Books For Adolescents: Naftali Bennett As Tom Sawyer

In a course on Literature for Adolescents that I took as a  graduate student we learnt about the sharp decline in reading for fun once children hit puberty. The required list of novels for the course provided another reason why teenagers were not that interested in reading. Most of the novels that we read had predictable formulas, and demonstrated lack of respect for the intellect of the readers.

According to a recent article in The New Yorker Do Kids Read Seriously Anymore? by David Denby: "Work by the Pew Research Center and other outfits have confirmed the testimony of teachers and parents and the evidence of one’s eyes. Few late teen-agers are reading many books. A recent summary of studies cited by Common Sense Media indicates that American teen-agers are less likely to read “for fun” at seventeen than at thirteen."

But the novel A Trumpet In The Wadi, by the renowned Israeli novelist Sami Michael, which was taken out of the required reading list in Israeli high schools, is nothing like the young adult books that I had to read for my course. It is a thought provoking story that youngsters could really enjoy. But perhaps reading serious novels has become, as  David Denby claims, “a chore, like doing the laundry or prepping a meal for a kid brother.”

Obviously our Education Minister is aware of the crucial problem of teenagers who do not read, and proves that he understands the mentality of the young adult. Thus, rather than pleading with kids to read good literature he chooses reverse psychology and removes A Trumpet In The Wadi from the required reading list. Did he secretly do it in order to lure kids back into reading?

If he did, he learnt from the best: in many ways Naftali Bennett reminds me of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain’s hero. Like the Minister, Tom is certain that he is much cleverer than the rest, and uses his ingenuity to get what he wants at the expense of others, as the famous story of whitewashing the fence illustrates.

“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”

Tom considered, was about to consent; but he altered his mind:

“No – no – I reckon it wouldn’t hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly’s awful particular about this fence – right here on the street, you know – but if it was the back fence I wouldn’t mind and she wouldn’t. Yes, she’s awful particular about this fence; it’s got to be done very careful; I reckon there ain’t one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it’s got to be done.”

“No – is that so? Oh come, now – lemme, just try. Only just a little – I’d let you, if you was me, Tom.”

“Ben, I’d like to, honest injun; but Aunt Polly – well, Jim wanted to do it, but she wouldn’t let him; Sid wanted to do it, and she wouldn’t let Sid. Now don’t you see how I’m fixed? If you was to tackle this fence and anything was to happen to it – ”

“Oh, shucks, I’ll be just as careful. Now lemme try. Say – I’ll give you the core of my apple.”

“Well, here – No, Ben, now don’t. I’m afeard – ”

“I’ll give you all of it!”

Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart. And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with – and so on, and so on, hour after hour...

…He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while – plenty of company – and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If he hadn’t run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village."

Mark Twain summarizes the lesson of the whitewashing anecdote with these words: "Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain"

The classic novel Tom Sawyer, was banned in schools around the US,  because Tom was seen as a questionable protagonist in terms of his moral character. We know that since the book was "difficult to attain" it became even more popular and in demand. Naftali Bennett  just added another book to the best selling banned books.

The essay appeared in the Rimes Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/books-for-adolescents-naftali-bennett-as-tom-sawyer/

The Kid Who Ran Away from School and Children Books' Justice

This school year, twice a week, I have been reading together with a young friend. He is  9-year-old, very curious and intelligent, and has his own ideas about everything. He is also a new immigrant from Russia who needs some help with his Hebrew.

Since reading, even in a foreign language, is supposed to be fun we choose together enjoyable books and  take turns reading aloud. My friend reads one page and I read the next. We usually read like that for half an hour (about six or seven pages), and then as a reward, I read to him till the end of the chapter.

My young friend is resourceful and always looks for the shorter pages to read out loud. So we negotiate and exchange a long page, which I read, with a shorter one which he reads.

Reading together is not only about improving his reading skills or his vocabulary. Of course we talk about concepts and unfamiliar words that appear in the text, but it is mainly a  great opportunity to think of and develop ideas. We discuss our opinions and to share personal stories. This is how I learnt about a trouble in my young friends’ life.

Apparently, during the recess another boy hit him, and when my friend reported the incident to the principal, nothing was done. He was frustrated and the next morning, when it happened again, he literally jumped the high fence and ran away from school.

This is a classic children book story: in order to get the attention of the adult world, a child does something extreme. In real life it usually doesn't happen. Thus, my young  friend was punished for running away, his mother was called into the principal office, and he was suspended for one day. That was the arbitrary law

In books the outcome would have certainly been different, after the child was found he was reproached for making every one worried. Then the grownups involved, the principal, the teacher and the parents, apologized to him and asked forgiveness for not paying attention to his plight. This is poetic justice.

When we met to read again my friend was  troubled by what had happened. Children know instinctively what is fair, and as literature is a great training for understanding concepts, he understood very well the difference between justice and the law.

Poetic justice is important to everyone, but it is extremely crucial for  children in order to form a confident and positive outlook of the word. I am sorry that in this case the school chose to ignore it. Moreover, how is it possible that no one asked what made a little boy feel that the outside world was safer than the school, which is supposed to be the safest place for our children.

Reading literature is a great preparation for life, as it is made of examples, stories with characters and situations, it enriches the repertoire of responses and provides tools to analyze the world. Perhaps the grownups in the school: the principal and the teachers, should reread children literature in order to remember to treat children more fairly.

The essay appeared in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-kid-who-ran-away-from-school-and-children-books-justice/

"People of the Book" Did Not Make The Top 10 List Of Literate Nations

Saturday is the eve of Shavuot, the holiday when we celebrate Matan Torah, the giving of the Torah to the Jewish People at Mt. Sinai. This gift has turned us into People of the Book, and as throughout the centuries Jewish identity was connected with the Torah, we have come to regard ourselves as a literate nation.

However, this is no longer the case, in a recent list of the world’s ten most literate nations, in the Guardian Finland ranked first, and Israel did not make the top ten at all. John Miller,who conducted the study, believes that Finland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden achieved the top marks because their culture values reading.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/11/finland-ranked-worlds-most-literate-nation,

That research did not look only at literacy achievement tests, but it closely examined  “literate behavior characteristics,” which means parameters like numbers of academic, public and school libraries, and the numbers of books in libraries, and statistics on years of schooling, computer penetration and newspapers.

When basic reading assessment were the only factors considered, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and China came on top. However when adding in the factors of literate behaviors, none of those countries made even the top 25 list. 

This study proves what many of us feel intuitively, that reading matters. It concludes that “literate behaviors are critical to the success of individuals and nations in the knowledge-based economics that define our global future”.

The United Kingdom reached  the 19th place. Diana Gerald, the chief executive of UK reading charity BookTrust, expressed her disappointment from the low ranking:  “We come from the nation of Dickens and Shakespeare, we have an extraordinary literary background.” “I believe we are doing lots of good work on core literacy and phonics, which are vital, but we need to add … getting children from a young age into loving reading, and wanting to read ."

Similarly, we are the people of the book and have an extraordinary literary tradition. We also do lots of good work on teaching our children to read. So what happened to us, why did we cease to be a literate nation?

There must be many important reasons to that decline, but I would like to focus on the most obvious one. For the last 10 years, in Israel the ministry of Education and Culture has been divided into two. How is it possible to separate between education and culture?

It isn’t, this was a cynical political move, which reveals that for the last ten years our governments have not been taking education and culture seriously. Moreover, our leaders fail to see the crucial role education and culture have in devising  the future of our nation.  Obviously this separation has not made the whole greater than the sum of its parts, and it is not surprising that although Israel is number 2 in its educational investment (after Brazil) this investment does not make us a literate nation.

Traditionally on Shavuot many Jewish people stay up all night reading and studying a variety of sacred texts. This custom Tikkun Leil Shavuot, goes beyond reciting the Torah, toward a more philosophical and humanistic reading of the different texts

I read that the custom of Tikkun originated with the mystics of Safed in the 16th century. This was our past, and it is exactly the kind of approach that we need to bring back into our culture today. The literate study clearly finds that if our children and our nation wish to succeed in tomorrow's world  we should start by reading books now.

The essay appeared in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/people-of-the-book-did-not-make-the-top-10-list-of-literate-nations/

Kindergarten Children Under A Magnifying Glass

Yesterday Ha’aretz reposted on Facebook  a popular article with the intriguing name: "Parents do not pity their Kindergarten children." This title is an ironic allusion to the famous poem by Yehuda Amichai: "God pities the Kindergarten children."

Among other issues, the article criticizes the new demand that children will know how to read while they are still in Kindergarten. I agree with the criticism, but can testify, from my personal experience, that it is not a new trend. This is an essay that I wrote about over parenting:

When another mother told me that I had to make sure that my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter knew how to read before she started kindergarten that fall, I knew that I was in trouble. She explained that in the event that she didn’t read she would be put in the lowest ability group, and that would be the end. I was sure no mother in her right mind would risk ruining her daughter’s future and teaching her to read seemed like a small price to pay. But that was only the beginning:

Please keep reading in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/kindergarten-children-under-a-magnifying-glass/

Reading and Reading Skills

- FEB.18.2013 

I have been teaching EFl to college age students in Israel since 1995. In my country children study English for about 8 years and have a matriculation examination at the end of 12th grade. Yet many  students still have problems reading and comprehending even a simple text. Often when I ask my students for the topic of a text they have difficulties pointing it out, and they find it much more challenging to formulate the central idea of the text or to restate what the writer says about that topic.

Although some students have serious problems with the language, I feel that this is not the reason for their difficulties. I believe that my students are having problems reading a text in English because they  do not read at all (in any language) and thus have no clue on how to approach a written text.  The fact that books are not part of my students’ life has many unfortunate consequences for their future life but it also makes my job as their teacher more challenging.  Since they do not read they know very little about the world; consequently when I assign an article I cannot presume that they would get references text that require a certain level of general knowledge. Also since reading is not part of their world when encountering an unfamiliar term or a name in the assigned reading they would not look it up as it requires more reading. Thus when assigning an article for homework I first have to find those terms and insist that they’d look them up and write down the definition.

We all know that reading sharpens the mind, it teaches the reader to distinguish between fact and opinion, to generalize,  to pay attention to what is not stated in the text,  to make assumptions about it--to  infer, and to recognize different tones and purposes . My students are lacking those abilities and when they do read their level of comprehension remains basic and they do not grasp complex concepts.

My students are already grown-ups;  I can no longer sit them down for a daily silent reading like the one the third graders in Ramona Kirby’s class do. What I could do is to motivate them by introducing interesting articles and to hope that the reading skills that we do teach them will compensate somehow for those abilities that they lack.

The Price Of An Haggadaless Seder

 MAR.24.2013 

Today as I spend the day  preparing for the Passover Seder I remember the many Seders which I attended as a child, a guest and a host.

My mother had 3 brothers and two of them lived in a kibbutz; when her own mother, my grandmother, was ill she asked her children to keep on getting together for the two main Jewish holidays: Passover and Rosh Hashana.  So my parents, brother and I spent those holidays in one kibbutz and the other brothers in a second kibbutz. In the kibbutz  holidays are celebrated in a communal dinner of about 400 people. Although I loved my uncle and aunt, I always disliked those occasions in which the Passover Haggada was replaced with the kibbutz's own spring Haggada and the food never tasted right.

One year, I got the measles and my family had to stay home, this was the happiest Seder of my childhood: my mother made our favorite food, we read some portions from the regular Haggada, and best of all, it was just the four of us –my parents, my brother and I.

Jewish people call any place outside Israel “a diaspora” and there they celebrate the holidays twice. One year, when we lived in the States we arranged with another family with small children to celebrate the two Seders together. We were supposed to celebrate the first Seder  at our place and the second night at their's. Unfortunately on that first night my kitchen drain got plugged.  I was very uncomfortable as I told  my friend that we had to do the first Seder at their home. My friend, a  good woman, was not very happy, she did not like her plans changed. I felt very guilty, and it was a strained evening in which we read the Haggada in in a foreign language and heard familiar Hebrew songs sung with unfamiliar melodies. When we came home that night my two year old daughter said “we didn’t have any Seder:  the songs and the language were all wrong”. I spent the next hour reading and singing to her, in Hebrew parts of the Haggada. After that night we only celebrated the first Seder at home in Hebrew.

Our Seders became much happier when we returned to Israel and could celebrate with my parents and my brother and family.  Our children became expert at finding the Afikoman(the mazzo that the head of the household hides for the children to find, and rewards them with gifts) which my husband hid.

As the girls grew older my husband decided that the Haggada was no longer relevant. He claimed that it was a  ridiculous text and he felt silly reading it. He was  right of course, by itself the text doesn’t make much sense. It doesn’t tell the story of the Exodus, rather it  is a collection of songs, interpretations, different customs and anecdotes. In order to appreciate it you have to learn a lot and even then it is quite obscure. So from that time on we  prepared all the symbolic food for the Seder meal, we sang the songs and  followed the customs but we never read the Haggada anymore.

Yet being post- modern has its price, it seems that in spite of the preparations and the anticipation an Haggadaless Seder   makes the evening somewhat disappointing.

My partner asked me the other day “how about reintroducing some of the highlights of the Haggada to our Seder?”  I hope my husband who is looking down from above forgives my transgression, but I seriously consider doing it.

Keywords:

Afikoman Haggada Hebrew kibbutz Pesach reading Seder

How NOT to Write About Motherhood

 MAY.10.2013 

Since Sunday is Mother's Day in the US; in Israel, alas, this day has already turned into "Family Day," I decided to use the opportunity to bring up a minor yet important point about motherhood and fiction.

Rereading Jane and Prudence  (1953) Barbara Pym’s third novel, I was surprised to read that  Jane, one of the heroines, states that she  does not feel much like a mother, since she only has one child. At first, this statement didn’t register,  I glossed over it. But then I kept thinking and  realized that this was a major error. Even in fiction, the feeling of motherhood does not depend on how many children you have. I believe  that  the narrator here reveals  the lack of knowledge and inexperience of the  author, who herself never married and had no children of her own.  

It is true that Jane, a clergyman’s wife, has romantic notions about her role and the life that comes with it. She regards her inability to produce a large family, like the ones exemplified in the clerical novels by Charlotte Yonge, as a personal failure.  However, to me this does not feel like an authentic emotion that could come from a mother.

Before our first daughter was born my husband and I took prenatal Lamaze classes. I remember that on the last class the instructor suggested, “before you go to the hospital to have the baby take a good look around your home, it will never be the same.” Although it seems like a  cliché, this statement could not have been more accurate. Coming back with our first baby life has never been the same. And I felt like a mother and could not feel stronger about it when I  had another child.

I don’t subscribe to the belief that in order to write about something you have to personally  experience it, although it does help as it provides a shortcut. But if I don’t have personal  experience about divorce, for example, I will have to compensate for it. Since it means that I don’t have  instincts or  intuitions to rely upon I will have to conduct  thorough research on divorce.

Moreover, because I don't have that personal experience, even when I do conduct thorough research, my knowledge will lack a certain depth and could never be equal to someone who had life experience. There  could always be surprises -- those issues that I didn’t even know  existed.

On the other hand, not going through the experience myself means that I am not bound by reality, granting me the freedom to write about the subject in a novel way. But I still have to be careful, since I cannot rely on my own experience and intuition I would likely want to consult with esxperts. The most obvious way is  to find an informed reader and  especially a good editor.

Barbara Pym does not make many mistakes, generally her information is reliable and the sentiments of her characters ring true, to the extent that her novels are often used as a source for social and church historians.

 In a way it is gratifying to find a flaw in an otherwise great writer. It encourages me that even Barbara Pym can  make such a silly mistake.

A Short Middle-Aged Lover: The "American" Poet Yehudah Amichai

JUL.08.2013 -

As we were walking toward the hall where he was giving a  reading, the poet Yehudah Amichai  (1924—2000) suddenly turned to me and said: “I always feel so awkward  before readings, the students expect the writer of all those love poems, to be a great lover and here I am a short middle-aged man.”

At that time I was the program director at the Hillel House of the University of Iowa, and Yehudah Amichai was our guest lecturer.

As soon as we entered the room it was clear that Amichai was wrong; the audience, most of whom were students at the Writers' Workshop, had long known his poetry and admired him. Moreover, since Amichai's  poems worked so well in English, they regarded him as one of their own –a great American poet.

Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was well aware of his stature, but still was not afraid to reveal a more vulnerable side. I suspect that the apprehension that Amichai  felt before his reading contributed to his very personal and warm performance during the reading.

I remember that when one of the students asked him about his work habits, he answered that he did not write every day, and that most of his poems came to him when he was taking walks. The students seemed quite surprised at that answer, as they must have expected him to say that he wrote every day at his study.

At a reading in Princeton, the writer Jonathan Safran Foer told the audience that in his senior year at Princeton in 1999 he heard Yehuda Amichai give one of his final readings in the Stewart theater. While listening to Amichai, Foer realized that he wanted "to somehow move somebody" just as Amichai had moved him. "I wouldn't be up here if it weren't for Amichai."

I too have an Amichai  moment which I cherish; once, several years prior to that reading in the Hillel House, he had been to Iowa City for a reading. At its end I was asked to drive him to his hotel. Once there I realized that it was still early and invited Amichai to our home, he accepted gladly. My husband Tzvi was there with our young daughters, and when we got home Amichai asked first to see my two sleeping girls. I was really touched. 

This anecdote reminds me of another, somewhat similar  story. When Yitzhak Rabin visited the White House, president Jimmy Carter asked him if he wanted to see the sleeping Amy.  Rabin, perhaps out of shyness, declined and missed an opportunity to bond with the parents of the sleeping girl.  Many political analysts, and Carter himself in his memoir, regard this famous incident as a serious faux pas

In contrast,  Amichai’s  human approach and  exceptional personal  skills, combined with his strong and timeless poetry which so easily translated into English, contributed to his great success outside Israel. Evidence of his popularity can be seen in the fact that Amichai sold his archive for over $200,000 to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.

The English poet Ted Hughes, who translated Amichai's poems into English together with Amichai himself, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement: "I've become more than ever convinced that Amichai is one of the biggest, most essential, most durable poetic voices of this past century – one of the most intimate, alive and human, wise, humorous, true, loving, inwardly free and resourceful, at home in every human situation.”

I agree, and to illustrate his power in English here  is one of his love  poems translated  from Hebrew by Amichai and Ted Hughes

 Once a Great Love

Once a great love cut my life in two.

The first part goes on twisting

at some other place like a snake cut in two.

The passing years have calmed me

and brought healing to my heart and rest to my eyes.

And I’m like someone standing in

the Judean desert, looking at a sign:

“Sea Level.”

He cannot see the sea, but he knows.

Thus I remember your face everywhere

at your “face level.”

Promises To Keep And Reading

Published on DEC.07.2013 - 9:53 AM

When I applied to graduate school at the University of Toronto, I had to translate my Hebrew transcript into English. My B.A. was in Comparative Literature, but even courses like Elizabethan Drama or 19th century American Literature were taught in Hebrew. All the texts we read were translations.

My English transcript did not reveal this, of course, and I didn't tell anyone (and no one thought to ask). But all of a sudden I had to read Shakespeare and long Victorian novels in English. It was quite a shock, and my English had to improve fast. The hardest challenge was mastering the Master, and to that end I spent hours at the public library listening to records of Shakespeare's plays while following along with the texts.

I loved studying Shakespeare in this method, and even today I enjoy  performances of his plays more if I get to prepare beforehand. Still, it never occurred to me that I could listen to other forms of literature in the same way. But one day, back in 1989 as I was driving and listening to the radio, I heard an installemt of the novel Promises to Keep on "The Radio Reader" (NPR). This book by George Bernau tells an engaging alternate story of how the course of history would have changed if President Kennedy had survived the shooting in Dallas. Its distinct angle is not dissimilar to Philip Roth's The Plot Aganist America written some fifteen years later.

Since then, listening to audio books has become my favorite pastime while driving. I feel they add life to the written text, and ignite the imagination. Still  it seems like a slightly lazy activity to be read to, and it feels somewhat unfair to the author who worked so hard on writing their text. An actor who reads a book adds his/her own emphasis which could be different than mine. So as I regard listening to be inferior to reading, I decided on certain rules. First I only listen to books in English, second they have to be the kind which otherwise I won’t have the patience to read, like rereading the classics, and third, only unabridged novels are permitted.  The latter rule resulted of being lost in an abridged version of Bleak House. Unfortunately, I still had trouble keeping up even with the unabridged version.  

Unlike my technique for studying Shakespeare which combined listening and reading, it is hard to pay full attention to a novel while driving. In the case of Promises to Keep,  I never got to actually see the book or read it, thus the source and the meaning of its title escaped my attention.

But today I finally had a chance to make amends. I watched a documentary about President Kennedy’s  last day in Dallas and suddenly heard the line from Robert Frost 's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”  which is the reference to Bernau's title:  "But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/ And miles to go before I sleep."  The title was aptly chosen since President Kennedy, who admired Robert Frost and asked him to read at his inauguration in 1961, used  those particular lines in his campaign to show his commitment to his promises and to serving the people. 

  

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

  

 Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

  

Don't get me wrong, I adore audio books, but after today I have yet another proof that, especially in the case of a second language, they can never fully replace "real" reading.