They threw resolutions into the fire every December 31, took Argus on a family walk every Tuesday after dinner, and read report cards aloud on the way to Vace for otherwise forbidden aranciatas and limonatas. They ritualistically marked the children’s heights on the doorframe on the first day of every year - secular and Jewish - always first thing in the morning, before gravity did its work of compression. A religion for three, for four, for five. Sam’s birth felt like another chance, as did Max’s and Benjy’s. Everything seemed to move toward ritual - Jacob picking Julia up from work on Thursdays, the morning coffee in shared silence, Julia replacing Jacob’s bookmarks with small notes - until, like a universe that has expanded to its limit and then contracts toward its beginning, everything was undone. They started to collect, when traveling, things whose insides had an aspect of being larger than their outsides: the ocean contained in a seashell, a depleted typewriter ribbon, the world in a mercury-glass mirror. Every morning, before rising from the bed, Jacob kissed Julia between the legs - not sexually (the ritual demanded that the kiss never lead to anything), but religiously. Some sank, some were carried to other shores by the current, some regrets were taken by gulls to feed their still-blind young. Every Rosh Hashanah, in lieu of going to services, they performed the ritual of tashlich: casting breadcrumbs, meant to symbolize the past year’s regrets, into the Potomac. Wednesday sunrise strolls: the route became unwittingly ritualized, traced and retraced week after week, until the sidewalk bore an impression of their path - imperceptible, but there. Their Shabbat: every Friday night, Jacob would read a letter he had written for Julia over the course of the week, and she would recite a poem from memory and without overhead lighting, the phone unplugged, the watches stowed under the cushion of the red corduroy armchair, they would slowly eat the dinner they’d slowly prepared together and they would draw a bath and make love while the waterline rose. When they had started dating, Jacob and Julia often spoke about a “religion for two.” It would have felt embarrassing if it hadn’t felt ennobling. He had lived in an apartment with books touching the ceilings, and rugs thick enough to hide dice then in a room and a half with dirt floors on forest floors, under unconcerned stars under the floorboards of a Christian who, half a world and three-quarters of a century away, would have a tree planted to commemorate his righteousness in a hole for so many days his knees would never wholly unbend among Gypsies and partisans and half-decent Poles in transit, refugee, and displaced persons camps on a boat with a bottle with a boat that an insomniac agnostic had miraculously constructed inside it on the other side of an ocean he would never wholly cross above half a dozen grocery stores he killed himself fixing up and selling for small profits beside a woman who rechecked the locks until she broke them, and died of old age at forty-two without a syllable of praise in her throat but the cells of her murdered mother still dividing in her brain and finally, for the last quarter century, in a snow-globe-quiet Silver Spring split-level: ten pounds of Roman Vishniac bleaching on the coffee table Enemies, A Love Story demagnetizing in the world’s last functional VCR egg salad becoming bird flu in a refrigerator mummified with photographs of gorgeous, genius, tumorless great-grandchildren. When the destruction of Israel commenced, Isaac Bloch was weighing whether to kill himself or move to the Jewish Home. THERE ARE THINGS THAT ARE HARD TO SAY TODAY.A HAND THE SIZE OF YOURS, A HOUSE THE SIZE OF THIS ONE.It not only confirms Foer’s stature as a dazzling literary talent but reveals a mature novelist who has fully come into his own as one of the most important writers of his generation. Showcasing the same high-energy inventiveness, hilarious irreverence, and emotional urgency that readers and critics loved in his earlier work, Here I Am is Foer’s most searching, hard-hitting, and grandly entertaining novel yet.
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