Tom Reiss Quotes

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.

Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

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.

‘The War in the Air’ describes the destruction of Manhattan by air attack.

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.

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.

‘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.’

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.’

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.

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.

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.

Until 2005, France had the only senior Catholic prelate in modern times who was born Jewish and still considered himself culturally Jewish: Cardinal Lustiger.

The French Revolution ends slavery unilaterally. And it does so at this moment when the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Americans – all of the other major powers – keep slavery. And the fact is that it’s almost bankrupting the French Colonial Empire.

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.

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.

Remembering people is the most fundamental gesture of love and respect. For me, there are people in my life who are no longer with me, who have died, who are with me as much as any living person because I remember everything about them. My great-uncle, who I got a lot of guidance in life from, meant so much to me.

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.

‘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.

The one thing I’m not tempted to ever do is stop working. Retirement would be too tough for me. As a workaholic and an insomniac, I identified with my subject, General Dumas, who, according to field reports, would ride on patrols without sleep sometimes for two nights on end before going into battle – and winning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Dumas memoirs – which I also discovered when I was a kid – had a big impact on me.

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.

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.

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.