How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
You cannot know how it felt to have to hear these things and then repeat them, because when I repeated them, I felt like I was making them new again. (23.9)
This drives home the "talking about memories makes them real" theory we've been talking about. And this is Alex talking, who didn't even live through the war. Simply translating Not-Augustine's story to Jonathan is traumatic for him. Is there a word for feeling trauma-by-proxy? The Germans probably have one.
Quote #8
"People can remember without the ring. And when those people forget, or die, then no one will know about the ring." (23.16)
The ring is evidence that the people of Trachimbrod existed, but it has no meaning at all if no one is alive to remember why the ring existed. It's like, without that story of how The Wanted signed your shirt, it's just another ratty t-shirt that your grandkids are going to throw away someday. You have to tell that story to make it meaningful—over and over and over and over and …
Quote #9
Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing… memory. […] Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. […] When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like? (24.21,24.22)
Memory is positioned as a sixth sense here—not in a Haley Joel Osment way, but in a way that memory helps us experience and give meaning to the world, just like our other senses do.