Although I was in first grade and already spoke and read English, I couldn't read the book some kind American gave me for Christmas that first year we lived in the United States. Words like "charcoal burners," "sledge," and "harnessing" were beyond me, and in frustration I leafed through the book looking at all the illustrations whose captions were equally mystifying.
It doesn't surprise me that at some point, on the first inside page, I scribbled over the title of the book, "The Grateful Sparrow and Other Tales," for in the end, when my mother read the book to me, I hated it.
That is the only book I have ever "hated," and for years afterward " even when I was in college, I could not bear to touch it. Mother once suggested that if I had such an intense dislike of it, I should maybe give it away. But that was unthinkable. To whom could I give it? It would be like giving away a smelly shoe, or a broken umbrella. Besides, it was my very first American book and, like it or not, it held between its covers something of the young girl I once was.
Decades removed from that girl and that time, I discover daily how much there is that I don't know " not only about the external world, but my internal one. Literature speaks of this internal world as "the journey of the self," which often manifests itself as travel in the external world: a rafting trip down a river; a journey by train; a walk through a forest. Sometimes we find ourselves taking someone else's journey, imagining and examining why we are so fascinated by the real life of Richard Nixon or the fictitious life of Monte Cristo, Huckleberry Finn or the Marquis de Sade.
Every time we ask ourselves why we like the movie "A Star is Born," say, or the short story "To Light a Fire" by Jack London, we are, in fact, shadowing, or tracking our own journey of the self. And the reverse is equally revealing: Why didn't I like "The Grateful Sparrow," for instance.
Recently, I reread that disturbingly dark book and was only a little surprised to discover the reason for my antipathy.
The stories in the book were seemingly fairy tales, but they were like no fairy tales I knew, and I knew a great many, for I loved them. These stories featured a girl wearing "old slippers" in winter snow, begging for a crust of bread; a bird starving for a sip of soup; parents who gave up their children because they could not feed them.
Apparently the relatively happy endings of two of the four stories made no impression on me, for all I remembered was the misery of having nothing to eat. I knew from my own experience in the refugee camps of World War II that even worse than having nothing to eat was the next stage: having no appetite for what little there was.
Worst of all was the story about a young man whose bride drowns in the river on the morning of their wedding day. He mourns her the rest of his life, leaving his family and home. In old age, he decides to return, only to die a short distance from reaching his goal. He is buried alongside his old love, but as years pass, no one even remembers their names.
These were cautionary tales, heavy on subtext: life is difficult and unfair; expect punishment if you don't do "what's right." We lose all that we love. We are insignificant. I already sensed the truth of that subtext, but I know now that I did not want that truth. In "hating" the book, I was rebelling against an Old World culture that had me already in its firm grip.
- Ursula Carlson, Ph.D., teaches writing and literature at Western Nevada College.