These are pages from the opening section of a book I am writing called The Garden. The Garden, as I’ve started to say boldly or foolishly, is the first part of a trilogy on the themes of Jewishness, war, memory, and time. I could have said, on the themes of personhood, spirit, afterlife. For in this trilogy, only two sections of which actually exist, personhood is very much in the air while the spirits of persons refuse to stay underground.

Having spent five years writing a family history, I’d been pressed into a greater sense of the confluence, of the overlapping kinespheres, that make up what we call our (individual) lives.1 The past was not past, of course, which meant that the beings that inhabited so-called pastness were acting on me in uncountable ways. Moreover, the current of influence seemed to go in both directions. Having...

You do not currently have access to this content.