I am sitting in the lobby of my son’s Brooklyn school, reading the diaries of Victor Klemperer. The diaries have sat on my shelf for years — invaluable, excruciating records of daily life in the Third Reich. My son’s school is Jewish. It’s the most reform kind of Jewish school imaginable; even Klemperer might have been comfortable here. But the building has Hebrew on its facade, so I am sitting here because I am unable to concentrate anywhere else.

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Persons: Victor Klemperer, Klemperer, wasn’t, Eva Organizations: Lutheran Church Locations: Brooklyn, German, France