I recall quite vividly the moment I learned to read. I was walking on Nagle Avenue in upper Manhattan with my mother when I saw a sign that read, CAFÉ. But I didn’t know, as a five-year-old, that the é was vocalized, so I read the word as “caf.” At first my mother didn’t understand what I was saying, so I pointed to the sign — and she reflexively corrected me.
The first word I ever read, I pronounced wrong.
My parents stay alive partly so they can read more books. My mother, who is ninety-one, is enraptured by Balzac; my dad, ninety-five, savors Yiddish literature. Though they are limited in their physical movement — they can barely walk across the street — books sweep them up and carry them to nineteenth-century France and czarist Russia.
