Ex Patria

Reading

Alan is reading really well, and he likes it.  He reads above grade level in English and slightly below grade level in German.  He is, at heart, a little American.  He does a Headsprout Reading Comprehension program right now which is geared towards grade three to four and he aces it.  He is also participating in an online book quiz portal with his class and is doing fine reading books and answering questions.

David, however, is a voracious reader.  He will read for hours.  Often, they will be in their room and David is sprawled on his bed with a book while Alan is building complicated and intricate Lego creations.  It delights my heart.  He even gets the red cheeks that I get when I am really diving into a book and read for hours and hours.  (Uh, that never happens anymore.  Those "hours and hours" just don't seem to exist somehow.)

Doug got the boys hooked on the Oz books.  I confess I never really got the entire Oz thing - maybe it's something you have to grow up with and as shocking as that may be to my dear American readers, Oz has never really made it in Germany.  Many Germans may have heard of The Wizard of Oz but mostly in connection with the movie.  It's not a rite of childhood to read those books, just as the Narnia books have never been a standard youth read, either.  So, I am vaguely aware of what is happening in the Oz books but not in detail.

So Doug read some Oz book with the kids.  I think he started with an Oz comic book.  Then he brought home books like "Ozma of Oz" and the like.

David devoured "Ozma of Oz" in a few days.  Then he went on to "Glinda of Oz" which has some 200 pages and 28 chapters.  He kept me informed about which chapter he was just reading, and he read fast and he read throroughly.  Where Alan likes to skip whole pages, David will read every. single. word.

He finished it yesterday and is very proud of himself.  And well he should be.

Now I have to find more Oz books but I really don't know anything about them.  I guess I have to wait until the husband reappears from the copperbelt of Zambia.  Yup, more things I didn't know existed.  It's what makes life so interesting, I suppose.

Shaping generations

Some words don't translate. Like "prägen".  It means: coin, emboss, coffer, mint, mold, shape, stamp, imprint.  It's all that, and more.  An event that alters your life. A person whose influence is felt long after he left. A duckling that accepts the first living thing it sees as its mother.  We express these concepts with one word, prägen.  It's both a scientific term and a household word.

We also use it for influential books or authors.  It almost seems like a rite of passage to read "Siddharta" when you turn 16.  Or "Ansichten eines Clowns".  Or "Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.".  Is this a German phenomenon?  That whole generations read the same books at certain stages in their lives?

Then there are the personal books that shape you as an adolescent.  I read myself through all of Hermann Hesse's books, and I liked The Glass Bead Game much better than Steppenwolf. I also liked his poems quite a bit.  The poems of Else Lasker-Schüler.  Heinrich Böll and later, Sten Nadolny.  Die letzten Kinder von Schewenwang.  I adored Kurt Tucholsky.  I liked Schloss Gripsholm so much that years later, when I traveled in Sweden, I made a point of seeing the real castle, and to put a pebble on his grave in Marifred.

Re-reading those novels and poems is a trip down memory lane.  Like smells, the words conjure up long summer days and longer winter nights, the invariable incense sticks, those strange headscarves we wore around our necks, the hard little cookies we baked by the hundreds, the green teas we drank, the little green/crunchy/alternative/esoteric mail order service that supplied us with sandalwood bookmarks and "The Hobbit".  The world was ours to conquer, and we knew everything.

Right.  My 20th High School reunion on July 1st.  I wonder how you guessed.