Difference between Male and Female Version of Dictionary of the Khazars
The passage in the female version of the novel that differs from the male version is in the last letter of book (The Yellow Book, entries SCHULTZ, DR. DOROTHEA, 11. letter), after the sentence:
And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the table in front of him.
Male version
I could have pulled the trigger at that moment. I could not have had a better one – there was but a single witness in the garden – and a child at that. But it played out differently. I reached forward and took those several exciting pages, which I attach to the letter. Taking them instead of shooting, I looked at those Saracen fingers with nails like hazelnuts and though of the tree that Halevi mentions in his book about the Khazars. I thought that every one of us is such a tree: the more we grow upwards towards the sky, through the winds and the rain towards God, the deeper we have to sink with our roots into the mud and ground waters towards Hell. With such thoughts I read the pages handed to me by the Saracen with the green eyes. They amazed me and I asked Dr. Muawia in disbelief where he had gotten them from.
Female version
As he passed them to me, his thumb brushed mine and I trembled from the touch. I had the sensation that our past and our future were in our fingers and that they had touched. And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago. I gained and learned more by not reading than by reading those pages, and when I asked Dr. Muawia here he had got them he said something that astonished me even more:
