Sarah had a saying: Der gleichster veg iz ful mit shtainer. What's it mean? The smoothest way is sometimes full of stones.
How astounding, Andras thought, that a ship that size could shrink to the size of a house, and then to the size of a car; the size of a desk, a book, a shoe, a walnut, a grain of rice, a grain of sand...
One and a half million Jewish men and women and children: How was anyone to understand a number like that? Andras knew it took three thousand to fill the seats of the Dohány Street Synagogue. To accom...
I wondered how it could be that people could love God and hate one another.
He could almost see insider her that unnameable thing that had remained the same through all of it: her I, her very life. It seemed so small, a mustard seed with one rootlet shit deep into the earth,...
He had the strange sensation of not knowing who he was, of having traveled off the map of his own existence.
God asks the most of those he loves best.
Later he would tell her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the eve...
It's no small matter to cross an ocean,Chagall said. More can be lost than canvas and paint. An artist must bear witness, Monsieur Fry. He cannot turn away, even if he wished to.An artist cannot bear...
Andras went through the Sortie doors and walked out into a city that no longer contained his brother. He walked on benumbed feet in the new black Oxfords his brother had brought him from Hungary. He d...
Me to Munkaszolgálat websites
Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust?
The stone basin was crusted with ice now. The courtyard security light illuminated its depths, and as he leaned over it he could make out the fiery glints of goldfish beneath the surface. There, benea...
It was nearly sunset when, after passing through a thirty-mile stretch of olive groves, they crested a hill and began to descend toward the edge of the earth. That was how it looked to Andras, who had...
He could see the inchworm in his mind even now, that snip of green elastic with it's tiny blunt legs, coiling and stretching its way toward the tabletop, on a mission whose nature was a mystery. Survi...
Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation.
It seemed a miracle that any man who loved a woman might be loved by her in return.
Here in his arms was the girl who had lived in the house near the Varosliget, the young dancer who had loved Sandor Goldstein, the woman who loved him now. He could almost see insider her that unnamea...
When he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what...
Sometimes I freeze in front of the canvas, full of the knowledge that if I keep painting, sooner or later I will fail her