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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Idhra do for Jakob?
(a) Opens his memory.
(b) Plunges him into a deeper depression.
(c) Liberates his heart.
(d) Liberates his mind.

2. How does the famed rabbi travel in the parable?
(a) With much elaborate preparations.
(b) Ostentatiously.
(c) Simply but openly.
(d) Incognito.

3. Why does Jakob say Germans tried to dehumanize Jews?
(a) So the Jews would believe the lies about themselves.
(b) So they could receive approval of the world at large for their atrocities.
(c) To make it easier to murder them.
(d) To convince others that genocide was acceptable.

4. What does Ben imagine happening to Petra as a child?
(a) Being made to sit in the corner to dampen down her sensuality.
(b) He cannot imagine her as a child.
(c) Being imprinted by lightning.
(d) Being frozen in a pose of beauty.

5. What is possible with recorded history?
(a) It can be altered.
(b) It can be forgotten.
(c) It can be erased.
(d) It can be resurrected.

6. What does Naomi do to escape the heat and humidity?
(a) Lies in the spring in the back of the house.
(b) Turns the A/C on high in her car.
(c) Takes a cold shower.
(d) Turns the thermostat down in the house.

7. What is the moral of the parable about the rabbi?
(a) Forgivness is not automatic.
(b) Be kind to all since you do not know if someone is an angel.
(c) Nothing erases an immoral act.
(d) Forgiveness is possible but penance is required.

8. Of what does the house remind Ben?
(a) Uninterrupted lives when Krakatoa erupted.
(b) Uninterrupted lives when Vesuvius erupted.
(c) Uninterrupted lives when the last tidal wave struck Japan when he was there.
(d) Uninterrupted lives when an avalanche buried a Canadian town in the Rockies.

9. What stories does Ben tell Petra?
(a) About his parents' experience in Treblinka.
(b) About him and Naomi.
(c) About Jakob and Michaela.
(d) About how he escapes his home.

10. For what does Jakob yearn?
(a) A way to love Michaela with no barriers.
(b) Forgetfulness.
(c) A sense of purpose now that his writings are complete.
(d) A child.

11. What do Ben and Petra discover when they pull down the covers on Jakob's bed?
(a) A note from Jakob to Bella.
(b) A handwritten group of poems no one has seen.
(c) A note from Michaela to her brother.
(d) A note from Michaela to Jakob.

12. Where does Jakob image Bella being?
(a) A German officer's home.
(b) A home for orphans.
(c) A camp barracks.
(d) A vault.

13. About what does Maurice worry?
(a) That Maurice will have to work many hours with Ben.
(b) That Ben will misinterpret Jakob's journals.
(c) That Jakob's journals are lost in the huge library.
(d) That Ben will not be persistent.

14. Of what does being moral consist in the time of the Holocaust?
(a) The greatest acts.
(b) Refusing to participate in evil.
(c) The tiniest acts.
(d) The knowledge of what is happening and changing.

15. What reminds Ben of his parents' shoes and mended clothing?
(a) A picture of a medicant preacher.
(b) Two elderly Jews walking past in the street.
(c) A description in one of Jakob's journals.
(d) A jumble of sandals in Jakob's study.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Jakob think Bella wants to do for him?

2. When does Ben arrive on Idhra?

3. What does making love with Petra do for Ben?

4. How does Jakob feel in Greece?

5. What does Michaela allow Jakob to do?

(see the answer keys)

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