The room seemed to gleam in the lamplight against the deepening blue that pressed against the windowpanes, the four girls’ faces glowing as they talked and laughed. Jacob watched the family around the table and marveled. He thought of the filthy camps where he had slept and eaten for most of the past year, the mud-coated tents and the vomit-stained blankets on ordinary nights, and then the choking smell of already rotting flesh on those howling twilit evenings when he had clawed his way off of the battlefields, the night air riven with the long screams of those not yet dead. It suddenly seemed impossible to him that those places and this room could exist in the same world. He looked around the table at the faces of the chattering Levy daughters and imagined that this room was a sealed compartment in time and space, with an entire world contained within it – an alternative world, independent from reality, where this house with its lights and laughter and beautiful girls had somehow, impossibly, become his home. (page 49)

Jacob watched as Isaacs coughed, than drank more ale. For a long time neither of them spoke. Just when Jacob was about to stammer out some platitude, Isaacs spoke again. “ I was married once before I came here, in East Prussia. When I was your age the Russians burned through the town as they defeated Napoleon. That was my first war,” he said. He paused again. Jacob fidgeted with his watch chain, glancing around at the bare painted walls, until Isaacs continued. “Some soldiers made a game of capturing Jewish girls and taking them as slaves. My wife and I had just gotten married then, and they took her and her sister. I – I pleaded with them to release her, I begged them on my knees, I offered them anything I owned, but – well, it was a comedy to them. Her sister endured it, and later she was set free, pregnant. She told me how my wife took her own life instead.” He stared at the back of his hand for a long time before returning to look at Jacob again. “Wars come and go, young man. They come and go, and you come and go with them. It’s like the weather, like a storm or a drought. All you can do is take shelter and wait for them to pass.”
Jacob saw then that they were speaking across oceans, across centuries. There was simply no way to tell him, no way to make him understand that in this new wilderness, wars were no longer like the weather – that he and Jeannie weren’t victims but perpetrators, that they were causing it, that the very battle he feared the most would be taking place in bed with his new bride tomorrow night, if he made it through the wedding day. (pages 86–87)

Every American Hebrew, including Jacob, knew the strange freedom of Sunday mornings. At first the streets would be crowded, the peals of church bells crowding the air as horses and carriages crammed the roads, one after another, loaded with families wearing their best clothes and their most serious faces, even the children chastened into little sorrowful adults. These sad children and their sad parents, along with their sad grandparents and sad uncles and aunts, would then all assemble on the steps of the churches, waiting for the doors to be thrown open. Then the owner of these sad faces would shuffle inside to devote the next hour of their lives to the praise of God. For that magical hour of every week, Hebrews in every American city were free to be themselves. On Sunday mornings they took to the empty streets, the empty courtyards, the empty squares, and breathed. Even as a child in New York, Jacob was aware of the paradise of that precious hour. It was the only time when Hebrew children were allowed to be children, released into the wilds of the gardens, streets and fields, talking as loudly as they wanted without their parents warning them to lower their voices, free to argue and rampage without the haunting fear of embarrassing their parents and thereby ruining their prospects for the lives of their dreams. (pages 255–256)