Life among the Readers

I know a lot of people who like to read, but none of them likes to read as much as Ilana Kurshan. She reads while cooking dinner and she reads while eating dinner, she reads for work and she reads for pleasure, and she reads while walking down the street (usually to the library for more reading). When she had children, naturally, she just started reading out loud.

Like the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding who cures all with Windex, Kurshan cures all with reading. Her five kids won’t sit still long enough to eat? Read to them. Kids are fighting? Read to them. Kids are hungry? Read to them (while cooking). Global pandemic? Lots of time to read. Need a break from (most of) your kids? Go on a walk with a kid while reading aloud—but caveat!—a novel for adults instead of a book for kids.

Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together is not a parenting manual. Kurshan isn’t even entirely sure how much it’s working for her, but it’s the best she’s got, so she’s going with it. Unlike Kurshan’s first book—the Daf Yomi-themed If All the Seas Were Ink, which inspired readers to learn Talmud with the promise that it could help with life’s greatest challenges (Kurshan was going through the breakup of her first marriage)—this book is less therapeutic and more aspirational. Readers are transported into a dewy world that abides by the unlikely rule that all family woes great and small should be addressed by reading. For example, Kurshan writes:

We own many books about sibling rivalry, but when my kids squabble, I prefer to be distracting rather than didactic. When Tagel protests that she got the smallest piece of cake, I don’t read to her about Alexander, who was convinced that his brothers had all the luck in Judith Viorst’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. . . . Instead, I think about which Shel Silverstein poems will make them both laugh so hard that they fall over one another in spite of themselves.

The book’s greatest tension, indeed, is not sibling rivalry, which can, at least sometimes, be overcome by silly poems. Nor is it the challenge of finding time to read, think, and create while being the mother of a large family, which can be overcome by reading aloud and cultivating an appreciation for children’s literature. (The painter Alice Neel took an alternative route and left her baby on the fire escape. Author Doris Lessing left her children on another continent. The extent to which most people find motherhood and creativity to be at odds cannot be overstated—but not so for Kurshan.) Instead, the greatest obstacle for Kurshan seems to be the limited selection of English-language books in the family’s Jerusalem library.

Toward the end of the book, Kurshan admits that “the relationship between truth, journal, and memoir poses complicated ethical questions. My account of our family’s reading life is certainly not the only way to tell our story.” Tellingly, she concludes, “We trace that fine line where recollection meets aspiration.”

Kurshan’s children almost never break things, and they barely seem to have bodily fluids. They sometimes push Kurshan to the limit, but when they do her husband is inevitably cucumber cool. Kurshan admits that she has been “deliberately selective. My children appear not as fully fleshed-out characters but as readers.” She seeks “to tell stories from their reading lives while also protecting
their privacy.” By contrast, her earlier memoir told the intimate, messy details of her own life (and that of her abusive ex-husband)—but that was entirely her story to tell. Here, Kurshan’s story is shared with a large family, and that means she has to consider how it might affect them now, in the eyes of her readers, or later, when they—inevitably—read it.

I have profound respect for Kurshan’s dilemma: Her children are her life, but as a memoirist, writing about her life is also her life, and she owes her children their privacy. This challenge isn’t new. A. A. Milne’s exploitation of his son Christopher Robin in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories destroyed their family, and Christopher Robin did not speak to his mother for the last fifteen years of her life. Of course, to write about one’s children is not always to exploit them. I am a character in one of my father’s books, A Time for Every Purpose: Letters to a Young Jew, and our relationship is a blessing. But I was old enough to give consent and participate as an editor. Kurshan is right to be cautious.

In a way, this is the challenge of all parenting in a social media age: It’s my life, but it’s theirs too, so how much can I post and share? Some parents erase their children entirely from their social media presence, floating through the internet in an alternative life in which no small humans need dinner right now. Others place their children front and center, with many influencers even monetizing the images of their children for profit. Then there is the middle road: The children are in the picture but not its focal point; sometimes their faces are even blurred out. Kurshan follows a literary version of this middle path. Her children are somewhat indistinct; their books are in the spotlight.

Obviously, Kurshan read a book during labor and remembers exactly which page of Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages she was on when her son was born (Jackson was giving birth too). That experience set in motion the pattern of Kurshan’s family life: “In our family we read all day, in every imaginable context.”

Kurshan not only loves reading books; she loves writing about books. She is the books editor of Lilith Magazine, a literary agent, and a translator. Insofar as translation work is mainly writing every detail of a book down in another language, that, too, is mostly a task of writing about books. Nearly every page of this memoir contains a gorgeous description of a book, typically in conversation with a theme in the Torah and her children’s development as readers.

With her youngest child, we find Kurshan reading Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar over and over, “all day long, by the light of the moon and the light of the sun, his appetite for the book insatiable.” The first chapter book she reads with each of her children is Charlotte’s Web, since it “was also the first chapter book I read to myself.” As they grow older, reading together also sometimes becomes a way “to make amends.” Kurshan describes a day when she and her eldest “have been bickering ever since he came home from school,” and throughout the afternoon she finds herself “overstepping my bounds.” After all the other children are asleep, Kurshan enters his bedroom, the two read The Little Prince, and eventually, touchingly, “draw closer . . . saying the words that I need to say, and the words that he needs to hear.”

When Kurshan cooks, she reads poetry. “I know I’ve stumbled upon something arresting when the soup boils over or dessert starts to burn. ‘These cookies are brought to you by Wallace Stevens,’ I will tell the kids when they complain they’re too crispy.” Once the boiled-over soup is served, “at mealtimes we primarily read picture books. . . . I keep a few favorites stashed among the cookbooks in the pantry, for easy access.”

But, in the Kurshan family, there is reading and there is Reading. They learn a lot of Torah, and Kurshan frequently chants the parsha to her children as they fall asleep. “It has been ingrained in them from a very early age that there is a hierarchy of sanctity when it comes to books.” Sometimes her children’s impressive Torah knowledge even helps them interpret the other books they are reading. As Kurshan and her daughter read the Ivy and Bean series, they come across the sentence “Ivy’s arms were trembling.” Kurshan’s young daughter has never heard the word “trembling,” and Kurshan explains, “Her arms were shaking from holding them up for so long.” It clicks, and her daughter replies, “Like in the war with Amalek,” in which Moses struggled to keep his arms aloft. This leads Kurshan to reflect on the place of literary allusions in parenting:

We can try to furnish our children with the associations that matter to us. We can fill their minds with allusions, in the hope that their experiences will evoke the texts they have read, and those texts will in turn evoke other texts.

As she makes abundantly clear, the most important allusions of all are biblical. Kurshan writes:

In the beginning, God created the world through words. . . . When I began reading to my children in infancy, I was creating their world through words, summoning objects into being by speaking their names and pointing to them on the page.

And she sees that it is good. “I watched in wonder as my son learned to point with his tiny finger as I read aloud the name of each item on the page: Spoon! Cup! Plate!”

In fact, the Torah provides Kurshan with the book’s five-part structure: Genesis and preliteracy, Exodus and coming to independent reading, Leviticus and the library, Numbers and the wilderness of COVID-19, and Deuteronomy and the challenges of memoir. The structure sounds complex or perhaps even overwrought, but since the book operates like a series of essays ordered according to the Torah, it is more effective in practice than description. Chapter 1 and chapter 2 take place a decade apart in time, but since both focus on the first chapter of Bereishit and the reading habits of babies, they flow seamlessly one to the next.

Why overlay a memoir about family reading onto the Torah? Kurshan’s answer is simple—this is what it means to be Jewish:

The story we are commanded to write is not just our own story but the Torah. We are charged to make our story part of the larger Jewish story, and to read the Torah and the texts of our tradition in light of our own questions and aspirations.

Kurshan isn’t just a memoirist, literary agent, and translator; she is also a Torah teacher, and a passionate one:

When do I hear the call of the transcendent, and how do I respond to that call? When have I felt bound and oppressed, and how have I been liberated? What is the promised land toward which I am setting my steps, and what obstacles stand in my way? When answering these questions, we map our story onto the story of our biblical forebears, such that their story provides us with the images and metaphors to narrate our own.

Kurshan’s Torah metaphors are delightful. Reflecting on the passage of time while raising small children, she writes about the often overlooked genealogies in Genesis: “Time seems to rush forward . . . until we come to a figure like Noah, or Abraham, and the story slows down to zoom in and take note.” As a parent, she writes:

One day leads to another with little to differentiate the daily pattern of mundane tasks . . . until we come to a milestone occasion, and suddenly I am cognizant of how much our kids have changed and grown while we were too busy to notice.

One day, when her children are a little older, she comes home to find two of them playing a game on a tablet in violation of house rules about screens. Kurshan compares the situation to the sin of the golden calf, “Like Moses, I am filled with rage. . . . For a moment I imagine myself smashing the tablet.”

More often than not, Kurshan braids together the allusive strands of this book beautifully, intertwining literature, the Torah, and the story of her family’s life. While reading the Clementine series with her daughter, they arrive at the scenes about a class talent show. Kurshan’s daughter asks, “What is my talent, Ima?” and Kurshan speaks to her of the Torah. “‘Every person is created in the image of God,’ I said to her solemnly. ‘That means that every person has a unique spark of God in them. You have talents that no one else in the world has.’” After some further discussion, the two conclude “that sometimes the best talent is just being who you are.”

Later in the book, reflecting on their experience of COVID-19 lockdown, Kurshan tells us about reading Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series:

As Ramona grew from an exasperating preschooler to a spunky, self-aware fourth grader, the Israelites made their way through their desert wanderings, her four-plus years corresponding to their forty. . . . “Growing up is hard work,” Mr. Quimby tells Ramona. We were all there as it happened, Daniel, the kids, and I—doing our own hard work of growing up alongside Ramona and the desert wanderers.

All of which rings as both more or less true to her family’s experience and a bit too curated.

Every so often, a messier reality slips through. Sometimes reading is simply not what a situation requires, and sometimes life, literature, and Torah do not braid together so perfectly. Kurshan describes her attempts to pray on Shabbat morning while her husband walks alone to the Kotel, leaving her with all of their children. She doesn’t describe how she feels about this de facto prioritization of his spiritual life over her own, which is now profoundly compromised by the presence of many small children and a shul inaccessible to double strollers. When she had only one small child, Kurshan “continued to chant from the Torah—often with Matan in a baby carrier on my chest when I stood before the congregation.” Now she cannot even make it through the door of her egalitarian synagogue, let alone leyn for the congregation and keep track of her children. Instead, she goes to an Orthodox synagogue with a big ramp, alternating “between keeping up with the prayers and attending to the kids’ needs. . . . I’d affirm God’s sovereignty and then, in the very same breath, respond to the two-year-old relentlessly tugging at my skirt that yes Elmo also has a tushie.” Elmo’s tushie and the Shema do not harmonize in quite the way that Clementine and Genesis or Ramona and Numbers do. Nevertheless, I cherish Kurshan’s claim that, when it does work, “both reading and mothering can be, each in its own way, an act of sacred devotion.”

Toward the end of the book, in one of its many poignant moments, Kurshan finds herself identifying with the Moses of Deuteronomy, who looks out onto the promised land where he will never go:

As I stand in the kitchen chopping vegetables for a salad, looking over at Liav as she ventures forth in the book without me, I know, of course, that I am not Moses. And yet I cannot help thinking that part of his story is mine.