How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Almost everything known about Zvi Litvinoff comes from the introduction his wife wrote in the volume of The History of Love, reissued a few years after he died. (3.1)
Leo and Alma announce their respective arrivals by personally introducing themselves by name, firmly basing their existence in fact and owning their identities. With Litvinoff, on the other hand, not only is his story introduced in the third-person, but we're told that everything we know about him comes second-hand, and post-mortem.
Quote #8
There was a shop on Lexington that advertised passport pictures. I like to go sometimes. I keep them in a little album. Mostly they're of me, except for one, which is of Isaac, aged five, and another of my cousin, the locksmith. He was an amateur photographer and one day he showed me how to make a pinhole camera. This was the spring of 1947. I stood in the back of his tiny shop watching him fix the photographic paper inside the box. He told me to sit, and shone a lamp on my face. Then he removed the cover over the pinhole. I sat so still I was hardly breathing. When it was finished we went into the darkroom and dropped it in the developing pan. We waited. Nothing. Where I should have been there was only a scratchy grayness. My cousin insisted we do it again, so we did it again, and again, nothing. Three times he tried to take a picture of me with the pinhole camera, and three times I failed to appear. My cousin couldn't understand it. He cursed the man who sold him the paper, thinking he'd been given a bad batch. But I knew he hadn't. I knew the way others had lost a leg or an arm, I'd lost whatever the thing is that makes people indelible. I told my cousin to sit in the chair. He was reluctant, but finally he agreed. I took a photograph of him and as we watched the paper in the developing pan his face appeared. He laughed. And I laughed, too. It was I who'd taken the picture, and if it was proof of his existence, it was also proof of my own. He let me keep it. Whenever I took it out of my wallet and looked at him, I knew I was really looking at me. (4.40)
Wow, this is a big one. Um, so Leo doesn't exist? But he makes other people exist? And that makes him feel like he exists too? That's the gist of this story, a pretty stunning revelation that seems, ever after, to color the way Leo sees himself in the world.
Quote #9
"Then again, you could always just stick with half English and half Israeli, since—" "I'M AMERICAN!" I shouted. My mother blinked. [...] From the corner of the room where he was looking at the pictures in a magazine, Bird muttered, "No, you're not. You're Jewish." (5.4)
Alma's mother runs through sixteen different ways for Alma to define herself ethnically. But Alma dismisses all these, instead considering herself simply American. And Bird, of course, thinks that all these labels are negated by the fact that she comes from a Jewish family. What does this say about each of their personalities?