Second World War

The Second World War enters the book not through a battlefield account but through a childhood lesson remembered years later. For Sekiguchi’s daughters, what they had learned at school about the wartime fate of Jews made Jake Adelstein’s presence seem almost impossible, turning a vast historical catastrophe into a revealing family anecdote about education and identity.

War Memory in the Family

When Adelstein recalls promising to check on Sekiguchi’s family after his death, he remembers the daughters as six and nine years old. They had learned at school that every Jew had been killed in the Second World War. Because Adelstein was Jewish, the younger girl wanted to take him to school as an exhibit for show-and-tell. The children’s absolute conclusion is presented as their understanding, not as a factual account of the war’s outcome.

A Historical Reference in Retrospect

The recollection gives the war a small but consequential place in the book: it shows how a lesson about mass death had shaped two children’s idea of who could still exist. Adelstein’s memory also marks the distance between that school-age encounter and the later moment of narration, when the daughters have grown into adults and he continues to see the children he once knew. The Second World War is thus invoked through the persistence of its teaching in ordinary family life, rather than through a separate account of wartime events.