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the Arabs from considerations of oil, markets, and other interests. It was not going to be easy for us, even I could see that.

    The one thing we had plenty of was books. They were everywhere: from wall to laden wall, in the passage and the kitchen and the entrance and on every windowsill. Thousands of books, in every corner of the apartment. I had the feeling that people might come and go, be born and die, but books went on for ever. When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf life in some corner of an out-of-the-way library somewhere, in Reykjavik, Valladolid, or Vancouver.
    If once or twice it happened that there was not enough money to buy food for Shabbat, my mother would look at Father, and Father would understand that the moment had come to make a sacrifice, and turn to the bookcase. He was an ethical man, and he knew that bread takes precedence over books and that the good of the child takes precedence over everything. I remember his hunched back as he walked through the doorway, on his way to Mr. Meyer's secondhand bookshop with two or three beloved tomes under his arm, looking as though it cut him to the quick. So must Abraham's back have been bowed as he set off early in the morning from his tent with Isaac on his shoulder, on their way to Mount Moriah.
    I could imagine his sorrow. My father had a sensual relationship with his books. He loved feeling them, stroking them, sniffing them. He took a physical pleasure in books: he could not stop himself, he had to reach out and touch them, even other people's books. And books then really were sexier than books today: they were good to sniff and stroke and fondle. There were books with gold writing on fragrant, slightly rough leather bindings, that gave you gooseflesh when you touched them, as though you were groping something private and inaccessible, something that seemed to tremble at your touch. And there were other books that were bound in cloth-covered cardboard, stuck with a glue that had a wonderful smell. Every book had its own private, provocative
scent. Sometimes the cloth came away from the cardboard, like a saucy skirt, and it was hard to resist the temptation to peep into the dark space between body and clothing and sniff those dizzying smells.
    Father would generally return an hour or two later, without the books, laden with brown paper bags containing bread, eggs, cheese, occasionally even a can of corned beef. But sometimes he would come back from the sacrifice with a broad smile on his face, without his beloved books but also without anything to eat: he had indeed sold his books, but had immediately bought other books to take their place, because he had found such wonderful treasures in the secondhand bookshop, the kind of opportunity you encounter only once in a lifetime, and he had been unable to control himself. My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweet corn and ice cream. I loathed omelettes and corned beef. To be honest, I was sometimes even jealous of those starving children in India, because nobody ever told them to finish up everything on their plate.

    When I was about six, there was a great day in my life: Father cleared a small space for me in one of his bookcases and let me put my own books there. To be precise, he granted me about a quarter of the length of the bottom shelf. I hugged all my books, which up till then had lain on a stool by the side of my bed, carried them in my arms to Father's bookcase, and stood them up in the proper way, with their backs turned to the world outside and their faces to the wall.
    It was an initiation rite, a coming of age: anyone whose books are standing upright is no longer a child, he is a man. I was like my