That Christmas, back in South America, my parents gave me a copy of Old Peter’s Russian Tales, a collection of folk tales re-told by the russophile Englishman Arthur Ransome, who also wrote the classic Swallows and Amazons. This book initiated a lifelong interest in Russia for me. ‘Old Peter’ was the grandfather of Maroosiya and Vanya, who lived with him in a hut in the forest, ate “black bread” (how could bread possibly be black?), drank tea from a “samovar,” and slept, O wonder of wonders, on top of a stove to keep warm at night. I had never seen snow, and I was unprepared for the malice of Frost, personified in one of the stories as a cruel sadist who cackled with delight as he froze his victims to death in the coldest of winters. I read of the witch Baba Yaga, who terrified children and lived in a house mounted on hen’s legs. I met the bogatiri, heroic men of power, the Cat head-forester, talking fish, and Ivan the Ninny, an entrepreneur smarter than his name would suggest, who after discovering ‘white dust’ free for the taking on a desert island, sells what turns out to be salt to a king who had never tasted it, and who agrees to pay three bags of gold, silver, and jewels for each bag of salt. While palm trees clattered outside, I lay on my bed, entranced by the cold, exotic land I had been whisked away to by Ransome’s love for a faraway country, just as Keats had been by his reading of Chapman’s translation of The Odyssey. It was travel—albeit imaginative travel—at a price no airline could ever match, as it was entirely free. I still have the book, as well as similar tales I devoured at the time by Hans Christian Andersen and those collected by the brothers Grimm. I also read Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer avidly, admiring Tom for his skill in avoiding work assigned him by his Aunt Polly, and envying Huck Finn for his carefree life on the Mississippi. The boys get to attend their own funeral, witness a murder in a graveyard, help bring a fugitive to justice, and Tom gets lost in a cave with his sweetheart Becky Thatcher in the frightening climax to its author’s ageless story.
When I was eight, we were transferred briefly from Venezuela’s capital city, Caracas, to Maracaibo. As we drove there in our Vauxhall Velox, I vividly recall reading in the back seat some of Kipling’s animal stories of India, among them ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,’ the story of the brave mongoose who attacked and killed an intruding snake, the Just So stories with their ingenious explanations of how the elephant got its trunk, how the camel got its hump, and the rhinoceros its skin, and remember howling with delighted derision when I read of the monkeys’ sublime self-deception when they congratulated themselves thus: “We all think so, so it must be true!” Later, I discovered in the garage of the house we rented in Maracaibo a treasure trove of dog-eared abandoned children’s books. Among them was Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, which sits beside me as I type this 60 years later. It was to this novel of growing up in the Swiss Alps that I ascribe the power of books to change settled habits. I could not be persuaded to eat cheese until I read Ms. Spyri’s lyrical descriptions of Heidi’s grandfather’s cheese-making in her book. I have been grateful to her ever since, especially whenever my wife makes her excellent French onion soup thick with gruyere or her spaghetti sauce liberally sprinkled with freshly-grated parmesan.
