CHILDREN OF THE BOOK

Reading and redemption.

Reading to the young builds character. It establishes a unique intimacy between parent and child. It can be the space of the imagination, a world of dreaming before bedtime. Books are adventures. They are places of escape. For American Israeli writer Kurshan, books are sites of personal growth. And the first book, the five books of Moses in the Old Testament, becomes a model for the birth, growth, departure, and return that shape a parent’s and a child’s heroic adventure. In a series of brief, evocative chapters, Kurshan tells stories of the books that mattered to her and her children. She selects books that are designed to “expand my children’s range of associations and broaden their imaginations” but also ones that “make it easier to parent.” She creates a personal canon of such books, and at this memoir’s end, she catalogs her recommendations, from Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, from William Steig to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Behind it all, however, is the sacred book of the Torah. Using the sequence of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, Kurshan tells a progressive story of reading together, moving from the simplest beginnings to the most complex, symbolic tales. “From paradise to the promised land, the story of my family’s reading life has unfolded against the backdrop of the Bible’s narratives. It is a story about beginnings—the first books we read as parents, the books that create our world. It is a story about an exodus and a journey to freedom that our kids undertake when they learn to read on their own.” Through this powerful conceit—parenting as holy journey—Kurshan takes us, with her family, into a place of reading freedom, a true release through word and picture. In the end, we are all children of the book.

An exquisitely written account of mother and children reading together, framed as a tale of biblical redemption.