Always, even after he’d lost the desire to touch or be touched by her, he abhorred the thought of her touching or being touched by another man. People she’d been with, pleasure she’d given and received, things she’d moaned. He was not an insecure person in other contexts, but his brain was compelled, with the magnetism of someone unable to escape t

“And Yael?” “She’s fine. She’s in Auschwitz.”

“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

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda single-handedly revived Hebrew. Unlike most Zionists, he wasn’t passionate about the creation of the State of Israel so that his people would have a home. He wanted his language to have a home. He knew that without a state—without a place for Jews to haggle, and curse, and create secular laws, and make love—the language wouldn’t

“Anyway, Grandpa Irv used to do this thing where he’d give Max and me five bucks if we made a speech that convinced him of something. Anytime, anything.

But now that something had happened between them—it was entirely possible they’d already fucked—his mind was released. It’s not that the fantasy was suddenly too painful; it suddenly wasn’t painful enough.

“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.”

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.

If it flushed, he fucked it.