These stories express the Jewish community’s two highest hopes and deepest fears. The first hope is that the Jews in this new place will remain part of the chain of Jewish tradition, and the second hope is that the local population will accept them.

that by studying these exceptional people, we can learn to be more like them.

(For the record, the number of actual “righteous Gentiles” officially recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum and research center, for their efforts in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust is under 30,000 people, out of a European population at the time of nearly 300 million—or .001 percent. Even if we were to assume that the offic

makes Jewish literature into a kind of anti-literature—one that should make everyone question what they want out of a work of literary art.

Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility.

The beginning of freedom is the beginning of responsibility.

What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world. These are stories without conclusions, but full of endurance and resilience. They are about human limitations, which

But Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime—and for Jews, it came at a very specific price.

reconciliation or even integrity. There are ways to rebuild a broken world, and they require humility and empathy, a constant awareness that no one is better than anyone else. That constant awareness requires practice, vigilance, being up at all the watches.