It is my firm conviction that nothing – absolutely nothing! – is more important in child’s upbringing than inculcating in his/her little sensitive heart and soul an insatiable desire to read. No movies, no computer games, no soccer, no chess, not even theater or classical music can, in my judgment and experience, compete with the powerful magic of the printed word.
Children develop diverse temperaments, characters, and propensities. Some of them are eager to start reading on their own at the age of five or six, despite obvious lack of reading fluency. But with Jenny it was quite different. When she was six, then seven, and even eight, all my incessant efforts to make her open a book were in vain; she liked very much to listen to my reading, she constantly begged me to read aloud to her, but she never expressed any desire to read herself. I tried every approach, every trick, every means, and every method – but no, nothing helped, she silently but stubbornly resisted. I was literally in the state of total despair. I was gloomily contemplating an imminent failure of my teaching/reading enterprise.
There was, however, one thing that I was instinctively sure of at the time (as I’m sure of it now): it is prohibitive and counterproductive to force child to read. Forcing her/him to read, and especially violently forcing, would in all probability result in child’s visceral and everlasting hatred of books.
Jennifer was already eight when I brought home The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Relying on the magical power of Mark Twain’s famous narrative, I decided to try a new way of persuading Jenny to open the book and read.
I put my granddaughter to bed, sat down next to her, and began reading the story. She was listening, completely enchanted. To tell you the truth, I felt enchanted myself, although it was probably the fifth time I was reading about Tom’s adventures. In three bedside sessions, we went through Tom’s friendship with the homeless vagrant Huck Finn, his futile attempts to put together a band of thieves, his fake funeral, and his love for the pretty Becky. Finally, we came to the scene where Tom and Becky found themselves alone in a dark cave, with no way out, and with a killer lurking somewhere nearby. That was the moment when Jenny became very excited. And that was exactly the moment when I abruptly stopped reading.
“Enough for tonight,” I said, kissing her. “Sleep well.”
“Grandpa, don’t go away,” she begged. “I don’t want to sleep. Read, please.”
“No.” I said. “Good night, my dear. It’s already late. Tomorrow, we’ll continue.” And I left.
Within the next week, I was busy inventing all kinds of excuses not to continue with our bedside readings about Tom’s adventures: I faked mysterious headaches; I worked long overtimes; I even talked my boss into sending me on a short business trip to Dayton, Ohio…
Whenever Jenny saw me coming home, she immediately rushed to me, the Tom Sawyer’s book in hand, and beseeched me to read. She became excessively sweet; she snuggled up to me; she was even ready to do the dishes after dinner – all in the vain hope that I would return to our bedside reading routine. I responded evasively: “I’m sorry, I cannot; I have a terrible headache. Please, finish this chapter on your own, and then do the next one. Be a good child.”
Finally, after a week of hopeless struggle, she gave up. She went to her room, closed the door, and immersed herself in Tom’s and Becky’s love story, and in their frightening adventure in the cave. In three days, the Mark Twain’s wonderful novel was finished, and I brought her the next one — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
That was the beginning of Jenny’s life-long reading journey. We continued with books of adventures, travels, and mysteries: Treasure Island, Children of Captain Grant, Sherlock Holmes Stories, The Count of Monte Cristo, Last of the Mohicans… No child, I believe, can resist the magnetic power of these books penned by Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Dumas, and James Fennimore Cooper.
It was the greatest joy of my life – to watch how Jenny traveled relentlessly through the vast ocean of world literature. As she grew up, we talked for hours about biographies of great writers; we recited poetic passages from the Bible’s Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs of Solomon; and I recalled my encounters and conversations with literary personalities in Russia and America.
I had been constantly in search for some new experiments in our reading voyage. Once, when Jennifer was fourteen, I brought her The Young Lions, a novel by Irwin Shaw. I deliberately removed several pages at the end of the book where the story reaches its dramatic culmination, and then waited patiently until Jenny reached the end of the novel. Jenny, visibly upset, came up to me and complained:
“Grandpa, can you tell me what’s finally happened to Noah and Whittaker and that abominable Nazi beast? The last pages of the book are missing, you know? I’ll go to the library, and get another copy.”
“Wait, Jenny, wait a second,” I said. “What do you think should happen to them? Put yourself for a moment in Irwin Shaw’s shoes. Two American soldiers and one German found themselves outside of a Nazi concentration camp in May 1945, at the end of the war. What fate would you assign to them?”
“I think,” she said hesitantly, after some reflection, “that Irwin Shaw probably killed that Nazi murderer, right?”
“Maybe. But what about the Americans? Look, Jenny, why wouldn’t you sit down and write your version of the final episode? And then we’ll compare your version with the writer’s.”
So, Jennifer sat down at her desk, opened a notebook, and in two days of hard work wrote the culmination scene. In her interpretation, all three soldiers remained alive. “I couldn’t kill anybody, Grandpa,” she said. “Now, tell me what the real end of the story was?”
“Noah was wounded (he died later), and then Whittaker killed the German soldier.”
“Probably, Shaw was right,” she sighed. “But I do not have the courage to put anybody to death even on paper.”
****
Some people might say: “Well, reading certainly is good and necessary, but it’s not everything. There’re a lot of other things in children’s life which are not less important than literature.”
Maybe, they have a point – love for books is no substitute for hard work, excellent education, and burning ambitions. But that’s not the purpose of reading at all; the purpose of it is something else — it’s the enriching and everlasting education of child’s heart and soul.
When Jennifer was twelve, I decided to get her acquainted with the best novellas of love – with the amazing Spring Torrents, First Love, and Asya written by Ivan Turgenev. She started with Spring Torrents, a dramatic story of overwhelming love that ended in unexpected and cruel betrayal. Three hours later, I suddenly heard sounds of sobbing coming from Jennifer’s room. I came up to her, hugged her, and said: “Don’t cry, honey. Don’t get upset. It’s just a book.”
“No,” she whispered, wiping her eyes. “No, Grandpa, you are wrong. It’s not just a book; it is life.”
****
Not long ago, I got an e-mail from Jennifer who is now a student at one of California universities. Among other things, she wrote: “Remembering your obsession with reading, Grandpa, I sometimes think it’s a pity that you and Grandma never had pets in your house. It would’ve been extremely interesting to see how you would teach your dog to read.”