My Father's Books

I was already in my thirties when I opened my father’s favorite novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, for the first time.  He had been wanting me to read it for…oh, I’d say about twenty years.

Of course, I hadn't listened. He was my father, for heaven’s sake. What did he know about literature?

Just about everything, it turns out. He, Samuel Reuben, was of that breed of first generation Americans who read to be transported: From poverty. From drudgery. From the repetitive and unrelenting monotony of Real Life.  

I will set the scene: Young Sam is living with his Yiddish speaking immigrant parents in a tenement in Chicago.  At age eight, he working in his father’s clothing store on Maxwell Street.  At age fourteen, he is managing his own tuxedo rental business.    

In the secret recesses of his mind, though, he isn't selling shirts or renting tuxedos, he is jousting with knights in shining armor, evading the law with escaped convicts, and digging for buried treasure on desolate islands inhabited by pirates and goats!  

Let me tell you about the three books my father loved: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. The Wandering Jew, by Eugene Sue.  

First things first. The Count! He was born a simple sailor named Edmond Dantès. In an act of vile treachery, he is denounced as a Bonapartist and consigned to the Château d'If, a dungeon from which the wretched are never released. There, he encounters the Abbé Faria, a priest who imparts vast stores of knowledge, gives Dantès the map to a buried treasure, and provides the means for his escape.

After Dantès is free, he first takes on the identity of Sinbad the Sailor, then the Count of Monte Cristo, and finally wreaks havoc on those who betrayed him. The book is thrilling. It has adulterers, bandits, children born out of wedlock, a beautiful poisoner, mind-altering drugs, Aladdin’s caves, Nubian servants, Sultans, unscrupulous politicians, and even a beautiful slave girl with whom the Count eventually falls in love.

Whenever I read The Count of Monte Cristo, I am the beneficiary, not only of a great story, but also the gift my father, as a boy, clutching this same remarkable novel in his hands as he plunged into the miracle of its pages, in much the same way that I do now.  

I was equally reluctant to read Ivanhoe.

Ah, Ivanhoe.  

How my father loved that book!  When I was in college, he wrote me long letters  about Lady Rowena, Rebecca, and the noble knight whom they both loved.  I also came to know Isaac of York, the vilified Jew who saves Ivanhoe’s life; Cedric the Saxon, who tries to force Rowena into a loveless marriage; Friar Tuck, a jovial and flagrantly immoral hermit; King Richard, traveling incognito as the Sluggish Knight; and one of the most interesting characters in all literature—Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, a Knight Templar so consumed by passion for the beautiful Jewess Rebecca that, when she rejects his advances, he denounces her as a witch.

“Tempter,” Rebecca reacts to him in horror. “Begone! I hold thee as my worst and most deadly enemy!”

Now, that’s a girl who knows how to turn a guy down.  

Of the three books that my father cherished, the only one I have not finished is The Wandering Jew. 

The story revolves around the Renepont family, who do not know that they are beneficiaries of an inheritance which, over the centuries, has grown to a staggering amount. The Reneponts are the good guys. The bad guys, plotting to murder them and steal their fortune, are the Jesuits.  

Among the intriguing characters who compose the Renepount family are two Siberian orphans, an Indian prince, a Parisian workman, and a honorable factory owner. Those out to destroy them include devious poisoners, diabolical priests, and the truly terrifying Thuggees of in India who, in the name of  for their religion, murder people by strangulation.    

Why, you may ask, have I not finished reading The Wandering Jew?

Because of Adrienne de Cardoville.  She is innocent. She is kind. She is intelligent. She is beautiful. She is one of the doomed Reneponts.  Her aunt, in cahoots with a former lover, has had her imprisoned in an lunatic asylum. And I know ... I just know that when I turn the next page, a Thuggee or a Jesuit or an evil physician ... is going to sneak into Adrienne’s cell and kill her. I don't want Adrienne de Cardoville to die, so, I will not turn that page.  

At least, not now.  One of these days, though, I will. For the simple pleasure of revisiting my father’s imagination. I know that by the sweet and simple process of reading the same words that he has read and experiencing the same romantic adventures that once stirred his soul, I can enter a time machine and return to a day when, older, wiser, and far better versed in literature than I, he held out a book to me and said, “Read this.”  

And that is exactly what I did.