First of all, I've got to tell you, I probably said this to you maybe when we talked about Bonhoeffer a long time ago, but my, you know, of course this is one of those questions growing up, you know, but if you knew my mother, if you knew my grandmother, you'd know that these were just deeply good people, right?
So that's the first thing that you say.
Also, what's really weird...
When you read my book, I talk about the Greeks and the Germans.
I got the sense of humor from the Germans.
My mother and grandmother never stopped joking.
It's the craziest thing.
You would never expect this from Germans, but they were like peasants that tumbled out of a Bruegel painting or something.
I guess because maybe they're from part of Germany where Luther's from.
There's all this kind of jesting and coarse joking or something.
But just all of that humor I get from my grandmother, from my mother, which is bizarre, but that's in the book.
But I was going to say that I remember my grandmother said that my grandfather would listen to the BBC. With his ear literally pressed against the radio speaker because you could be sent to a concentration camp for listening to the BBC during the war.
And they, you know, there's no doubt that he was not on board with what was going on.
He managed to stay out of the war until 1943, which is crazy.
He was working in a sewing machine factory and managed to avoid going to war until 1943. And then he was killed on a train heading for the Russian front.
It was blown up and he was killed.
He was 31. My mother was 10. And, you know, I've lived with this my whole life.
But I remember when I was very little, about five, six years old, we lived in an apartment building in Queens.
I think we were like the only Gentiles on our floor.
I think everybody was Jewish except for us on the floor.
And there was an older woman, Mrs. Weingarten, who lived down.
And my mother and I would go down and my mother would talk to her in German.
Mrs. Weingarten was a German Jew.
And she showed me once the tattoo of numbers on her arm.
And my mother explained this to me.
And so this has just been part of my whole life growing up.
And I never thought I'd write a book about it.
But obviously...
I've thought about it a lot in the last ten years, just because of the Bonhoeffer book.
I think you have to deal with that, right?
Yeah, no, of course.
I would have assumed that you would have, which indeed you did.
Just for the record, by the way, Bruegel was Dutch, so...
No, no, I know that.
How did they fall out of a Bruegel painting?
What I'm saying is that when you look at one of those paintings, I think that my...
I'm just giving you a hard time.
I know, I know, but my relatives in Germany, they were kind of of that...
You know, either peasant stock or...
It's hilarious for you to say you got your sense of humor from your German background.
Yeah, it's totally true.
I write about it in the book.
I'm not kidding.
No, no, I believe you.
It's just funny.
By the way, did you grow up speaking German and Greek?
Well, yes and no.
Because my parents obviously don't speak each other's languages, their common language was English.
So I grew up speaking English, but I heard tons...
Of Greek and tons of German.
So I can get by in Greek and I can get by in German.
I can fool non-native speakers that I'm fluent.
And I can fool native speakers for about three sentences.
I hear you.
Can you say in either language the essence of effervescence is its quintessence?
No.
Okay.
That's my test sentence.
Wow.
Yeah.
I don't think anybody in any language would be able to do that.
That would be really tough.
I don't even know if I could do that in English.
What happened at age 25?
God spoke to me in a dream.
It was as real as anything.
It totally changed my life because I knew without any doubt it was God.
It's basically the punchline to the story, but it was utterly...
Miraculous.
And I needed a miracle, Dennis, because I was so bound up in my own mind.
I had been trained at Yale and in the secular culture to be very, very wary of people who believe in the Bible, of evangelical Christians, of anybody who's conservative.
I was really inoculated against that.
So the whole idea that I could become one of those people who would talk about God or read the Bible, I just thought, I don't want to be one of those people.
And yet, I was in a lot of pain after I graduated Yale.
My joke version of it is I say that Yale really does communicate to you that life has no meaning.
Like, we don't want to get into that.
We just want to kind of avoid thinking about the big questions because we don't have any good answers, you know?
And so they say, you know, get a good job and just work really hard and don't think about it.
And in a few decades, it'll all be over, you know?
I was an English major.
I wanted to be a writer.
Therefore, obviously, I did not get a good job.
So I had plenty of time to think about it.
And that's where I went wrong.
And so I floundered around.
I ended up moving back in with my parents at age 24, which you don't want to move back in with your parents if they're working-class European immigrants because even your Yale friends, their parents would be like, oh, Eric's trying to find himself.
And my parents would be like, well, why don't you find yourself a job and get out of here because we worked really hard to put you through Yale.
It was a really painful time in my life, and I met a guy who was a profound person who starts sharing about the Bible with me and God and stuff, and I kept him at arm's length during that year as best I could, but I was in so much pain that privately,
you know, I was kind of wondering, but I was not exactly eager to become one of those people who talks about God and Jesus and whatever, and I've got to say that About a year into this, God spoke to me in a dream, and that's the punchline.
I won't tell you, but it relates to the title of the book.