As a writer, I can’t be a heroic sword fighter like General Dumas, but I can rescue someone who’s been taken out of history by using my writing to bring them back. – Tom Reiss
When I was a kid, my mum had a lot of Dumas books in the house, and she’s from France originally. My mother had one particular Dumas book that was a family heirloom – this old, beat-up 1938 edition of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ in French. She came to America after losing her parents in World War II as a little kid. – Tom Reiss
Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. – Tom Reiss
While writing ‘The Orientalist,’ I played a soundtrack that alternated between ragtime and Azeri mugams, Russian operas and German and Italian pop songs from the 1920s and 30s. When I finally finished, I gorged on all my music from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. – Tom Reiss
The one thing I’m not tempted to ever do is stop working. Retirement would be too tough for me. As a workaholic and an insomniac, I identified with my subject, General Dumas, who, according to field reports, would ride on patrols without sleep sometimes for two nights on end before going into battle – and winning. – Tom Reiss
When Czar Ivan III took a liking to the Judaizers, they were invited to Moscow, where they managed to convert so much of the court nobility in the last decades of the fifteenth century that traditionalists felt the need to counter the trend through selective burnings at the stake. – Tom Reiss
Even arch-isolationists, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio – two of the most right-wing figures in the Republican Party – insisted on being called liberal. – Tom Reiss
I once started a small business when I got out of college and enjoyed the stress of making it work. High-stress situations clear my head, and I love the challenge of getting along with many different kinds of people. I’m scared of routine. – Tom Reiss
Prisoners around the world have said that reading ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ helped them get through their ordeal. That’s something to aspire to. – Tom Reiss
For fifty years, debates about French anti-Semitism mainly revolved around France’s record during the Second World War, when the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans. – Tom Reiss
Until the absorption of the Polish territories, the Russian Empire had had practically no Jews, and it was uniquely ill-equipped to handle this new addition to its ethnic and religious mix. – Tom Reiss
The first generation of Russian terrorists came out of the ’60s counterculture – the 1860s in Russia bearing a striking similarity to the 1960s in the United States, with Russian students growing their hair, following gurus who extolled the ‘new man,’ and starting communes. – Tom Reiss
One of my most persistent, long-term fantasy wishes is not that I could fly or become invisible, but that I could make sound recording be invented decades or even centuries earlier than it was, so I could hear what people in the 1830s or 1750s actually sounded like. – Tom Reiss
There’s nothing better than to be rootless cosmopolitans who seamlessly merge into whatever society. That’s the greatest thing human beings can aspire to. Whether forced by duress, Jews became perfect modern human beings. After the Holocaust, one doesn’t really mourn for that – it’s too disturbing, seems like a mistake. – Tom Reiss
Today, the world is so awash in sugar – it is such a staple of the modern diet, associated with all that is cheap and unhealthy – that it’s hard to believe things were once exactly the opposite. The West Indies were colonized in a world where sugar was seen as a scarce, luxurious, and profoundly health-giving substance. – Tom Reiss
I am definitely of the method-acting school. Everything to me is about sound. I don’t dress up in period costumes or anything like that. I’m very aural. When I’m working, I try to soak up the sounds of an era. – Tom Reiss
Alex Dumas was a consummate warrior and a man of great conviction and moral courage. He was renowned for his strength, his swordsmanship, his bravery, and his knack for pulling victory out of the toughest situations. But he was known, too, for his profane back talk and his problems with authority. – Tom Reiss
The first time I dedicated myself to resurrecting and preserving somebody’s memories was with my great-uncle. I knew he was going to die in the next few years, and I had grown up listening to all his stories about people who had been trapped or chased by the Nazis. I began to record them. – Tom Reiss
Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed sugar pills for nearly everything: heart problems, headache, consumption, labor pains, insanity, old age, and blindness. Hence, the French expression ‘like an apothecary without sugar’ meant someone in an utterly hopeless situation. – Tom Reiss
I feel like history is about going and discovering the great human stories that just are every bit as relevant as anything that’s going on today. – Tom Reiss