Door to Another World

I always think of books as doors into other worlds -- another time, another place, another person's experience. If the book is well written, I'll expect to absorb the details of that other world, to assimilate them into my own experience.

So I'm sometimes reluctant to begin a book that will drop me into a place I know I wouldn't want to be -- present day Afghanistan, for instance, or Wall Street, or Nazi Germany. So much more pleasant to read about nice people in a charming village in the Cotswolds.

Occasionally though, usually after hearing enough recommendations, I'll brave up. And usually I'm rewarded. For example,I'm glad to have read Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. My fund of experience has been deepened -- and all without the bother and danger of travel to unfriendly places.

My recent visit to Nazi Germany was equally rewarding.

This beautifully imagined tale, fittingly narrated by a compassionate and poetic Death, centers around a young German girl and her foster family  -- and their decision to hide a Jew.  It's a beautiful story of how strangers become a family, how the the most ordinary of people can rise to heroism, and how the written word can change lives.

I'm glad I went through the door.