Fiftieth Gate Quotes Flashcards
Truth - blackness
“It always begins in blackness, until the first light illuminates a hidden fragment of memory”
Repressed - force him
“I want to break the silence for him… to force him to look back”
Empathy - greandparents
“He scouls and I realise how deeply buried is his pain. I have always pitied myself for the grandparents I do not have, rarely considering my father’s own orphaned state. I identify him as a survivor - a parent with a tragic past - but not as parentless.”
Interplay - another time
“His eyes have refocused on my document, drawn to the letters that make up the sound of his father’s name, but his mind has travelled to another time and place, far from Melbourne, far from me.”
Impact - darkness
“I’m still scared of darkness…”
Repressed - sisters
“Marta and Yenta, his baby sisters of whom he never speaks as if their murder was intended to erase their memory from the earth.”
Impact - shmistory
“‘History, shmistory,’ she railed, ‘where will the past get you in life?’”
Empathy - disrepect
“I thought about it later, the arrogance of my request, the unintended disrespect. He was no longer a child, and his son, was inviting him to return to those days as if his childhood could be fixed.”
Interplay - deal
“This was the deal: I would give them my knowledge of history; they would give me their memory”
Interplay - dismisses
“…dismisses my efforts to extract facts from the past.”
Emotion - books
“You read, you read. Books, books, everywhere. But do you know how it feels?”
Interplay - remember more
“Does history remember more than memory?”
Objective - Jewish Council
“The Jewish Council in his town was neither good nor bad. It simply did what had to be done.”
Objective - number
“Prisoner Number 5503”
Interplay - throwing facts
“I share my discoveries with my parents, throwing fats into their stories based on documents drawn up under obsessive gaze of Polish overlords.”
Emotion - echoes
“What are these papers anyway except echoes of the past, dark shadows without screams, without smells, without fear?”
Truth - understand
“You think that because you’ve read a few piece of paper that you suddenly understand everything?”
Impact - recognising
“He hates not recognising somebody. His unquenchable instinct for sociability, I have always throught was instilled in him in Auschwitz, where intimacy and friendship were tools of survial.”
Objective - going
“Going - 11, Coming - 2”
Repressed - child
“I never associated his fear with my parents’ captivity. It was somebody else’s child.”
Repressed - faceless
“He never spoke of his mother and father; they are faceless and nameless.”
Repressed - informer
“There was more to this episode than he is prepared to admit and I - his son turned informer - confront him.”
Repressed - Soviet
“My mother does not recall this day, nor does she remember much else about the Soviet occupation.”
Emotion - run
“… what I remember now. What can I hear? Feel. Alone. Crying. ‘Run’ she said ‘Run’ From there. Where the church is.”
Repressed - might have bee
“‘Spoiled dreams,’ she ponders, ‘but no use talking about what might have been’”
Repressed - goodnight
“Tuck your memories in bed and say goodnight”
Repressed - rivers
“For my father, the rivers have not thawed, until now, when his words break out from their glacial silence, releasing a torrent whose flow runs backward into his darkest nights.”
Truth - unedited
“bit and piece of paper from an unedited life.”
Emotion - fecks
“Fecks, fecks…”
