How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Every Orthodox Jew sent his male children to a yeshiva, a Jewish parochial school. (1.7)
Reuven, our narrator, is informative. He’s always giving us little bits of interesting information, like any good teacher.
Quote #2
Danny and I probably would never have met […] had it not been for America’s entry into the Second World War and the desire this bred on the part of some English teachers in Jewish […] schools to show […] that yeshiva students were as physically fit […] as any other American student. (1.9)
Education, religion, fate, and patriotism converge on the baseball field. Of course, somebody gets his eye poked out.
Quote #3
[…] Hebrew was the Holy Tongue and to use it in ordinary classroom discourse was to desecrate God’s name. (1.261)
Reuven is giving us the Reb’s position on education: class should be taught in Yiddish, the language of the people, and education is secondary to honoring religious tradition. When the Reb learns that his son doesn't necessarily agree, he freaks out. But, he gets over it. By the end of the novel, we find that the Reb is a (somewhat) flexible guy.
Quote #4
I have a photographic mind. My father says it’s a gift from God. (3.235)
So much is made of Danny’s mind. Lots of cool images occur to us, like Danny as a walking camera, taking pictures of everything he sees. We wonder what the novel would have been like if he was the narrator.
Quote #5
"I read seven or eight books a week outside of my schoolwork." (4.98)
By the end of the book we’ve heard enough about Danny’s brilliance. Reuven is brilliant, too. But, of course, Reuven can’t tell us story about how brilliant he is – we’d just he think he was a raging egomaniac.
Quote #6
"Is it so strange, then, that he is breaking his father’s rules and reading forbidden books? He cannot help himself." (13.40)
David can’t resist helping Danny read. David feels like he’ll die before he’ll get to read all the books he wants to. If only David could read as fast as Danny! No wonder he identifies with the kid and wants to help him.
Quote #7
It was frustrating to be sitting there surrounded by all these journals and not be able to read a thing myself, and I decided to review by heart some of the symbolic logic I’d been studying. (8.8)
Reuven’s descriptions of his own intelligence are always so modest. But he can’t keep reminding us that he knows math.
Quote #8
"You’ve heard about Freud. He started psychoanalysis. I’m teaching myself German, so I can read him in the original."
Danny doesn’t quite accomplish his goal of reading Freud in the original. He sort of lets that go by the wayside, as he learns that there are many approaches to the study of the human mind. Potok himself was quite loyal to Freud, and believed that Freud taught us a great deal about the human mind.
Quote #9
And I waited out the silence by studying. (14.28)
Get a load of this guy, studying, all the time. But, don’t we all approach loneliness in unique ways? Reuven takes solace in what he loves most, after David and Danny, of course. In this brief sentence, Reuven expresses worlds of loneliness.