That afternoon, for no reason I could name, I suddenly remembered a novel I read as a child: The Island on Bird Street.
When I read that book I was not reading someone else's story. I climbed the rope ladder into that ruin and hid in the cupboard on the third floor; I went down the secret passage, back and forth between the Jewish quarter and the Polish one; I held my breath to avoid German soldiers and searched empty rooms for food. The whole adventure was mine, from beginning to end. All these years later I can still remember that heartbeat — frightened, excited, and certain I could do anything. Everything a child could want from an adventure, that book gave me.
And what I miss more than the adventure is the way love and friendship were written in it.
Almost nothing happened in that love story, and precisely because nothing happened, everything was settled. It made me decide, very young, that real feeling is clean and restrained and unchanged even in a broken world; that it is sharing a piece of bread in the ruins, that it is thinking of someone else while your own life hangs by a thread. Friendship was defined just as clearly — a guinea pig named Snow, a few people you can count on. My whole standard for love and friendship was probably set back then, from that book's mould, and I have never replaced it.
Later I grew up. I read a lot of news and a lot of history, and gradually formed some rather unflattering views about the Jewish people. It is not a pleasant thing to say, but I have to be honest. At a certain age the heart ends up holding many things that contradict each other.
The strange part is that it never made me dislike the book.
The adventure, the love, the friendship — they are still there in my memory, still bright. The truth and goodness in those pages, courage and kindness and love and hope, are still the foundation at the very bottom of how I see things. I even think sometimes: the person who wrote it was herself a Jewish survivor; the people I met in those pages were Jewish children too. That makes me a little uncomfortable, but a fact is a fact. Perhaps a person's heart is meant to hold that discomfort.
Sometimes I think the books we read in childhood are seeds. What grows out of them is not governed by the messy feelings that come later. Number 78 Bird Street, that ruin, still stands somewhere in my inner world, and the wind cannot knock it down.
