Little Women in Jerusalem

During those early years of grade school, when my children were able to read to themselves only in Hebrew, I read aloud to them many of the books in English that I had enjoyed when I was their age—Little Women, The Railway Children, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and my favorite of all—The Secret Garden.

All these books required a fair amount of explanation for my kids, who were growing up in a very different cultural context. As we sat on our porch overlooking a dog park and playground, I told them about the windswept moors and the heather-scented air of Yorkshire. The park outside our apartment building is surrounded by building complexes like ours with a large underground parking garage; my kids marveled at the notion of a manor house so large that there were still new wings to discover and little girls in gingham who traveled by stagecoach. They interrupted to ask about wartime telegrams, organ grinders, doctors who paid house calls, and children who had broth for dinner because their parents could not afford mutton. These were the episodes and landscapes that had cultivated my imagination when I was a young reader, and it felt important that my children, too, discover the secret garden, overhear the mysterious crying in the corridors, and witness the invalid’s miraculous return to health as the lilies bloomed and the roses climbed the garden walls.

It is hard to imagine that my Israeli children will ever read such books to their own children, certainly not in English. I imagine the stories will seem too foreign and removed, like a garden overgrown and locked away. But no matter. They will choose other books to share. Though the stories may change, it is the tradition of telling stories to the next generation that I hope will endure.

I begin reading Little Women to my eight-year-old twins shortly after we begin reading the Book of Leviticus in the Torah-reading cycle, conscious that the novel might seem as for- eign and alienating to my girls as Tabernacle in the wilderness with its sacrificial system of sin and atonement. My twins have never heard of New England or the Civil War. They don’t know about measles, telegrams, or young ladies who come out into society. But I have always loved this story about family devotion and the complexities of sisterhood and the dreams we harbor when we are young. As a child I read about the “castles in the air” that Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy share with one another—their dreams for a future they can only imagine: Meg will be rich. Jo will be a famous writer. Beth will stay home with her parents. And Amy, the youngest sister, will travel to Rome and become the greatest artist in the world. Jo, ever the practical one, sug- gests that they meet in ten years and see which of their dreams have come true. I remember reading this chapter as a child and thinking, like the sisters, that ten years seemed so far away; now, thirty years later, I am thinking of my own little women. How can I not share this story with my daughters, no matter how far removed its cultural and historical contexts?

I’m astonished when, midway through the first chapter, Liav interrupts me to tell me the story is in fact quite familiar to her. “I know this book,” she tells me. “It’s about four sisters who live with their mom, because their father is off at war. One of the sisters gets very sick and, Ima, it’s really sad. This book is going to get very sad.” I turn to look at her in surprise. How does she know this story?

She tells me. “One of my friends had it, and she let me read it during recess. I like the part about how the family came to be. The mom had one daughter named Meg, but then her husband left their family. And she married a man who had one daughter, Jo, and they both had dark skin. And then the mom and the new dad had two girls together, Beth and Amy, and their skin was kind of light brown.” Wait a second. Are we talking about the same book? I look at Liav quizzically. “The sisters were named Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy? What was the book called?”
 
“I don’t remember the name. But it was a comic book. Maybe it was the comics version of the book you’re reading us?”

With a bit of sleuthing on Amazon, I discover that Liav is right. The book her friend lent her was a graphic novel version of Little Women set in contemporary times. It is a story about four sisters whose father is off at war, though he’s not serving as chaplain in the Union army during the Civil War but fighting overseas with the American military in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Instead of telegrams, he communicates with his family by email. And yes, in the modern version, the Marches are an interracial blended family. “See, Ima, I told you I’d read this before.”

As I read aloud from Little Women, Liav keeps interrupting me to announce what is going to happen, because she’s already familiar with it all from the graphic novel. “They’re going to volunteer in a soup kitchen on Christmas, and then their neighbor Mr. Laurence is going to invite them over for fancy restaurant food in his apartment,” she tells me, just before I read about how the sisters donate their own breakfasts to feed a poor family on Christmas morning, and then their neighbor sends his servant over with flowers and ice cream when he learns of their good deed. Liav tells me what each sister wants for Christmas. In the version she has read, Jo longs for a copy of a Pulitzer Prize-winning coming-of-age novel about an intersex character; in the version I read her, Jo wants a German romance about a water sprite and a knight. Ultimately, the sisters pool their money to buy their mother a massage and manicure—the equivalent of the handkerchiefs and gloves they buy her in Alcott’s original.

As Liav apprises me of the parallel story that unfolds in the graphic novel, I realize that the version she has read might be described as a midrash on Little Women—an interpretation of the original text that makes that text seem relevant and vital in light of our contemporary reality. Liav doesn’t use handkerchiefs, but she knows about manicures, because she and her sisters polish their nails on Friday afternoons on the bathroom floor. As with the handkerchief-turned-manicure, midrash connects contemporary readers to a canonical text, rendering it less foreign, less alienating, less difficult.

According to some Jewish commentators, the Tabernacle was constructed in response to the sin of the golden calf. After the people sinned against God by building an idol at the foot of Mount Sinai, the Tabernacle enabled the Israelites to atone not just for the collective sin of the golden calf but also for the sins of individuals. Any time a person committed a sin unwittingly—without intending to sin—that individual would bring a sacrificial goat or sheep to the Tabernacle. There the priest slaughtered the animal and sprinkled its blood on the altar to achieve expiation. 

As a parent, I sin unwittingly all the time. I do not mean to hurt my daughter’s feelings. I do not mean to yell at my son. I have apologized to my children countless times for my failings, but the regret and guilt remain. A friend once told me that every morning, she prays that she will not inadvertently say or do anything that will hurt her children. Inevitably I do, nearly every single day.

“Go away! You’re the worst mother! You don’t love me,” my daughter shouts at me after dinner one night. She has just discovered her art project in the garbage, a leaf collage now covered in tomato sauce and pasta scraped off the dinner plates.

She is deeply hurt. Surely if I loved her, I could not possibly have thrown away the work of her hands. I feel terrible, but I am also tired, and it has been a long day. And so instead of apologizing, I snap. “Do you really think I can save every art project you’ve ever made? Where would we keep them all? Are you going to organize them all yourself? Because I certainly don’t have time for that.”

I am angry. I have lost my temper. But I am determined to prove to my daughter that my mistake can be rectified. I lift her collage out of the garbage and begin scrubbing with a dry sponge, as if I can make it look new again. “I’m going to fix your collage,” I insist with a resolve that borders on aggression. “I’m going to take off the stains and then we’re going to put it under a pile of books so it’s not wrinkled anymore. It’s going to be fine,” I tell her, but I’ve already raised my voice to a fever pitch and it’s clear to my daughter that all is not fine.

My daughter looks at me in fury. “You don’t love me!” she cries out, by which she means that she needs me to regain my composure, like the responsible adult I ought to be. I misread her, responding to her words rather than to her emotions. “How can you say I don’t love you?” I lash out. “I just stuck my hands into the garbage for you.” She looks at me. I have lost control. She starts crying and runs to her room.

I set my elbow on the counter and lean my forehead into my palm. And in the midst of our argument, I think about Little Women, which we are still reading together. If only I could learn to read my daughter as well as I read to her. If only I could learn, from the mother in the novel, how to modulate my responses. As a child, when I read Little Women, I didn’t pay much attention to Mrs. March. I thought of her simply as Marmee, as her daughters call her—the calm, wise, and devoted mother who always knew what was best. Now I can appreciate how well she reads her daughters, and how skilled she is at communicating with them. It seems that Mrs. March knows how to do everything I am still trying to figure out.

It is somewhat comforting to know that it wasn’t always so easy for Mrs. March, either. For all that Louisa May Alcott idealizes Marmee, she also makes it clear that becoming such a good mother took many long years of hard work. One evening, when Jo laments her inability to control her temper, her mother responds by telling her that she, too, has a terrible temper. Jo is astonished; she has never seen her mother angry. Mrs. March shares with Jo that she has been angry every day of her life, but she has learned not to show it. She explains that her own mother helped her keep her temper in check, and then when she met her husband—whom she describes as a paragon of patience and virtue—she asked him to help her by giving her a certain look whenever she was about to lose control. Mrs. March confesses to Jo that she still sometimes has to leave the room when she feels that she is about to utter words that she will regret.

After Mrs. March explains to Jo about her own struggle to control her temper, Jo holds her close, grateful for all that she has shared. I wonder how I can reclaim that closeness with my own daughter, now sprawled on her bed clutching a leaf from her collage, kicking and screaming, “You don’t love me! You don’t!”

The book of Leviticus describes that in the Tabernacle, there were two cherubs carved of gold, each atop a corner of the holy ark. The rabbis of the Talmud explain that the cherubs would face each other whenever the people were doing God’s will. But when the people and God were at odds, the cherubs would face in opposite directions.

I look into my daughter’s bedroom, and she turns the other way. How can I catch her eye again? How can I draw her close?

From Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together by Ilana Kurshan. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. 

Kurshan is also the author of If All the Seas Were Ink.