Thursday 1 September 2016

...of ostracism

4.


My father quoted from If This is a Man during the first serious argument we had. It was in the second term of the year in which I had my bar mitzvah, when I told him I wanted to leave the school. By that time, things had already changed, I had severed all ties with my former friends. I didn’t even talk to them and had already become accustomed to being ignored by them too: from one day to the next, people start turning their back on you, they stop phoning or asking you so much as to lend them a pencil and, in the space of a week, you no longer feel able to talk about this with anyone, a state of affairs that can easily last for what remains of your school life, because there’s nothing more difficult when you’re thirteen than changing your label.

[Diary of the Fall, Laub, M.]

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