Beloved books are the ultimate time machine

There were a lot of books and stories read to me when I was a child, but two remain sharp in my memory.

One was “Velvet Paws and Shiny Eyes,” written in 1928 by Carol Cassidy Cole. It is the story about a cruel little boy named Eric who wakes in the woods one day to find he has been turned into an elf and is now at the mercy of the animals he used to hurt. He is befriended by many of them, particularly a flock of geese, and in the end sacrifices himself to save one of the geese – only to wake safely, it all having been a dream. However, there is a goose feather by his side when he wakes.

Oh how I loved that book and had my mother read it to me at bedtime over and over and over.

The other was “Struwwelpeter,” a German-language book of rhymed tales written by Heinrich Hoffmann in 1845. We spoke German at home because it was the only language my grandmother understood. She lived with us and took care of me while my parents worked, and she would sit with me and read me stories from the book.

This was no happy, happy book Mr. Hoffmann wrote. Each story had a strong moral to it and showed in extreme ways the awful consequences of misbehavior – such as the tale of the girl who plays with matches and burns to death, or the story of the boy who refuses to stop sucking his thumb and finds them cut off by a roving tailor, or the boy who refuses to eat his soup and dies of malnutrition. And there is the tale of three boys who tease a dark-skinned boy and are themselves dipped in black ink by St. Nicholas to teach them a lesson – an oddly crafted story but still revolutionary for the time.

And to top it off, each story was illustrated in color with the most gruesome images – blood dripping from severed fingers, girl on fire, etc. It was a book most horrible and frightening but also somehow compelling. I have since learned that it was hugely popular with children throughout Europe and was translated into several languages. In 1891, even Mark Twain did his own translation, published as “Slovenly Peter” 25 years after he died, and there have been film and musical versions of it as well as parodies.

These books made such an impact on me that I have held on to them all these years. They are in terrible shape – covers separated from the binding, some pages loose. Clearly, I have loved them to death.

Earlier this year I rented the film “Woman in Gold” to watch at home. It is the based-on-fact story of a Jewish woman who escaped her native Austria at the outset of World War II. Many works of art from her well-to-do family’s home were taken by the Nazis, and the film chronicles the story of how she seeks to reclaim one particular painting.

Early in the film the woman is trying to convince her nephew, an attorney, to help her in her quest, and she brings him into a spare room in her home where she has boxes of items from her sister who had just died. She takes out some of the memorabilia of their childhood and talks about how these things must be remembered somehow. And one of the items in one of the boxes is the book “Struwwelpeter.”

There is a brief discussion between the characters, and a plot point is that the nephew’s own recollection of having had stories from the book read to him convinces him to take on the challenge.

I was stunned when I saw the book on screen. It was a time-travel moment. I was a little girl again sitting by my grandmother in the living room of our home in New York City – her flowered housedress neatly pressed, her sensible shoes tightly laced and her hair held in place by a thin hairnet and gathered in a bun at the nape of her neck. She was reading to me and I was again both repelled and drawn into the stories, learning lessons about personal grooming, about falling into the river if you don’t watch where you’re going and all the others.

When the movie ended I went to the basement to retrieve the book and lovingly held it in my hands again, looked at the pictures – and remembered.

This is the second time in a year that I’ve had one of those childhood flashback moments, when something I saw in the here and now catapulted me back to when I saw or experienced it the first time. It was a brief visit to another time, of course, but so lovely. I wonder if such recollection experiences are among the benefits we get to enjoy as we get older.

I hope so.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@ comcast.net. Previous columns are available at spokesman.com/ columnists/