In Children of the Book, American-born Israeli writer, editor, and translator Ilana Kurshan combines a charming memoir focused on the joys and challenges of parenthood with a thoughtful exploration of the power of books and reading to shape young lives. Kurshan's candid yet warmhearted story is enriched by her skill in relating her family's experiences to ancient sources of Jewish wisdom in which their lives are rooted.
Kurshan, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her memoir, If All the Seas Were Ink, was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, and lives in Jerusalem with her husband, Daniel, a university literature professor. Their five children range in age from almost three to 10 during the period she describes in the book. She's a voracious reader, revealing that she comforted herself between contractions as her eldest child was being born with Shirley Jackson's family memoir Life Among the Savages, and confessing somewhat sheepishly that when she accompanies her children to the playground she often has one eye on them and the other on a book.
In five sections corresponding to the books of the Torah--the Five Books of Moses, or Chumash in Hebrew--Kurshan gently recounts a journey of shared reading with her children, from the earliest board books, through their introduction to chapter books, and finally to the bittersweet moment when her oldest children achieved the status of independent readers. In doing so, Kurshan, a dedicated student of Hebrew texts, invokes the practice of midrash--rabbinic commentary on the Torah found in sources like the Talmud--to relate her family's experiences to Judaism's timeless wisdom.
Examples of Kurshan's skill at this task are numerous. They include, for example, an analogy she draws between the day-by-day structure of the biblical creation story and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, one of the earliest books she introduced to her children, and the marvelous way she connects the miraculous salvation of Wilbur the pig in Charlotte's Web to the tale of Moses and the Israelites' exodus from Egypt. The story of the 40 years of wandering in the desert recounted in the book of Numbers provides a useful metaphor for Kurshan's family's experience during the Covid-19 pandemic and the "reading that gave shape to our days" through the long months of lockdown.
Children of the Book is filled with moments like these that make it a singularly wise and thought-provoking reading experience. Kurshan helpfully provides an extensive list of reading recommendations to encourage others to follow her practice. Many parents will recall the closeness that shared reading with their children engendered. Kurshan's book is guaranteed to stir those happy memories and perhaps inspire anyone able to do so to create new ones. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: In this heartfelt account of reading to her children, Ilana Kurshan connects that experience to the timeless wisdom of the Torah.