Book: Shadows in Paradise

Germans are not a nation of revolutionaries. They were a nation of executors. The order replaced their conscience. This has become their favorite excuse. Whoever acted under the order, in their opinion, did not bear any responsibility.

- For a doctor, it's as easy as shelling pears. Patching people up again so that they die in the next war.

Those who decided to stay precisely because they would soon be able to return began to torment some vague sense of loss. The prospect of staying in the States did not seem as bright as before, although, in essence, nothing changed. And those who intended to return and before whom Europe, the old homeland always loomed, suddenly felt that now this is not paradise at all, but a devastated land full of all sorts of problems. It was like a weather vane: it turned one side, then the other. The touching illusions that they all lived with burst. Both those who wanted to return and those who wanted to stay equally felt like deserters. This time they deserted themselves.

What you least expect happened in my life too often: it was one of the unwritten laws of emigration.

This phantom war with invisible wounded and invisible dead, silent bombs exploding and silent cemeteries is coming to an end. What will be left of all this? Shadows, shadows - and we are just shadows too.

New York is too hot and too cold, cold, like that damn neon light - the very inconsolability; it seems that you are alone wandering the streets and chattering your teeth from the cold.

Jews are always old. They are born old. From birth on everyone bears the stamp of two thousand years of persecution.

I have a terrible feeling, Natasha, that I love you. And we put so much effort to avoid this.

- He adores me so much that my head starts to ache. It's so boring!

Once my homeland was Germany, then Austria, France, in general - Europe, and after that America, and each time this or that country became my homeland only because I left it, and not at all because I lived in her.

- Winter has come for you. You're always one season ahead of your time. Remember when you told me? And now you're in the midst of winter fashions and snow blizzards.

Natasha outwitted me, I thought bitterly, she had chosen the place of the battle. And now I had to fight not on her, but on my own territory, which is always dangerous. Once upon a time a familiar matador explained this to me.

I knew that we were fighting as a joke, that it was just a game. But the arrows weren't that dull, the words penetrating deep into the skin.

- Not the saddest, but the wisest.