The History of Love

by Nicole Krauss

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

In the summer of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen drove deeper east, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews. On a bright, hot day in July, they entered Slonim. At that hour, the boy happened to be lying on his back in the woods thinking about the girl. You could say it was his love for her that saved him.

Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.

Once my father told me: When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end.

I lost the only woman I ever wanted to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was born. And I lost Isaac. So who is to say that somewhere along the way, without my knowing it, I didn’t also lose my mind?

It’s one of the last self-portraits he did. He painted it sometime between 1665 and when he died four years later, bankrupt and alone. Whole stretches of the canvas are bare. There’s a hurried intensity in the strokes—you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It’s as if he knew there wasn’t much time left. And yet, there’s a serenity in his face, a sense of something that’s survived its own ruin.”

I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I—he—none of us—would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she’d built a world out of them she knew how to survive in, even if no one else could.