The Photobook
Just under three years ago, Christina and I were in the US with my family for the holidays. As part of our winter traditions, we all headed out to a particular tree farm with my parents, my siblings, and everyone's families to pick out and cut the year's Christmas trees. Olive, of course, wasn't even on the radar back then.
Some time after that, my parents took the photos from the event and made a photobook, and printed copies for everyone.
In the last few weeks, that photobook has become one of Olive's absolute favorite books. Unlike her other books, there is almost no text. Unlike her other books, it has photos, not illustrations. Unlike her other books, it illustrates people that she absolutely knows and loves. Come book-picking time, this is the single most common book for her to choose1, even though pretty much all we ever do is label the people and the activities as she points at them: "That's your Poppy. That's your Memere. That's me! That's your cousin, your uncle, your other cousin, ..."
She's met everyone in the book, of course, though it's an open question how well she actually remembers most of them. Her great grandparents take great joy in her; I just hope that they'll be part of her life for long enough for her to form permanent memories of them. It feels incredibly sad to face the possibility that my grandparents, who were such a big part of my own childhood, could one day be nothing to her but some pictures in a book made before she was born.
Still, that's the nature of things, I suppose. Of my own great-grandparents, I remember only one, and my dominant memory of him was his incredible age. We didn't have a whole lot to talk about together, so we mainly found common ground in appreciating beans and bacon served over a slice of thickly-buttered black bread from a can2. Did I miss out, never really knowing the people who so informed my parents' and grandparents' lives? Almost certainly. Still, at least I do have those memories; I hope that Olive has the same.
I've heard it said that permanent memories generally begin forming at around the age of two. Accepting this on its face, it means that in the long term Olive won't ever remember this photobook being her favorite reading material; she won't remember staring for minutes at a time at all the different photos of all the different people who love her but are far away. However, I choose to believe that she, right now, remembers meeting them, in whatever form her memories now take. Otherwise, why would she take such an active interest?
Previous holder of the title of Olive's Favorite Book was We're Going on a Bear Hunt, by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Helen Oxbury, which she owns in both languages3. At this point pretty much everyone in the family has that book completely memorized, which is both good and bad. On the one hand, Olive still sometimes enjoys a dramatic reading, and loves to join in with the climactic announcement: "It's a bear!!!!" (From her, this sounds kind of like "za Ba!!!!!") On the other hand, with this book, she really kind of prefers to read it to herself, just flipping through the cardboard pages and refreshing her memory.
This delicacy is completely unknown in Germany, and I honestly have no idea how to bring that bit of my childhood to Olive. The black bread was dense without being hard, and of course it boggled the mind when I was young to serve bread from a can. I'm pretty sure that molasses is involved in its baking somehow, but then, I haven't had it either since I went to college: as a student, I didn't really shop or cook; afterward, I've lived in places where it just wasn't a thing.
The German translation is not very good: it takes a cutesy tone, adds rhymes where there previously hadn't been any, and completely reverses the intent of the final denouement. We've taken to reading the German translation in German, but actually saying a more literal translation of the English work.