The History of Love

“I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn’t matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones. And because I accepted that what I’d once believed was possible was in fact impossible, and because I knew I would never show a word of it to anyone, I wrote a sentence: Once upon a time there was a boy.”

When Leo sits down to write for the first time in 57 years, his intention has changed drastically. Rather than his desire to impress Alma and his naive intention to find the right words, Leo is writing just for himself. He knows he won’t find the right words, but he also understands that there is still meaning in the exercise. His writing gives his life structure and purpose.

“When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?”

After Alma leaves for the United States, Leo sends her letters and a few passages from The History of Love. In his youthful enthusiasm, he believes that a word exists for everything he could hope to describe. This response from Alma, which may or may not be a figment of Leo’s imagination, speaks to the pessimism that Leo develops after his experiences in the war and his conviction that finding the right words is impossible.

“The idea of evolution is so beautiful and sad. Since the earliest life on earth, there have been somewhere between five and fifty billion species, only five to fifty million of which are alive today. So, ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are extinct.”

Alma’s reflections on evolution and extinction speak to the novel’s meditations on mortality and existence. She is interested in science and paleontology and wants to understand how and why the world works. Her particular interest in evolution and extinction brings to mind issues of change and impermanence, perhaps inspired by the changes and unsettling experiences she has had in her own life.

“Unlike her husband, Rosa Litvinoff wasn’t a writer, and yet the introduction is guided along by a natural intelligence, and shadowed throughout, almost intuitively, with pauses, suggestions, ellipses, whose total effect is of a kind of half-light in which the reader can project his or her own imagination.”

This quote discusses how the mechanics of language come together to create a certain feeling or experience. Even though Rosa has little writing experience, she instinctually uses writing to paint a mysterious portrait of a mysterious man. This could be indicative of her relationship with her husband. She describes him this way because he remains half-hidden from her as well.

“These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down.”

This phrase refers to Zvi Litvinoff, who produced no written material besides The History of Love. Writing is an important form of record-keeping in the novel and a way for characters to prove and validate their existence. Litvinoff has none of this. Even the words he is known for do not belong to him. His life is lost to time even though he is a published author.

“Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, how many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all.”

This passage offers one of the clearest examples of the connective power of literature in The History of Love. The books will go out into the world and hopefully impact some of their readers. Litvinoff dreams that they will also connect him to the world; he is a lonely man, and he imagines that the book will make these connections on his behalf.

“And yet, because people knew how easily [misunderstandings] could happen, because they didn’t go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me.”

This passage comes from the chapter “The Age of Silence” from the fictional The History of Love. It describes a period of time when humans had no verbal language and instead communicated only with gestures. Although misunderstandings were common, they were also expected, meaning that people were more specific and also more forgiving. This speaks to many of the difficulties that characters throughout The History of Love have with language and communication. Leo says, “words failed me” (119), and this is a common refrain for many of the characters who find themself unable to speak and long for alternatives to verbal communication.

“I thought it would be strange to live in the world without her in it. And yet. I’d gotten used to living with her memory a long time ago.”

When Leo learns that his son is dead, he realizes just how important Isaac’s existence was to his own. Without Isaac, Leo wonders what will happen to him. However, he remembers that he thought the same when Alma left him. Life went on, and he learned to live with only the memory.

“The printed book in his hands was a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the original, which no longer existed, except in his head.”

Litvinoff contemplates The History of Love and the convoluted path the text took to end up a printed book in his hands. The manuscript has been transcribed, translated, and printed, and is now so far from the so-called original manuscript. This questions the idea of authenticity in literature and suggests that all books are copies of something else.

“He was an average man. A man willing to accept things as they were, and, because of this, he lacked the potential to be in any way original. And though he was wrong in every way about this, after that night nothing could dissuade him.”

After reading Leo’s obituary of Isaac Babel, Litvinoff is convinced that his friend is a better writer and that he himself has no talent. This sentiment is evident in the fact that Litvinoff never writes again. He transcribes The History of Love but never tries to create anything of his own, not even for himself.

“There are things I find hard to describe. And yet I persist like a stubborn mule in my efforts.”

In contrast to Litvinoff’s sentiment that he is a worthless writer, which leads him to never write again, Leo perseveres. Although he becomes disillusioned and disenfranchised with language, Leo decides to return to writing and completes the novel that is his life story. He believes the effort is worthwhile, even if the result is imperfect.

“On every lock I installed, I inscribed my initials. A signature, very small, above the keyway. It didn’t matter that no one would ever notice. It was enough that I knew. I kept track of all the locks I’d inscribed with a map of the city folded and refolded so many times that certain streets had rubbed off in the creases.”

Leo’s job as a locksmith helps him build a new life in New York City. Throughout the novel, Leo leads a solitary life and is concerned with leaving evidence of his existence and making his mark on the world. Leo finds a way to do that by keeping track of the locks he opens. His initials on the lock are a way for him to fight invisibility and make sure he does not disappear completely.

“It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one. But I couldn’t, so he leaned down and kissed me.”

Alma is one of the characters who struggles the most with finding the right words at the right time. This phrase expresses the idea that there are so many words available to her, yet language is often inadequate when it comes to communication. Even if she knew all the languages that made her, chances are the exact right word still would not exist.

“He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn’t choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him.”

This is a key quote in explaining Litvinoff’s experience after the war and how each character learns to deal with their trauma. Litvinoff’s whole family is killed in the war, and he has to live with the truth of what happened to them. The elephant, an important symbol of the truth throughout the novel, is the conspicuous reality that Litvinoff is forced to ignore in order to go on with his life.

“What in the world could you offer a girl like that, don’t be a fool, you’ve let yourself fall apart, the pieces have got lost, and now there’s nothing left to give, you can’t hide it forever, sooner or later she’ll figure out the truth: you’re a shell of a man, all she has to do is knock against you to find out you’re empty.”

This quote is another example of Litvinoff’s experience and his attempt to disguise the truth, this time from Rosa, his wife. He fears that she will discover how broken he is and leave him. The only thing he can use to fill this emptiness is The History of Love. The novel gives him a chance to create a life where he is a writer, and Rosa is a writer’s wife.

“At the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.”

Leo often contemplates what he will leave behind when he dies. He wonders what his things will say about him and the kind of life he led. Seeing his son’s possessions, Leo learns things about Isaac he never knew, but he also realizes it is impossible to truly know someone just from their possessions. He, too, has tried to use his things to paint a specific picture of his life.

“I lost Sari and Hanna to the dogs. I lost Herschel to the rain. I lost Josef to a crack in time. I lost the sound of laughter. I lost a pair of shoes […] I lost the only woman I ever wanted to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was born. And I lost Isaac. So who is to say that somewhere along the way, without my knowing it, I didn’t also lose my mind?

Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.”

Walking through Isaac’s home, Leo contemplates everything he has lost in his life. He wonders how he knows he didn’t lose his mind because there is nothing and no one to confirm that he hasn’t. However, he is there, which is its own kind of proof that he exists. Perhaps he no longer needs confirmation from others.

“Why do people always get named after dead people? If they have to be named after anything at all, why can’t it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?”

When Alma learns that Alma Mereminski is no longer alive, she laments that everyone she is named after is dead. Death is prevalent for all the characters in The History of Love, and Alma hates having this reminder in her own name. She wishes for something more permanent so that she can distance herself from death’s constant shadow.

“I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I—he—none of us—would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she’d built a world out of them she knew how to survive in, even if no one else could.”

Alma gives up on finding a man to make her mother happy. She realizes that her mother doesn’t want this; she wants to live in the world of her memories. This idea of building a world she can survive in is precisely what the other characters do to combat their trauma. Just like Leo creates a world where his friend Bruno is alive and Litvinoff builds a world where he is a writer, Charlotte is content to live in her own reality rather than face the truth of her loss.

“I thought about how, if I read it closely enough, I might find out something true about my father, and the things he would have wanted to tell me if he hadn’t died.”

Once Alma lets go of her hope of finding Jacob Marcus, she reads The History of Love looking to find a deeper connection to her father. Speaking to the connective power of storytelling, the novel is something that she can continue to share with her father. By reading it closely, she might be able to capture some of the same experiences he had in reading the text.

“And if, when he tried a second time to replace her name with another, for the second time his hand froze, perhaps it was because he knew that to remove her name would be like erasing all the punctuation, and the vowels, and every adjective and noun. Because without Alma, there would have been no book.”

When Litvinoff transcribes The History of Love, he changes all names except Alma’s. He understands that she is so essential to the story that renaming her is impossible. To Leo, Alma signified love. She was his only reason for writing and became the heart and soul of the book.

“Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. Once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.”

Alma realizes that memories of her father are becoming harder to recall. This suggests that the disappearance that Leo fears is inevitable, no matter how much someone was loved or how full their life was. Impermanence is a fact of life, and all things fade over time.

“Today Dr. Vishnubakat asked me if I was feeling depressed so I said What do you mean by depressed so he said For example do you feel sad and one thing I did not say is Are you an ignoramus? because that is not what a lamed vovnik would say. Instead I said If a horse knew how small a man is compared to it, it would trample him, which is something Mr. Goldstein sometimes says, and Dr. Vishnubakat said That’s interesting, can you elaborate? and I said No.”

This quote comes from Bird’s diaries and describes a conversation with his therapist. The young Bird eschews proper grammar and punctuation, but his personality and intelligence are clear. He doesn’t trust his therapist and is reluctant to answer his questions, preferring instead to follow the wisdom of Mr. Goldstein.