‘My mother had no time for religion at all. She said that she had seen huge chimneys belching out smoke from the burning bodies of the people from her town, from the town next to hers, the town next to that and from every town she had never heard of. She saw it, Rose. Day after day, hour after hour, it never stopped. We cannot imagine it. She saw people come in and smoke go out way up into the air where God was supposed to be.
‘As children we heard her in the middle of the night. She would wake up screaming. She used to sleep in a separate room to my father because she needed to sleep with the television on.’
‘Why?’
‘In case she had a nightmare. She often had nightmares. The television would immediately remind her that her screams belonged to the past and that this was the present, the death camps were behind her.

I have an unfortunate habit of laughing when I’m nervous. I don’t know why. Perhaps it has something to do with the circumstances of my upbringing. Perhaps it is the fault of my parents, although, at twenty-eight, I am almost past the stage where you blame everything on your parents. I say stage and not age because some people come late to the realization that everything is their parents’ fault. You can only hope it comes early enough to be rejected for the simplistic explanation it usually is, that it comes while your parents are still young, or at least while they are still sentient enough to forgive you for forgiving them so late, and still capable of loving you when their conviction has been overturned.

What he did not know was that his father, the logical positivist, the athiest who destroyed with ease the first cause and teleological arguments for the existence of God, was crying in a synagogue on his way home from work on the nights he did not spend with his son.

‘Vermin. Fucking snake … in the fucking grass,’ Andy shouted in a voice I had never heard as he ran down the hall and out the back door towards the shed. I stood and looked at them. No one had said my name. Should I have tried to hit him on Andy’s behalf? Should I have hit her? Should I have tried to shake her? What was so wrong with me that I could not share in my son’s rage, the rage he felt for both our sakes?