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and the ineffectual stance taken by the UN and the media’s negative attitude toward Israel, it’s possible that more than half the conversations he had with me turned on that one topic.
29.
    As a child, I used to dream about those stories, the swastikas and the Cossack torches outside the window, as if someone in the street were about to put me in a pair of pajamas with a star on them and shove me onto a train headed for the chimneys, but this changed over the years. I realized that the stories kept being repeated, my father told them all in the same way, with the same intonation, and even today I can quote examples that would often cause his voice to break, the young girl who was imprisoned, the two brothers who were separated, the doctor and the teacher andthe postman and the pregnant woman who crossed the whole of Poland only to be caught in an ambush in the forest. Something happens when you see your father repeating the same thing once, twice, five hundred times, and suddenly you can no longer sympathize or feel affected by something which, gradually, when you get to be thirteen, in Porto Alegre, living in a house with a swimming pool and having shown yourself capable of allowing a classmate to fall to the floor on his back at his birthday party — gradually, you realize that those stories bear very little relation to your own life.
30.
    After I became friends with João, I started looking at my other friends, unable to understand why they had done that, and how they had managed to co-opt me as well, and I began to feel ashamed that I had ever shouted
son-of-a-bitch goy
, and this became mixed up with my growing feelings of discomfort around my father, a rejection of the performance he gave whenever he spoke of anti-Semitism, because I had nothing in common with the people he talked about apart from having been born Jewish, and I knew nothing about those people apart from the fact that they wereJews, and even though so many had died in the concentration camps it made no sense to be reminded of this every day.
31.
    It made no sense that I had nearly left a classmate crippled because of that or because I had in some way been influenced by it — my father’s speeches like a prayer before each meal, solidarity with the world’s Jews and a promise that their suffering would never be repeated, when what I had been witnessing for months was the exact opposite: João alone against the mob, ignoring the humiliations, never giving the slightest indication of defeat when he was buried in the sand, and because of that memory and my awareness that he was not the coward, but rather the ten or fifteen of us boys surrounding him, because of that sense of shame that would cling to me forever unless I did something about it, I decided to change schools at the end of the year.

A FEW THINGS I KNOW
ABOUT MYSELF

 
1.
    There are various ways of interpreting my grandfather’s notebooks. One is to assume that he could not possibly have spent years devoting himself to the task, compiling a kind of treatise on how the world should be, with his interminable entries on the ideal city, the ideal marriage, the ideal wife, the wife’s pregnancy
accompanied with diligence and love
by the husband, and never once mention the most important event of his life.
2.
    I read just a small part of the notebooks, and I was the only person to do so apart from my father. He had them translated after my grandfather died and never told my grandmother. I can even understand his reasons and even understand that this embarrassed him in a way, but right from the start, the effect they had on me was quite different.
3.
    My father was a fairly keen reader. Yet despite that, I can only remember him mentioning perhaps ten books during my adolescence. Maybe no more than five. And the reason I can only remember the title of one of those five,
If This Is a Man
, which he acquired in a foreign edition, is because he was constantly reading out the descriptions of how a