Why the Jewish way of reading is perfect for getting children to read

Research from HarperCollins UK published earlier this year found that the number of parents reading to their children is at an all-time low; Australian data similarly shows that fewer mums and dads are reading aloud to their children. But Jerusalem-based author Ilana Kurshan is not one of those parents.

Kurshan, the winner of the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her memoir, If All the Seas were Ink, has written a new book about the stories, both secular and sacred, that she reads to her five kids. Titled Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together, it’s about how Kurshan – who is also an editor, translator, book reviewer and teacher of Torah – reads to her children as a way of reconciling her passion for books with her responsibilities as a mother.

Children of the Book is structured in five parts to correspond to the five books of the Torah, and Kurshan deftly entwines Bible stories with the story of reading to her offspring. The idea for the memoir came to her some years ago, when her youngest child kept insisting that she read Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar to him. She thought to herself: why does he want to hear this book again?

Kurshan realised that just like parents read the same books over and over to their young children, we Jews are always re-reading the same books – not just the Siddur but also the Torah that we read in a yearly cycle. “I began to see that there was a more profound parallel between the experience of reading with children and that uniquely Jewish way of reading. And I wanted to unpack and explore that,” she says.