’s one hundred richest people were Russians.

Ongoing in the debate about our origins and our nature is the question of how we became fascinated by monsters, but only certain kinds. The existence of this book alone is a case in point. No one would read it if it were about a pig or a moose (or even a person) who attacked unemployed loggers. Tigers, on the other hand, get our full attention.

“Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov.”

Jewish Autonomous Region, a little known creation of Stalin’s intended to serve, oxymoronically, as a Soviet Zion for Russian Jews.

At the beginning of the last century, it is estimated that there were more than 75,000 tigers living in Asia. Today, you would never know; within the fragile envelope of a single human memory 95 percent of those animals have been killed—for sport, for beauty, for medicine, for money, for territory, and for revenge.

On a daily basis, Trush manifests the verity that faith is a physical act.

Leaving Church (Barbara Brown Taylor)

A beautifully written autobiography that rings true.

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Quotes:

This is not the life I planned or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me—that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human—seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that.

Like every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again.

“If we don’t leave the city, I’m going to die sooner than I have to.”

As one of four priests in a big downtown parish, I was engaged in work so meaningful that there was no place to stop.

The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is.

If I had been born in another time and place, I might have headed to a convent or to a small beehive-shaped hut made of stone on a holy island. I might even have found a shaman to lead me deeper into the mysteries. In my own time and place, I was not aware of so many options. When I put my strong sense of the Divine Presence together with my irresistible urge to help hurt things, seminary kept coming up as the next stop on my map.

being ordained is not about serving God perfectly but about serving God visibly, allowing other people to learn whatever they can from watching you rise and fall.

“Think hard before you do this,” one said to me when I told him I wanted to be ordained. “Right now, you have the broadest ministry imaginable. As a layperson, you can serve God no matter what you do for a living, and you can reach out to people who will never set foot inside a church. Once you are ordained, that is going to change. Every layer of responsibility you add is going to narrow your ministry, so think hard before you choose a smaller box.”

Sometimes, when people were busy adoring me or despising me, I got the distinct impression that it was not about me at all. I reminded them of someone else who was no longer around but who had made such a large dent in their lives that they were still trying to work it out.

“Eating forbidden fruit makes many jams,” read one church sign. “Give Satan an inch and he will become your ruler,” read another.

Because this is a love story, it is difficult to say what went wrong between the Church and me. On the one hand, it was the best of parish ministry that did me in.

On the other hand, there was a definite hardening taking place, not only at Grace-Calvary but at every church I knew. The presenting issue was human sexuality. While the Episcopal Church had gladly received the ministry of gay and lesbian people for as long as anyone could remember, it had done so without blessing the “gay and lesbian” part. The unspoken deal was that the ministry could continue as long as the sexuality stayed under cover.

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.

Because church people tend to think they should not fight, most of them are really bad at it.

Once I had begun crying on a regular basis, I realized just how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs.

The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts. “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy…” “Behold the Lamb of God…” “Behold, I stand at the door and knock…”

If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common? Or that coming together to confess all that we do not know is at least as sacred an activity as declaring what we think we do know?

By my rules, caring for troubled people always took precedence over enjoying delightful people, and the line of troubled people never ended. Sitting there with corn stuck between my teeth, I wondered why I had not changed that rule sooner.

Remember the Sabbath, the rabbis say, and you fulfill all of Torah.

A man standing in line with me at a grocery store in Atlanta once asked me if I were headed to a costume party as a cross-dressing priest.

In Clarkesville, the collar had a more sobering effect, especially among church members. When people saw it in public, they shifted from normal gear into the most reverent gear they could find.

“The people you think love you don’t love you as much as you think they love you,” Frank said to me, “and the people you think hate you don’t hate you as much as you think they hate you.”

my soul did not operate on a solar calendar. My soul operated on a lunar calendar, coming up at a different time every night and never looking the same way two nights in a row.

As Christians, we were especially vulnerable, since our faith turned on the story of a divine human being.

We needed a different way of being together before God, shaped more like a circle than a pyramid. We needed to ditch the sheep paradigm. We needed to take turns filling in for Jesus, understanding that none of us was equal to the task to which all of us had been called. We needed to share the power.

The second thing that happened when I lost my power was that I got a taste of the spiritual poverty that is central to the Christ path.

With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.

Gradually I remembered what I had known all along, which is that church is not a stopping place but a starting place for discerning God’s presence in this world. By offering people a place where they may engage the steady practice of listening to divine words and celebrating divine sacraments, church can help people gain a feel for how God shows up—not only in Holy Bibles and Holy Communion but also in near neighbors, mysterious strangers, sliced bread, and grocery store wine. That way, when they leave church, they no more leave God than God leaves them. They simply carry what they have learned into the wide, wide world, where there is a crying need for people who will recognize the holiness in things and hold them up to God.

Although I never found a church where I felt completely at home again, I made a new home in the world. I renewed my membership in the priesthood of all believers, who may not have as much power as we would like, but whose consolation prize is the freedom to meet God after work, well away from all centers of religious command, wherever God shows up.

He was so immersed in the life of the Church, he said, that he occasionally forgot that the life of faith was not always the same thing.

I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty.

It’s only wilderness if there’s something out there that can eat you.”

Once I understood that the gospel writers had not told me the whole truth about the Pharisees, I wondered what else they had not told me. Once I noticed that Luke said things about Paul that Paul denied, I wondered what other quarrels Luke had hidden from my view.

I felt like someone who had strolled into the feeding of the five thousand on a casual walk around the lake.

A priest is a priest, no matter where she happens to be. Her job is to recognize the holiness in things and hold them up to God. Her job is to speak in ways that help other people recognize the holiness in things too.

My priesthood was not what I did but who I was. In this new light, nothing was wasted. All that had gone before was blessing, and all yet to come was more.

the central truth of the Christian gospel: life springs from death, not only at the last but also in the many little deaths along the way. When everything you count on for protection has failed, the Divine Presence does not fail. The hands are still there—not promising to rescue, not promising to intervene—promising only to hold you no matter how far you fall.

The Summer Book (Tove Jansson)

Beatufiful, joyful and melancholy, a work of art. Very much like a Moomin story with a human cast.

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Quotes:

"Isn't that funny," Grandmother said. "It's only my heart, it's not a herring boat at all." For a long time she wondered if she should go back to bed or stay where she was. She guessed she would stay for a while.

The Newlyweds (Nell Freudenberger)

Heartbreakingly well written, this book will speak to anyone who is an immigrant, or has married one, or both. An exploration of the loneliness of our lives, what we do to cope, and the unpredictable consequences of our dreams. This one sits right there with The Namesake as one of the best books i've ever read about the immigrant life.

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Quotes:

Someone who is closer than a mother is called a witch.

Have you ever noticed that—the way the best and the worst things in your life can be all twisted up, so you couldn’t have done one without the other?”

Here was something she had noticed about God. He often granted one prayer when you were making another or gave you something you’d asked for in the past, long after you had stopped wanting it.

A lot of the things she’d heard about America had turned out not to be true: teenagers did not have sex in public; the majority of black people were not criminals (George had several black colleagues at TCE); and although most American women had jobs, there were also some like Annie Snyder who stayed at home with their children. Amina had wondered if the perversely named old-age “homes” would turn out to be a similar sort of myth, but George had confirmed their existence.

There were several paths to everything, and some of them were hidden when you started out. Her mother would say that God created those paths, but to Amina it seemed as if the paths were there; it was only that you needed God to help you find them.

All of George’s arguments about her parents’ happiness made sense, and at the same time they were completely beside the point. She was here, and so this was where they had to be.

According to Ghaniyah’s Femina magazine, she was no longer a newlywed, but the goals that she’d set for her first three years in Rochester seemed very distant.

Amina knew she was a different person in Bangla than she was English; she noticed the change every time she switched languages on the phone.

she knew what it was to feel that you would never become fully adult in the country where you lived, would never understand the jokes or master the graces that came so naturally to everyone around you.

Sarcasm had been the hardest thing to get in English; it had taken her at least a year to catch that tone in George’s voice that meant he was saying the opposite of what his words suggested.

Communication was supposed to be the secret to a successful marriage, but she sometimes thought things had been better between them when they’d understood each other less.

Amina had the strange feeling of being grateful to a person she had only a few moments ago wanted to strangle.

She thought he’d succeeded not out of any deviousness, but because he was the type of person whom God willed to be successful. Others were not meant to be so. It didn’t mean that God loved them any less, but the world couldn’t be full of only one type. The sooner you knew which type you were—and which were the people in your family—the sooner you could accept your lot and be happy.

It occurred to Amina that she was looking at this field the way George would, as if she had a camera, and that was what made it (an ordinary field of dal, dull green under midafternoon clouds) so beautiful.

That was the hardest thing about marriage, she thought—how could you continue to be kind, once you knew all of another person’s secrets?

What had George said that day, about her and her inflexible plans? She’d thought he wasn’t being fair, that he couldn’t understand her, but was it possible he’d been right after all?

When she’d gone alone, she’d been able to adapt, and because she had no one to talk to about the things that were shocking or offensive or odd, they’d slowly grown to seem less so. But with three of them there, it would be different.

"I believe that it is only by sharing our stories that we truly become one community." (Kim)

People of the Book: A Novel (Geraldine Brooks)

Another exiting and unputdownable historical novel by Geraldine Brooks. At least as good as Caleb's Crossing.

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Quotes:

‘We’re different in Sarajevo.’ That’s what we all thought. How could you possibly have an ethnic war here, in this city, when every second person is the product of a mixed marriage? How to have a religious war in a city where no one ever goes to church?

WHEN YOU HAVE WORKED WELL, there should be no sign that you have worked at all. Werner Heinrich, my instructor, taught me that. “Never mistake yourself for an artist, Miss Heath. You must be always behind your object.” At the end of a week, there probably weren’t ten people in the world who could have told for sure that I’d taken this book apart and put it back together.

“And tonight, please let me take you out to a part of Vienna where you can’t get Sacher torte and I can absolutely guarantee that you won’t hear a waltz.”

“As to secrets, Father, I have but one: if the congregation expects a sermon of forty minutes’ length, then give them one of thirty minutes. If they expect thirty, then give them twenty. In all my years as rabbi, I have never once had a soul complain to me that a sermon was too short.”

I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.

“No,” he said. “Not now. You know I am not a religious man. But Hanna, I have spent many nights, lying awake here in this room, thinking that the haggadah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox.”

Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art (Christopher Moore)

Whenever Christopher Moore deviates from his usual vampire stories (which are great, by the way), it's worth paying attention, because those are some of his best books. See Lamb, for example. He obsessed over the French impressionist painters for years, even lived in France for a few months. The result is high quality historical fiction, with the Christopher Moore trademarks of well developed characters that are well cared for by the author and readers.

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Quotes:

How do you know, when you think blue—when you say blue—that you are talking about the same blue as anyone else?

“I’ve just been mercilessly flirted with by a strange woman,” said Pissarro.

“Whistler,” Manet called. “How’s your mother?”

Now the ragpicker threw his head back and laughed in the way only a Frenchman with seven teeth and a conscience soaked in wine can laugh, the sound his donkey might make if he were a heavier smoker and had just licked the devil’s ass to chase all taste of goodness from his tongue. The ragpicker wasn’t a scoundrel, but scoundrels envied his laugh.

“Love them all,” said Renoir. “That is the secret, young man. Love them all.” The painter let go of his arm and shrugged. “Then, even if your paintings are shit, you will have loved them all.”

“Nonsense. Syphilis is a myth. It’s Greek, I think—everyone has heard of the myth of syphilis.” “That’s the myth of Sisyphus. He spends his whole life pushing a large stone up a hill.”

“Who—what, what are you?” said Lucien. “I am a muse,” said Juliette. “And you—you? What do you do?” “I amuse,” she said.

“There’s always a price, Lucien,” she said softly, looking down.

“Yes,” she said. “Do you think great art comes at no cost? There’s a price to be paid.”

Once it was determined that Lucien and Henri were, indeed, wretched creatures with ethical compasses that pivoted around a point at their groins, which is to say, men, and that Juliette was also a creature of abstract, if not altogether absent, ethics herself, although with some fealty to beauty, which is to say, a muse, it was further determined, by unanimous consent, that in order to proceed with her revelation, more alcohol would be required, which left only to be decided the matter of where.

“Well, this should be fun,” she said in their language (a language poor in vocabulary yet rich with gesture), which involved the roll of her eyes, a joyful screech, a pelvic thrust, and a finger pointing into the future.

I love you, Lucien, but I am a muse, you are an artist, I am not here to make you comfortable.”

I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING: “WELL THANKS LOADS, CHRIS, now you’ve ruined art for everyone.” You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure.

Caleb's Crossing: A Novel (Geraldine Brooks)

A tearjerker of a historical novel. Life was hard back then! However, a beautifully written book with spiritual overtones; a sympathetic look at the plight of women, Native Americans, and Native American women. I literally could not put this book down.

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Quotes:

I have presumed to give Caleb’s name to my imagined character in the hope of honoring the struggle, sacrifice and achievement of this remarkable young scholar.

God alone ordains the damned and the saved and naught that I set down on these pages can change that.

Caleb’s soul is stretched like the rope in a tug o’ war,

“Bethia, why do you strive so hard to quit the place in which God has set you?” His voice was gentle, not angry. “Your path is not your brother’s, it cannot be. Women are not made like men. You risk addling your brain by thinking on scholarly matters that need not concern you. I care only for your present health and your future happiness. It is not seemly for a wife to know more than her husband . . .”

Over time, I had come to grasp that the chief principle of their grammar is whether a thing to them is possessed of an animating soul. How they determine this is outlandish to our way of thinking, so profligate are they in giving out souls to all manner of things. A canoe paddle is animate, because it causes something else to move. Even a humble onion has, in their view, a soul, since it causes action—pulling tears from the eyes.

Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?

She believed that each humble thing, if done worthily, might be touched by grace.

“Do not look at me so, Storm Eyes. Did not God create the sun? Mayn’t I make a hymn of gladness upon it? Your father has never taught me that the only one place to pray is in the dim confines of your meeting house. God’s spirit shines out in every goodly thing. Do not wonder that I stretch up my hands and reach out for his grace.”

All morning, as I went about my tasks, I thought about braiding together two beliefs that seemed at first so much at odds, and how so doing might sit with our precisian faith. How easily Caleb had taken the teachings of his youth—the many gods, the animate spirit world—and simply recast them in terms of our teaching. And father, so it seemed, was satisfied.

His sermon that day was gentle in spirit, more like his preaching of old. He talked of the love of Christ and likened the bonds of affection between people with those between God and his faithful. That love, he said, endured, and was no less real and fervent, no matter that the parties did not see each other face-to-face.

How would it be, to have a husband who strove to elicit one’s ideas, with whom one could, over months and years of companionship, hone and refine them? Such a life would be something, indeed.

“Marriage is a heavy choice for an English woman.” “Why do you fashion it thus? Surely for any woman?” “Not so, for ours. A squa does not cease to be a person, in our law, just because she has got herself a husband. In most cases, he will go to live with her family, not she with his, so her daily state changes little. And if, at some later time, she wants to leave him and be married to another one, then that can be settled through parley.”

“It is—what did we just now learn that the Greeks say of it? Hubris?—to think we can know God’s will. The better question—the one question, in this matter—is, what do you, Bethia, want?”

Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage? I

In this fallen world, such is our condition. Every happiness is a bright ray between shadows, every gaiety bracketed by grief. There is no birth that does not recall a death, no victory but brings to mind a defeat.

Well, I thought. You have done it, my friend. It has cost you your home, and your health, and estrangement from your closest kinsman. But after today, no man may say the Indian mind is primitive and ineducable. Here, in this hall, you stand, the incontestible argument, the negat respondens.

He sang out his death song, and died like a hero going home.

I am not a hero. Life has not required it of me.

The Mysterious Benedict Society

Read with Laura. Smart and exciting. Loved it! Orphans, smart kids against the world, a secret mission against impossible odds, evil twins, obvious and subtle puns and puzzles, wow!

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Quotes:

Are you a gifted child looking for special opportunities?

After a few more pages of questions, all of which Reynie felt confiden he had answered correctly, he arrived at the test's final question: "Are you brave?" Just reading the words quickened Reynie's heart. Was he brave? Braver had never been required of him, so hoe could he tell? Finally he gave up trying to decide and simply wrote, "I hope so."

‘It’s important to protect yourself because it’s impossible to protect yourself’?

A Thread of Grace (Mary Doria Russell)

Beautiful and brutal. I liked the beginning and middle, but didn't like the end.

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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.