“During the war the congregation was largely broken up […] and it was never really reconstituted after the war. […] Before the war my parents (I, too) had known almost every shop and shopkeeper in Cricklewood […] and I would see them all in their places in shul. But all this was shattered with the impact of the war, and then with the rapid postwar social changes in our corner of London. I myself, traumatized at Braefield, had lost touch with, lost interest in, the religion of my childhood. I regret that I was to lose it as early and as abruptly as I did, and this feeling of sadness or nostalgia was strangely admixed with a raging atheism, a sort of fury with God for not existing, not taking care, not preventing the war, but allowing it, and all its horrors, to occur.”

—  Oliver Sacks , book Uncle Tungsten

Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), pp. 178–179

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Oliver Sacks 18
British neurologist and writer 1933–2015

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