Two Books: A Family Conversation Starter

This weekend friends and families will be sitting around tables exchanging food and words. Telling stories around tables is a hallmark of Jewish tradition and so is asking questions, a role often played by children. The Passover seder features four such children, one who remains silent because they don’t know what to ask. Sarah Hurwitz reflects on how she, like the fourth child, remained silent, unable to form the questions she needed.

Hurwitz compounds this silence with how we listen to the stories told by the world around us. Citing therapy, she instructs that only by telling your story, and figuring out what shaped you, can you form the questions. She asks, “Are they true? Are they helpful? Are there other stories you could tell, other beliefs you could adopt, that would be healthier? To become the author of your own story, modern psychology tells us, you first need to recognize the story you’ve been telling yourself and figure out whose story it was in the first place.” (91)

I write a series on my blog entitled “Two Books-A Conversation.” In this series, I pull quotes meant to illustrate two books in dialogue, discovering their commonalities and differences, and walking away with an ‘aha’ moment or shared appreciation of the other’s message. As a guest blogger, I also wrote about how parents and children can read the same author and that author’s different versions of the same story, for example Juno Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Islandborn and Sherman Alexie’s Junior paired with You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.

The uniqueness of the stars in the sky. The incompleteness of defining your identity, or someone else’s through metaphor you didn’t choose. Bringing forth the argument of your enemy in spite of friends and doing it with poetry, with history, with heart. I identified my most recent group sometime between editing a recent interview that reminded me of the value publishing brings to the world and a friend asking, “What are you reading?”

Unlike previous posts in the “Two Books: A Conversation” series, I offer “conversation starters,” instead of structuring the complete conversation. Read the books in the designated pairs or read all four recommendations. Allow the patterns to surface, find the connections in their content as you navigate their content with others. Encourage others to engage and question. Invite yourself the space to understand the most difficult to stand behind are often not about others, but yourself.

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A conversation starts …

• Book One: Hi, my name is On Thinking For Yourself: Instinct, Education, Dissension by Caitlin Flanagan. 

• Book Two: I’m interested in learning more about you. How can your argument reach deep and make others care about what you are sharing? (87). 

  
  

• Book One: To the extent that I have learned to think for myself, it’s because my father taught me how to do it. Usually by asking me a single question … There would be a moment of silence. And then my father would say–gently, because there was zero need to say it any other way: “And what is the best argument of the other side?” (x-xi) What’s your name?

• Book Two: Mascot by Traci Sorell. [Mama] says that to overcome those who claim to know you, or “honor you,” you need to know yourself and know them (53). Maybe I could read more about my people or read more in general. I don’t like being forced into anything. (28). Why are you here?

• Book One: My stubborn desire to think for myself. (xiii) And you?

• Book Two: I don’t know for sure. I just know that I’m not going to be invisible here (38). To quote my late grandmother, sometimes you can catch more stars by guiding them to land in your hands rather than snatching at the sky (84). 

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A conversation starts …

• Book One: My name is As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, And Try to Erase Us by Sarah Hurwitz but It has been difficult finding the words to describe who I am. The categories seem all wrong. Who are you?

• Book Two: I can understand that. My name is Isadora Moon series by Harriet Muncaster. I am half fairy and half vampire. I live in three worlds because I go to school with humans. It’s okay, because my father told me that stars are all different. Each one is unique. But they all look the same from down here. 

• Book One: “Thinking back on the Jew I was in college, I feel ashamed–not of my ignorance, but of my arrogance: how I’d concluded that thousands of years of Jewish tradition amounted to little more than what I’d learned in Hebrew school, and I had dismissed it accordingly. I would never dream of treating anyone else’s cultural, ethnic, national, or religious heritage that way. (2)

• Book Two: I understand that too, what it feels like to worry you’re not enough, not enough of one thing or the other, just not enough. Except when I share with my human friends, they love everything. I’m learning to be proud.

• Book One: Me too. I am no longer interested in being someone else’s metaphor. (15) This book is the story of how I learned to listen and understand. (17)

*Words in italics are original book text.