Everything Is Illuminated

I just finished this book and I might have a new favorite author. If you recall, Jonathan Safran Foer also wrote this, so I guess it's not a stretch to say he has been a big influence in my life. And that was BEFORE reading his novels, which usually touch me in more meaningful ways than non-fiction.

One of the many gems:

Jews Have Six Senses

Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing...memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for 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. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks - when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather's fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather's damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain - that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.


When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?