War and Peace

It seems to me hard to believe now, but I recall reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the 5th or 6th grade. Reading was always one of my greatest pleasures, and my mother, although she kept hoping that I spend more time outside, “like the other kids,” is herself a book lover, and so she would go to the public library once a week to replenish my pile of books. I suppose it was her idea that I would enjoy Tolstoy. How could I have had the notion that I should read him at that age myself? I remember the book, thick and heavy, bound in light blue canvas. The printed pages appear in my memory satin-like, smooth and vintage shiny . . . but this recollection cannot be true. There could not have been such a fine book in our public library, a bare-bones municipal institution in the still somewhat socialist Israel of the 1970s. I delved into my borrowed War and Peace with great anticipation. It was a big book and I loved big books, they promised a long journey ahead. It turned out that this one would give me another, special pleasure. As I began to read I discovered that some of it was in French! Needless to say, War and Peace was written in Russian, but Tolstoy rendered some of the dialogue between his aristocratic characters in the language they would have spoken in the beginning of the 19th century.