There are three books, well, one is a series of books, that I remember even today, well over 40 years since I read them. Deathless literature, you suppose?
Wrong.
The first one was my 4th grade reader. Since I usually took the book, meant for an entire school year, and read it from cover to cover the first evening I had it, reading in class was an excruciating experience for me. It was SO BORING, to sit with half a dozen nincompoops who struggled with infantile prose, a page a day. But this book was about a pioneer family travelling West (I believe "West" was what we would think of as the Middlewest, today) in the first half of the 19th century, complete with covered wagon. There was Mom and Pop, and two adorable and unbelievably well-behaved children, and undoubtedly a dog named "Spot". What made the book memorable was that nearly each chapter was devoted to a particular task or skill: making butter or soap, how an intinerant cobbler made boots, and so on. Once the gob of dough kept over each week from the bread baking went missing--a major tragedy since that was the only leavening available. (It was found stuck to the underside of the wooden kneading trough--kneading "trough"! What an exotic item in the age of electricity and plastic!). Besides learning (who knew when it might be useful to know how to make soap?) all kinds of arcane skills, the reader drummed home that essential American value, Self-Sufficiency. Ever since then, my approach to just about everything is "can I do it myself?" In a couple of weeks I intend building a pergola--the neighbors look at me aghast. "Why don't you get a carpenter?" they ask. Don't they understand? That takes all the fun out of it! After all, I came to Israel "to build and be built". So, I'm building!
The Sue Barton books, written in the Thirties by a woman who had studied to be a nurse in the Twenties, had a great deal to do with my decision to be a nurse. Of course, by the time I entered nursing school in the mid 60s the profession had already changed beyond recognition. But Sue Barton didn't solve mysteries, a la Cherry Ames (who always seemed rather unprofessional to me). Her experiences with teachers and head nurses and patients engrossed me, and when, after graduating, she married a handsome doctor and left hospital nursing for life in New England, I felt let down somehow. Hospitals were where it was at.
Not long after Sue Barton, Sister Luke entered my life. "The Nun's Story" made a huge impression on me, which might be construed as odd, since I am Jewish. In those days I perceived nursing as a total committment; instead of a habit we had a uniform, full of starch, instead of conventual discipline we had precise ways of performing tasks in accordance with the principles of asepsis, we were supposed to be instantly obedient to the doctors' orders, and we were supposed to be completely selfless. (It came as rather a shock when I realized that nursing was an 8 hour a day job, actually.) But the concept of discipline has remained with me. I also found the spirituality intriguing, "translating" it into Jewish modes of conceptualization. In many ways Christian monastic life, adhering to a Holy Rule which defines one's entire life as an act of worship is exactly similar to the Jewish approach to Halacha. (Forget about Jesus, of course) If at this point you say that I am obsessive-compulsive, you'd be right, btw.
So there it is. There have been thousands of other memorable books that I've read (and even more that weren't memorable), but these are the ones that actually made a difference.
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