When the Romans sacked the Second Temple of Jerusalem in the first century, legend has it that the great rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai asked himself in anguish: "What is a Jew without Jerusalem? How can you be a Jew without a nation?" His answer was to rebuild Jerusalem in the mind. The school that grew up around his teachings became known as the Great House, after the verse in the Books of Kings: "He burned the house of G-d, the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; even every great house he burned with fire." Over the centuries that followed the Jewish people preserved the fragments of that Great House - in effect, the whole body of Jewish culture - in their memories, each retaining "a pattern on the wall, a knot in the wood of the door, a memory of how light fell across the floor," as the sinister antiques dealer who flits through the novel's pages explains. "But if every Jewish memory were put together, every last holy fragment joined up again as one, the House would be built again".
From the Great House, Nicole Krauss' latest novel
