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" Prisoners around the world have said that reading 'The Count of Monte Cristo' helped them get through their ordeal. That's something to aspire to. "
Tom Reiss
Through
Reading
World
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" While writing 'The Orientalist,' I played a soundtrack that alternated between ragtime and Azeri mugams, Russian operas and German and Italian pop songs from the 1920s and 30s. When I finally finished, I gorged on all my music from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. "
Tom Reiss
Songs
1920s
Finally
" Until the absorption of the Polish territories, the Russian Empire had had practically no Jews, and it was uniquely ill-equipped to handle this new addition to its ethnic and religious mix. "
Tom Reiss
Handle
Empire
New
" This is the positive way of seeing the modern Jewish dilemma: I am from everywhere. The negative way is no matter where you go, you find out that you're a victim, that you're unwanted and don't belong. "
Tom Reiss
Seeing
Negative
Positive
" In 'The World Set Free,' the world's major superpowers attack each other simultaneously. "
Tom Reiss
Attack
Free
Other
" Anthropology seems so bland and friendly now, but in the early 20th century, Jews could only be dissected badly by these fields. The Jews were extremely assimilated; it's a different world than now. "
Tom Reiss
Only
Now
Early
" The first generation of Russian terrorists came out of the '60s counterculture - the 1860s in Russia bearing a striking similarity to the 1960s in the United States, with Russian students growing their hair, following gurus who extolled the 'new man,' and starting communes. "
Tom Reiss
Man
Hair
Generation
" When Czar Ivan III took a liking to the Judaizers, they were invited to Moscow, where they managed to convert so much of the court nobility in the last decades of the fifteenth century that traditionalists felt the need to counter the trend through selective burnings at the stake. "
Tom Reiss
Need
Court
Nobility
" Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed sugar pills for nearly everything: heart problems, headache, consumption, labor pains, insanity, old age, and blindness. Hence, the French expression 'like an apothecary without sugar' meant someone in an utterly hopeless situation. "
Tom Reiss
Situation
Problems
Age
" Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie - father of the future Alex Dumas - was born on February 26, 1714, in the Norman province of Caux, a region of rolling dairy farms that hung above great chalk cliffs on the northwest coast of France. "
Tom Reiss
France
Great
Future
" The French Revolution was a kind of 21st-century moment in the heart of the 18th century - and Alex Dumas, outstanding though he was, could never have risen the way he did if not for that. The French Revolution was the American Revolution on steroids. "
Tom Reiss
Revolution
Way
Heart
" All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died after stabbing himself in the foot. "
Tom Reiss
Name
Said
Pen
" Alex Dumas was a consummate warrior and a man of great conviction and moral courage. He was renowned for his strength, his swordsmanship, his bravery, and his knack for pulling victory out of the toughest situations. But he was known, too, for his profane back talk and his problems with authority. "
Tom Reiss
Victory
Great
Man
" Napoleon - the people who were becoming Napoleon's generals realized that for him, it was not about spreading freedom and revolution; it was about creating a new empire with Napoleon the dictator or the emperor. "
Tom Reiss
Creating
Revolution
People
" When I was a kid, my mum had a lot of Dumas books in the house, and she's from France originally. My mother had one particular Dumas book that was a family heirloom - this old, beat-up 1938 edition of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' in French. She came to America after losing her parents in World War II as a little kid. "
Tom Reiss
Book
She
Parents
" The one challenge you have when you're going back into history is that people, unlike with today's news - we think we know what's happened already - we think that it's history and therefore less interesting. "
Tom Reiss
People
History
Challenge
" In the winter of 1940, 'The Atlantic Monthly' invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college's top essay and poetry prizes, to write about 'the meaning of young liberalism for the present age.' "
Tom Reiss
Poetry
Winter
Age
" 'The Secret Agent,' Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich - in fact, a scheme by a secret police agent to stir up a government backlash - has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age. "
Tom Reiss
Age
Police
Kind
" For fifty years, debates about French anti-Semitism mainly revolved around France's record during the Second World War, when the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans. "
Tom Reiss
War
Fifty
Government
" The demons you have are what motivate you to make your art. This is what drives the detective, this is what drives the painter, this is what drives the writer: a conflicting urge to forget pain and at the same time remember it and fight for some kind of justice. I know these powerful things are inside of me and everyone in some way or another. "
Tom Reiss
Fight
Justice
Art
" Since 2002, there has been a wave of attacks against Jewish 'persons or property' in France, a great many of them committed by young men living outside Paris, in the vast ghettos called les banlieues. "
Tom Reiss
Wave
Great
Living
" 'The Secret Agent' remains the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside. But 'Under Western Eyes' dares to leap inside - not only into the terrorist mind, but also into the troubled zone that divides West from East, 'the autocracy in mystic vestments.' "
Tom Reiss
Study
Leap
Mind
" It was nearly midnight on the night of February 26, 1806, and Alexandre Dumas, the future author of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' and 'The Three Musketeers,' was asleep at his uncle's house. He was not yet four years old. He was staying there because his father was gravely ill, and his mother thought it best for him not to be at home. "
Tom Reiss
Home
Mother
Future
" The life of General Alex Dumas is so extraordinary on so many levels that it's easy to forget the most extraordinary fact about it: that it was led by a black man, in a world of whites, at the end of the eighteenth century. "
Tom Reiss
End
Black
World
" There's nothing better than to be rootless cosmopolitans who seamlessly merge into whatever society. That's the greatest thing human beings can aspire to. Whether forced by duress, Jews became perfect modern human beings. After the Holocaust, one doesn't really mourn for that - it's too disturbing, seems like a mistake. "
Tom Reiss
Mistake
Society
Better
" In early 1798, the Directory, the oligarchy that was ruling revolutionary France, ordered its top general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to plan the invasion of England. Instead, Napoleon organized and carried out the invasion of Egypt, which became the first modern incursion by the West into the Middle East. "
Tom Reiss
Plan
West
Top
" My particular pain is that the world of Jewishness that I identify with - the extremely assimilated, educated European and Russian Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries - is lost, and is not mourned enough. "
Tom Reiss
Educated
Lost
Enough
" Conservatism as a formal political doctrine didn't exist in America in 1940. The word 'conservative' was associated primarily with fringe groups - anti-industrial Southern agrarians and the anti-New Deal tycoons who led the Liberty League. "
Tom Reiss
Liberty
America
Deal
" The first time I dedicated myself to resurrecting and preserving somebody's memories was with my great-uncle. I knew he was going to die in the next few years, and I had grown up listening to all his stories about people who had been trapped or chased by the Nazis. I began to record them. "
Tom Reiss
Die
Time
People
" In 1817, Czar Alexander I personally founded the Society of Israelite Christians but had less luck defeating Judaism than he'd had defeating Napoleon; gentile serfs and merchants in areas bordering the Pale even showed disturbing new signs of 'Judaizing.' "
Tom Reiss
Society
New
Luck
" The Jewish exodus from North Africa, in the late nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties, brought hundreds of thousands of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian Jews to France. "
Tom Reiss
Africa
France
Jewish