Finding My Father Quotes

“During that year, 2017, according to FBI statistics, 60 percent of religious hate crimes were anti-Jewish (17 percent were anti-Islamic and 5 percent anti-Catholic).”
― Deborah Tannen, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow

“If I don’t think Jewish is a race—though in 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that it is, so Jews are protected by laws against racial discrimination—what is it? A religion? Yes, but I’m not religious. A culture? I hear people talk about “cultural Jews,” but that term feels inadequate to me; “culture” doesn’t go deep enough. I’m more comfortable with the term “secular Jew”; that feels like a reasonable way to describe Jews who aren’t “observant,” but it still doesn’t say what Judaism is. Is”
― Deborah Tannen, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow

“I don’t think Jewish is a race—though in 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that it is, so Jews are protected by laws against racial discrimination—what is it? A religion? Yes, but I’m not religious. A culture? I hear people talk about “cultural Jews,” but that term feels inadequate to me; “culture” doesn’t go deep enough. I’m more comfortable with the term “secular Jew”; that feels like a reasonable way to describe Jews who aren’t “observant,” but it still doesn’t say what Judaism is. Is it”
― Deborah Tannen, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow

“Throughout everything, my father’s cheerfulness, his optimism, is palpable in his ever-present sense of humor. Yet I’m struck by a comment he makes in a conversation with Ryan: “If there is no humor, you find sadness. Sadness appears. No humor isn’t followed by nothing. It’s followed by sadness.” I see in his journals and written memories that my father’s perennial good humor and quick wit may be a cover for his sadness, which reminds me of my own.”
― Deborah Tannen, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow

“In all my memories, my father is unfailingly cheerful. It’s my mother who is often unhappy, whose unhappiness I dread because I absorb it, as if I were a lightning rod grounding her sadness in my chest. When”
― Deborah Tannen, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow

“I’ll just be a memory,” he says. “There are so many people who were so real to me in their lives, and now they’re just memories.”
― Deborah Tannen, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow

“IT’S 1996; MY father is eighty-eight. I arrive for a visit at their Westchester condo. My mother greets me at the door. After we’ve hugged and kissed, my father appears at the end of the hallway. It’s taken him longer to rise from his chair. He isn’t carrying the cane he finally agreed to use after his last fall. He stumbles, but the wall catches him. Something inside me rebels: who stole my father and put this old man in his place?”
― Deborah Tannen, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow

“We all have alternate lives we might have lived had we made different decisions, including decisions about whom to marry. I”
― Deborah Tannen, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow

“The very next year the Statue of Liberty lowered her torch: in 1921 Congress imposed quotas, and in 1924—the year after my mother arrived—quotas were set so low that the doors effectively slammed shut.”
― Deborah Tannen, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow