The Patriots Quotes

“She was arriving at a revelation that the secret to living was simply forgetting”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“What is more human than having our cruelty incited by another's weakness?”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian...What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence herself might be on the chopping block herself”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“A Red Riding Hood out of her depths in the woods of socialism”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Sunset was just then settling over Red Square. There seemed some hidden vision to be gleaned. A message about man’s chaotic spirit and his sombre dignity. His dignity and his power. His power and his purpose. She was sure that there was some thread there, but the burden of decoding it made her feel too tired”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Dita immigrated to Israel,”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Yasha, is it my fault,” I said, “that ‘out of principle’ you elected to immigrate to a country that enjoys a Euro-socialist lifestyle”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Lubarsky immigrated to Israel”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Young people, what sense is there in these ‘laws’ that are violated by the very officials who issue them? How can they compare to the eternal, immutable laws of Newton, Pascal, Bernoulli, Einstein?”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“afflicted with that national form of Stockholm syndrome they call patriotism.”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Old age made you discover that it wasn't the big mistakes but the small ones that laid claim to your regrets. That she had not brought more pleasure into Leon's life - this now caused her more heartache than anything she could or could not have done to save his life. How stingy she'd been to rush off somewhere when he wanted her to sit and listen to a joke. How she'd rolled her eyes at his entertainments, his 'frivolity,' when all along it was only her he wanted to make laugh. How parsimonious not to make love more often, to turn away from his desire because she was too tired, not to tell him at every opportunity how much he meant to her.”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“I mourned now because when she had been alive I had not understood her. To the end, she frustrated my understanding, defied it with her own silences, her suppressions and elisions. Not about her past in the camps, per se. I was careful not to probe too hard into her tour through the bowels of hell, respecting her silence on the subject. No, what I blamed her for was another kind of silence. What I could not abide was her unwillingness to condemn the very system that had destroyed our family. Her refusal to impugn the evil that had deprived me of a father and left me motherless in those years when a boy most needs a mother's love. I am not a crybaby. I am not one to nurse old wounds. Others suffered more, God knows. I t would have been enough for me if she had said, just one time, Yes, what they did to you, to me, to our family - that was unforgivable. But she did not say those words, and her muteness - her apologism for the system that she insisted - to me! - 'would always take care of the children' - became a second, no less painful, abandonment. In the sixties and seventies, when I was compulsively reading samizdat, I wanted her to be as cynical and disillusioned as I was. I wanted her to be angry for the miseries that she had endured: the murder of her husband, the forcible separation from her child, seven years of bondage and humiliation and hunger. That all this failed to enrage her infuriated me all the more. For it left me to carry the anger for both of us.”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“And then, a second surprise: for the first time in my adult life I was not leaping to become my mother's judge, or her defense attorney. For so many years, those had been the only two roles I could play. Prosecutor was the default - there was always an abundance of her qualities to criticize and impugn - but the prosecutor's costume could be instantly traded for the defender's if, and only if, I was in the docket along with her. Neither posture carried much meaning now.”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“And at that instant, I was six and half years old again, watching the two arresting officers - a man and a woman dressed in quasi-military olive-drab uniforms - opening the door of our wardrobe, running their hands over every hanging item of clothing, palpating the linings, sticking their busy fingers in the pockets before flinging every one of my mother's possessions on the floor.”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“And suddenly, having waited so long to hold it in my hands, I felt paralyzed to read it. Certainly, I was unable to read it like any normal manuscript - starting with page 1, then moving to page 2, 3, and so on. I was seized with a terrifying feeling that here in my possession was something that could do me physical harm the longer I held on to it - a radioactive item - even though my mind continued to reassure me it was just an inert, dead stack of papers. And so, out of rapacious curiosity or immobilizing fear, I undertook to devour the entire thing at once, thumbing through pages and skimming my eyes haphazardly over random words.”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“A memory is a difficult thing to judge from a distance. Did the details unfold as the child perceived them?”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Florence, listen to me carefully.... Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Florence could feel a constriction in her chest…She had been foolish enough to hope that whatever she was walking into would affect no one but herself. Now the truth was catching up with her at the speed of her galloping heartbeat…Now they had summoned her. And they knew everything”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he’d stood before, but the caramel color of his coat was unmistakable. He was loitering in front of what looked like a Ford V8 parked nose-up on the sidewalk. Florence adjusted her shawl over her shoulders and crossed to the opposite corner of the plaza. When she turned back to look again, he was gone”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Was it an instinct towards their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her mind’s eye, was an image of the two of them dancing on the edge of the world, not realising that they were about to fall off”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“My mother had been in the Soviet whirlpool for eleven years by this point. Enough time, I imagine, to unlearn the bourgeois habits of her native Brooklyn, to accustom herself to the farting and shouting of her neighbours, to doing her washing by hand in the collective tub, to keeping her dry food locked up in her wardrobe”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots