Quiet

A Note on the Dedication

My grandfather was a soft-spoken man with sympathetic blue eyes, and a passion for books and ideas. He always dressed in a suit, and had a courtly way of exclaiming over whatever was exclaimable in people, especially in children. In the Brooklyn neighborhood where he served as a rabbi, the sidewalks were filled with men in black hats, women in skirts that hid their knees, and improbably well-behaved kids. On his way to synagogue, my grandfather would greet the passersby, gently praising this child’s brains, that one’s height, the other’s command of current events. Kids adored him, businessmen respected him, lost souls clung to him.

But what he loved to do best was read. In his small apartment, where as a widower he’d lived alone for decades, all the furniture had yielded its original function to serve as a surface for piles of books: gold-leafed Hebrew texts jumbled together with Margaret Atwood and Milan Kundera. My grandfather would sit beneath a halo-shaped fluorescent light at his tiny kitchen table, sipping Lipton tea and snacking on marble cake, a book propped open on the white cotton tablecloth. In his sermons, each a tapestry of ancient and humanist thought, he’d share with his congregation the fruits of that week’s study. He was a shy person who had trouble making eye contact with the audience, but he was so bold in his spiritual and intellectual explorations that when he spoke the congregation swelled to standing-room-only.

The rest of my family took its cue from him. In our house, reading was the primary group activity. On Saturday afternoons we curled up with our books in the den. It was the best of both worlds: you had the animal warmth of your family right next to you, but you also got to roam around the adventure-land inside your own head.

Yet as a preteen I began to wonder whether all this reading had marked me as “out of it,” a suspicion that seemed confirmed when I went away to summer camp at the age of ten and watched as a girl with thick glasses and a high forehead refused to put down her book on the all-important first day of camp and instantly became a pariah, her days and nights a hell of social exclusion. I longed to read, too, but left my own paperbacks untouched in my suitcase (though I felt guilty about this, as if the books needed me and I was forsaking them). I saw that the girl who kept reading was considered bookish and shy, the very things that I was, too, and knew that I must hide.

After that summer, I felt less comfortable about my desire to be alone with a book. In high school, in college, and as a young lawyer, I tried to make myself appear more extroverted and less eggheady than I truly was.

But as I grew older, I drew inspiration from my grandfather’s example. He was a quiet man, and a great one. When he died at the age of ninety-four, after sixty-two years at the pulpit, the NYPD had to close the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the throngs of mourners. He would have been surprised to know this. Today, I think that one of the best things about him was his humility.

This book is dedicated, with love, to my childhood family. To my mother, with her endless enthusiasm for quiet kitchen-table chats; she gave us children the gift of intimacy. I was so lucky to have such a devoted mother. To my father, a dedicated physician who taught by example the joys of sitting for hours at a desk, hunting for knowledge, but who also came up for air to introduce me to his favorite poems and science experiments. To my brother and sister, who share to this day the warmth and affection of having grown up in our small family and household full of literature. To my grandmother, for her pluck, grit, and caring.

And in memory of my grandfather, who spoke so eloquently the language of quiet.