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Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams QUOTES

Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams QUOTES

1 " The way the kids of immigrants heard about America, you would think it was not down the stairs and out the door but still across the ocean, a distant place where everything is promised and, for hard work, everything is given. From the day he left his parents' house, Abe [Reles] had to know his father was right, that America promises everything, but he also had to know his father was wrong--America gives nothing. Those things that are promised, they cannot be worked for but must be taken, conned away with good looks, obsequiousness, mimicry; or traded for with bit of your soul or the morals of the stories your parents told; or tricked away with lies; or wrested away with brute force. "

― Rich Cohen , Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams

2 " Maybe [Abe] Reles even thought, What goes around comes around! Probably not. For this suggests there is a finite amount of shit, and every gangster knows the amount of shit is infinite. It also suggests a degree of cause and effect, and every gangster knows the shit you give and the shit you take are only sometimes connected. And this is one source of the gangster’s power: a freedom the rest of suspicious, God-fearing America will never have access to. Gangsters know that even if they stop doing bad things, which they so enjoy doing, bad things will still happen to them. So why not go ahead and break shit before you yourself are broken? "

― Rich Cohen , Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams

3 " Where you end up is the thing, not how you get there. How you get there, that’s just something to be debated by the suckers who never make it out. "

― Rich Cohen , Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams

4 " You have to leave town to claim your life, to birth yourself, to take possession of the world. If you do not leave town, sooner or later, ten minutes from now, if not ten years hence, you wake to find you were never alive, that your town exists against a nothing background. You have to leave your town before you can claim it—this is something my father and his friends came to realize in the fifties, when it seemed the entire borough was packing up and moving off. Dead or out of town. Dead or out. Out or dead of town. Dead town out of. And of course, years later, when they did try to come back, when they stood on the corner and closed their eyes, they realized the old town was gone, had died while they were off living their lives. "

― Rich Cohen , Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams