`With Wonder and Gratitude'

To be illiterate or to learn to read and leave the gift dormant are, respectively, a curse and a crime. A mind without words lives among ruins. My 7-year-old objects to bedtime because it robs him of reading time, and the next morning he wakes early to resume reading. He sits curled on the couch for hours, moving only to turn pages or adjust his glasses, lost in a book. I look at him and, for once, see a flattering reflection of myself.

Last weekend I took the boys to the neighborhood branch library. Michael has read the first six Harry Potter books and wanted the seventh, but was unable to find it on the shelves. He asked a librarian, seated at his desk playing a computer game, where he could find the final volume. Sourly, the gnomish fellow said, “How old are you?” Michael told him and the librarian swiveled in his seat, pointed toward the children’s section and said, “Maybe you can find something over there.” I moved in, repeated Michael’s question in a voice several octaves lower, and the guy silently stood up, led us to the shelf holding multiple copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and handed one to Michael. Fear is an excellent quality in a public servant.

Who remembers Andrei Sinyavsky, known as Abram Tertz? The great Russian writer and dissident, author of Fantastic Stories and Goodnight!, died in Paris in 1997. My sense is that Western readers, if they ever knew Sinvavsky, have forgotten him. He spent 1966 to 1971 in Soviet forced labor camps for the “anti-Soviet activity” of his fictional characters – a crime Sinyavsky’s master, Nikolai Gogol, might have posited. Out of his time in the Gulag, Sinyavsky fashioned a book, A Voice from the Chorus, based on letters he wrote his wife. It’s my favorite among Sinyavsky’s works, a ragbag of observations, yearnings and overheard dialogue that achieves a peculiar unity-in-fragmentation. In a passage from 1966, he writes:

“I have no time to read books, but think of them constantly, with wonder and gratitude. And never cease marveling at a book’s capacity to absorb and then conjure up on demand a whole world for you to see.

“In childhood a book resembled a folding screen. A heap of animals and plants would suddenly pop out at you from behind dreary grey covers and when you shut it, everything vanished again. A book has something of the `magic cap,’ or the `magic table-cloth.’”

The translators, Kyril Fitzlyon and Max Hayward, add a footnote to the phrases in quotes:

“The reference is to Russian fairy-tales in which he who dons a magic cap becomes invisible and where a magic table-cloth becomes instantly laid with plates, cutlery and food.”

The librarian, with his computer game and rococo beard, has never known the conjuror’s tricks latent in a worthwhile book. Neither did the apparatchiks who locked up Sinyavsky for his fictional seditions. Already, my son does.