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" 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
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" Even arch-isolationists, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio - two of the most right-wing figures in the Republican Party - insisted on being called liberal. "
Tom Reiss
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" 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
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Positive
" 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. "
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" The revolution breaks out; they form this group of swordsmen called the Black Legion. Alex Dumas is there at every moment, protecting the revolution and protecting France, and he rises to the equivalent of a four-star general. "
Tom Reiss
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" By comparison, 'The Secret Agent' is not especially prescient about terrorism, certainly not technically. The Professor was a stock figure of Edwardian fiction, and his dreams of mass destruction were nothing ahead of their time. Many novels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries involved plots far more deadly. "
Tom Reiss
Nothing
More
Late
" 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 'The World Set Free,' the world's major superpowers attack each other simultaneously. "
Tom Reiss
Attack
Free
Other
" 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
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" Napoleon's plan was for his army to arrive in Egypt not as conquerors but liberators. Landing in Aboukir Bay on July 1, 1798, the French captured Alexandria the next day, overcoming the surprised Mamelukes - the despotic local rulers - with a combination of modern artillery and infantry tactics. "
Tom Reiss
Overcoming
Army
Day
" 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 original Alexandre Dumas was born in 1762, the son of 'Antoine Alexandre de l'Isle,' in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. Antoine was a nobleman in hiding from his family and from the law, and he fathered the boy with a black slave. "
Tom Reiss
Boy
Son
Family
" '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
" Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. "
Tom Reiss
Pulitzer
Became
Modern
" 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 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
" One of my most persistent, long-term fantasy wishes is not that I could fly or become invisible, but that I could make sound recording be invented decades or even centuries earlier than it was, so I could hear what people in the 1830s or 1750s actually sounded like. "
Tom Reiss
Fantasy
Wishes
Sound
" 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
" 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
" I've considered myself a writer since I was 7 years old, but I've done a lot of jobs along the way. I enjoyed waiting tables and tending bar during college, especially when it got busy, so I might like managing a big restaurant. In fact, I might like managing many kinds of businesses or organizations. "
Tom Reiss
Waiting
Busy
College
" For me, history is always personal. And it's how your personal history interacts with the history of your time. I'm very attracted to characters who were cursed, as the Chinese say, to live in interesting times. "
Tom Reiss
Interesting
History
Me
" I am definitely of the method-acting school. Everything to me is about sound. I don't dress up in period costumes or anything like that. I'm very aural. When I'm working, I try to soak up the sounds of an era. "
Tom Reiss
Dress
I Am
Me
" 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
" 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
" I once started a small business when I got out of college and enjoyed the stress of making it work. High-stress situations clear my head, and I love the challenge of getting along with many different kinds of people. I'm scared of routine. "
Tom Reiss
Business
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Love
" Sugar planting was the oil business of the eighteenth century, and Saint-Domingue was the Ancien Regime's Wild West frontier, where sons of impoverished noble families could strike it rich. "
Tom Reiss
Rich
Oil
Noble
" 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
" Today, the world is so awash in sugar - it is such a staple of the modern diet, associated with all that is cheap and unhealthy - that it's hard to believe things were once exactly the opposite. The West Indies were colonized in a world where sugar was seen as a scarce, luxurious, and profoundly health-giving substance. "
Tom Reiss
Today
World
Hard
" I soon abandoned the question of who Kurban Said or Essad Bey was for the more problematic one - who was Lev Nussimbaum? "
Tom Reiss
Question
Soon
Said
" 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
" As a writer, I can't be a heroic sword fighter like General Dumas, but I can rescue someone who's been taken out of history by using my writing to bring them back. "
Tom Reiss
Writing
Back
History