But having read her wonderful evocation of Jewish Vitebsk, tsarist St Petersburg and modernist Paris, having lived as in a novel with the Hasidic families of Chagall and Bella Rosenfeld, his first wife, the reader will be hooked.
He then joined the soldiers and local dignitaries for a service in the Minster Church of St Denys, which began with the names of the dead men being read out and the playing of the Last Post.