Daily Article (Bharath’s Reading list) - Answers and Explanations :

01.11.2022

Article link : https://bit.ly/3SWAbPT (I bid goodbye to my boxes)

1.According to the author, he had kept the boxes containing an archive of his
"professional mental life" as
A.It cataloged and affirmed the reality of his own existence
B.He believed his own future work could redeem their contents
C.It contained the records of other minds and his relationship to them
D.His respect for the written word meant he could not obliviate the contents, which related to the
meaning of his life

Explanation:

Correct option - C
Refer to the penultimate paragraph: “What was in the box was less my past than the records of
other minds that had come into my possession and been passed on to me....My boxes were
part of my relationship to others...By keeping these papers, I was keeping a little spark of that
world going.”
The author categorically rules out the reasons mentioned in options A and B in the passage.
Option D is incorrect as it says that the contents related to the meaning of the author’s life.

2.The author discusses Mexican Marranos and their tradition of the flame in the pitcher in
order to explain:
A.crypto-Judaism and the shadowland of habits severed from beliefs
B.his own sense of "displaced halachic yearning" about his boxes
C.how observances and sacred traditions are observed even in forgetting
D.All the above
Explanation:

Correct option - D

Refer to the paragraph describing the tradition of Mexican Marranos and the one referring to the
author’s discomfort on being unable to identify the distinction between the top and bottom of a
blanket.

3.According to the author, his "genizah of the self" was the result of:
A.his belief in the sanctity of individual self-expression and the uniquely American optimism of
that triumphant generation
B.the blending of vestinginal inherited traditions of Orthodox Judaism and liberal American
selfhood in him
C.his spiritual belief that the self was God and that it was his task to preserve individual
self-expression
D.vanity and shame holding him back from obliterating his past without redeeming himself

Explanation:
Correct option - B
Note these lines in the passage: “My genizah of the self, on the other hand, was the result of
what happens when God is no longer seen as worth hitting anyone about, but the self too is also
taken for granted, no longer a triumph to be earned. It was evidence of the congealed half-life of
two vestigial inherited traditions, neither of them truly flourishing in me: the sanctity of the
ineffable name within Orthodox Judaism, and the sanctity of progressive Jewish American
immigrant success within liberal Judaism.”