Uprooted is very much about my mother’s side of the family, who were Polish Catholics. They were deeply patriotic and deeply rooted in their country.… - Naomi Novik

“There’s no such thing as normal people, I said, a desperate flailing. “There’s just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you’ve the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.

By mundane standards, it was a cozy little place, the sort that a real estate listing would call charming, meaning not quite as large as you’d like.

I think that a lot of anti-Semitism is historically a deflection of resentment of capital. It’s a deflection of that by the elite onto Jews, who are a convenient population to target. And this was something that happened in Western Europe and Eastern Europe, where the Jewish community became a piggy bank for rulers. These rulers deflected hostility from people who felt themselves being exploited but didn’t understand the system of exploitation.