City of God by E.L. Doctorow

less went on, I stayed mostly in the side streets, though never out of sight or hearing of the square. I was a responsible child, but when things were too quiet and I could not resist the impulse I’d slip into one of the empty houses and climb out on the roof and maintain my watch there. Most of the ghetto houses were no more than cabins, but some were two stories, some were made of stone, there were barns with haylofts, stables, shops with flat roofs, a commercial building or two. The danger of watching from a roof, huddled in the crevice made by the chimney and warmed by the sun, was that I could find myself falling asleep and one of the open cars could come across the bridge and pass under me without my being aware. Usually, I was too hungry to fall asleep, though I did daydream. I could see the entire span of the bridge and the frontage streets of the city across the river that I had once called home. The veins of the city spread into the uplands and I could see the blocks of apartment houses and office buildings and, depending on where I was, I might even see the military factories against the hills where on windless days smoke from the tall stacks poured directly upward into the sky.
    If I turned my head to the east, I could see where the terrain roughened into foothills and then mountains with canyons, all of it thickly forested with pine and birch trees. This terrain was magical to me because it was where the Jewish partisans were based who had guns and attacked Germans in military forays. I believed, quite unreasonably, that my parents were with the partisans, were themselves fighting heroes of the Jewish resistance. I believed this at the same time that I believed they were dead. I believed both simultaneously. I will explain this to you, because it also will show you how I became a runner in the first place.
    Before the German invasion, before the eviction of the Jews, my father, your grandfather, had been an agrarian economist at the university. That meant matters of crops, farm production, and so on. That is why he was a secret consultant of the council. They had to figure out the distribution of foodstuffs allotted by the Germans. Of course there was never enough. It was my father who staked in two empty lots the plan for a community vegetable garden that the council brought to the Germans for their approval.
    My mother had been a doctoral candidate in English language andliterature at the same university. When we moved to the ghetto all of that was over. In the beginning my father went off every dawn with the labor details across the bridge to work on the assembly line in the airplane factory, and my mother was designated to teach in the ghetto school. But nothing stayed the same, restrictions followed one another, and more and more of the normal things of life were taken away. So one day the Germans shut down our schools, and after that my mother was assigned like my father to the labor brigades in the city.
    I was warned to stay out of sight. I spent most of my time in our house. My mother had saved several books from confiscation and brought them home to me. The books were kept behind a loose wall board in my room. It was an attic room with a small window I could see from only if I got down on my knees. I studied those books avidly, French and English readers, math workbooks, and histories of European civilization. I relished books from the higher grades and liked to master them. My mama made up assignments from these books and even tests for me to take. I loved tests. I loved her voice as she read my work and graded it and I loved it when we bent over my workbook together in the evening after she made our supper.
    Of course I had one or two friends. Joseph Liebner, who had been a year ahead of me in school and whose father was a baker in the ghetto bakery, and a boy named Nicoli, who shared with me his German-language cowboy novels, and the blond girl Sarah Levin, whose pretty mother, Miriam, taught