The Gates of November Quotes

“The Communist Party, a seeming haven for the radical intelligentsia and apparently uninterested in the ethnic and religious origins of its members, became the sole refuge of certain marginal Jews, who believed it would bring a great and true salvation to the world, a revolutionary universalism in which the destructive differences that divided humankind would once and for all be forever dissolved. It mattered little to most Russians that these Jews were no more Jewish than their non-Jewish atheist party comrades; that they did not speak for or identify with Jews, and indeed were often the enemies of Jews. Further, because many Jews stepped into the vacuum created by the disintegration of the tsarist bureaucracy, it now seemed to many Russians that Jewish government officials were everywhere. Their sudden appearance, concurrent as it was with the Revolution and the Civil War, forever linked those events in the minds of Russians, for whom the Jew now became the evil cause of the Fatherland’s unutterable misery.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“(Question: What will happen after Cuba builds communism? Answer: It will start importing sugar. Question: What’s the difference between capitalism and communism? Answer: Under capitalism, man exploits man; under communism, it’s the other way around)”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Isn’t it better to arrest and prosecute a hundred innocent people and catch among them one spy than to let the spy go free?”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Are there American variations of Solomon Slepak, those rendered so rigid by ideas that all reason fails them? Prudence, a cautious awareness of nuances, of complexities, of consequences, a perception of the unity of the American experience, and a saving sense of irony and humor—pervasive in the Founding Fathers and lacking in contemporary ideologues. Can we learn something from these chronicles about iron righteousness and rigid doctrine, about the stony heart, the sealed mind, the capricious use of law, and the tragedies that often result when theories are not adjusted to realities? Do the chronicles seem to reveal a glaring and almost obvious truth: the larger the nation, the more tumultuous its demise? Are we approaching the finale now to the bright possibilities once inherent in this land? Is that old America forever gone? Indeed, did it ever exist? Were we seduced as schoolchildren into a vision of a land green and golden from sea to shining sea, a land as illusory for many Americans as the Motherland of Solomon Slepak was for Volodya and Masha? Perhaps the more sensible question is not about what we once were but about what we intend ourselves to be one day. Things are happening to us today that we don’t seem able to explain. Can we enter the uncertain future without the corrosive cynicism, the clutching greed, the divisive self-interests—the beasts that destroyed the world of Solomon Slepak and rendered it uninhabitable to his family?”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“And so the land lay atomized, all in fear of all, in a miasma of dread, with no possibility of organized resistance because the terror struck at individuals, each instance of it a separate and personal experience—the knock on the door, the abrupt arrest, the sense of shocked disbelief, the certainty that an error had been made and would soon be corrected—and everyone thinking, Don’t look, don’t listen, don’t ask, how do I know, maybe he really was a spy, I’m not doing anything wrong, it won’t touch me.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Can we learn something from these chronicles about iron righteousness and rigid doctrine, about the stony heart, the sealed mind, the capricious use of law, and the tragedies that often result when theories are not adjusted to realities?”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“In all, there were about 4,800 refuseniks in the USSR, 221 of them for five years or more. One Muscovite, Benjamin Bogomolny, had been refused a visa since his first application in 1966 and would not be allowed to leave until October 1986.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Better that ten innocent people should suffer,” he said, “than one spy get away.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Still, what point can there be in comparing pain and punishment? Do we know what scars they bear, what dreams wake them, what echoes of that cruel corner of Siberia haunt their sleep?”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Torture, we know, leaves permanent psychic scars. Refusal is a condition of torture, crueler perhaps than exile, for there is a terminus to exile, and none to refusal. And surely exile is torture.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“If we had not made the effort to leave, our children would have assimilated and disappeared as Jews.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“The cultural buildup of Jews in Russia today is temporary and unnatural,” he said. “It will be good until the first pogrom.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Polygons of Satan: Crimes of the Communist Party by Igor Bunich, published in 1994 in Rostov-on-Don.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Jesse Jackson asked the Soviet premier about the Jews and was informed that the “so-called problem of Jews in the Soviet Union does not exist.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“In a letter she wrote that autumn, she opened her heart, sharing the despair that often came upon the refuseniks: their nearly unendurable inner torment and stress: stripped of home, community, and country; the leaders suddenly exiled, jailed; the families fractured; the burden of unbounded waiting borne by parents and children who felt themselves belonging nowhere.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“It was one of the paradoxes of the socialist system that when a book was published, copies would be distributed to bookstores in the Soviet Union, not on the basis of demand but according to population.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Buryats were of Mongolian stock and were called Buryats on this side of the border and Mongols on the Mongolian side.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“The prisoners’ class system divided the world into good kikes and bad kikes.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Alyona, who later became his wife, typed carbon copies of Exodus by Leon Uris; the novel, illegal in the Soviet Union, was a near-sacred text to Jewish dissidents.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Jews in the pay of the CIA! Jews a threat to the security of the Motherland! That was how newspapers and journals began to report it throughout the USSR.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“A frequent Soviet reaction to queries from the West about its treatment of the Jews inside its borders echoed an answer often given by the tsars: Our Jews are our business, entirely an internal matter; to presume to dictate to us how we ought deal with them is to violate our national sovereignty.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“The diploma tax put an end to any hope they had of ever leaving the country. As it did to the hopes of the other refuseniks.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“It is part of the torture for the torturer to display the instruments of torture before the one about to be tortured.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Whenever you cut down trees, chips will fly in all directions.’ ” Solomon Slepak quoted the old Russian proverb.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“He loved sweets, often told Masha tales of a mountain outside Odessa, a fantasy mountain of halvah, describing it so vividly she could taste its rich, honeyed sweetness.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November

“Masha was born in Moscow on November 7, 1926, the ninth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Friends said to her parents, “You must name her Octyabrina in honor of the October Revolution.” People were still euphoric about the Revolution, about the future; they gave their children names like Tractor and Industriya.”
― Chaim Potok, The Gates of November