June 2009, The Jewish House

Bedside Reading

NESSA RAPOPORT

Mtional. Its teetering volumes are a hazard to my sleeping head — but y bedside table is, let us say, aspira-

heartening to contemplate.

Naturally, there are many books that have not remained in my possession long enough to reside on my bedside table. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury is one, devoured in less than a week of overly late nights. I am fascinated by British women writers and “How They Did It,” domestically speaking. Because, as Virginia Woolf knew, a room of one’s own is possible only with a paid pair of hands.

The position of books in the bedside pile varies, but
the Hebrew novel and dictionary are near the top.

At the turn of the 20th century, one third of British women were in domestic service. Not that I wish servitude on anyone, but the transformation of women’s lot also explains the scrim of urban dust on the glass top of my bedside table.

As for my late nights, what nights aren’t? It is a truth universally acknowledged that a working mother cannot read during the day. Ergo, at the precise hour when the bedside lamp should be doused in order to assure a good night’s sleep, said reader can be found poring over a book. Knowing that she’ll pay dearly. And not caring.

When my children were young, I read that their ambition could be measured by their answer to the question: “Would you rather have a small cookie now or a big cookie later?”

In the matter of reading, I’ll take the big cookie now.

What books await me when I am, at last, horizontal? Whatever Hebrew novel I am painstakingly reading; and a paperback Hebrew dictionary, coverless from its being toted on subways and planes, often unopened while I peruse something more ephemeral than a novel in my second, halting language, however beloved.

The position of books in the bedside pile varies, but the Hebrew novel and dictionary are near the top. They reflect an existential predica-

June 2009/Sivan 5769
ment, posed ardently, centuries ago, by the poet
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Nessa Rapoport

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And so I see:

Peter Cole’s Hebrew Writers on Writing, discovered by my friend Avi Katzman, visiting from Israel and my source for books Israeli and pertaining to the Jewish narrative. I have already bought Avraham ben Yitzhak’s Collected Poems, published in a bilingual volume by Ibis Editions, which Cole founded with Adina Hoffman. The pleasure of this book — I have too many copies to keep at my bedside — is an ever-renewing spring. Ben Yitzhak’s published oeuvre, so influential to modern Hebrew poetry, consists of eleven ravishing poems and some fragments. This fact may or may not have afflicted their pseudonymous creator, but it is inevitably heartening to fastidious writers who live one hundred years later.

Avi’s own recent book, be-machloket: shishim imutim she-his’iru et ha-itonim [Controversies: 60 Momentous Debates in the Hebrew Press from 1918 to 2008], reproduces his meticulously chosen excerpts of controversies reported in the left-to-right spectrum of the dynamic Hebrew press, from ‘Should women get the vote?’ to ‘Should we withdraw from Gaza?’ It would have a place of honor in the pile, but is necessarily oversize — and thus threatens the stability of even the most compulsively arranged book tower.

Here is Catherine Madsen’s The Bones Reassemble: Reconstituting Liturgical Speech. Her subject is among my obsessions: The impoverishment of English prayer language and translation, a stultifying betrayal of the Hebrew originals. Madsen articulates the problem with an awakening — galvanizing to this writer — incisiveness that is incompatible with the need to read for the transition between the constraints of the day and sleep’s oblivion. Which is why I have begun to take this book with me for the interstices of my work life (a notion, alas, more symbolic than likely).

Finally, Worlds of Truth: A Philosophy of Knowledge, the most recent work of my friend and teacher, Israel Scheffler. I have a bookshelf of his work, not all of which I am equipped to understand, as he is a scrupulous philosopher and I am a civilian. But I learn from him always — and, when I complete this sentence, I will open the book to savor his words.