How It All Goes Down
The Beginning of the World Often Comes, 1942-1791
- It's Trachimday yet again, March 18, 1942.
- Safran and his very pregnant wife watch the parade.
- When the Float Queen throws the sacks, as she does every year, this time… time stops.
- The bags stay there, "they hung as if on strings" (33.21).
- After the bombing, the Nazis line everyone up and make them spit on the Torah. Then they put the Jews in the synagogue. ("It was the same in every shtetl. It happened hundreds of times" [33.22].)
- This chapter ends as a soldier burns the nine volumes of The Book of Recurrent Dreams, but not before we get a glimpse of one of Brod's dreams, The dream of the end of the world.
- In it, Safran throws his wife into the river to save her, but she ends up drowning as she gives birth to her child, which also dies.
- Many bodies are dumped into the river that day: "This is what we've done we've killed our own babies to save them" (33.22).