Pam Schiller

why render that experience through fiction? First because we are only fiction. We are only the idea we have of ourselves.

Edmond Jabès sampler

Not sure how many of my friends are going to take an interest in Edmond Jabes, but here goes anyway. This is a book of interviews with Sephardic Jewish author Edmond Jabes, who grew up in Cairo and educated in French at a Catholic school. He held an Italian passport, handed down from his grandfather from the 19thC when the Europeans in Egypt were show more required to take on a foreign passport. They could not be Egyptian. Identity expresses itself as a major theme for Jabes. He wrote poetry, often prose-like, departing from the surrealism he took up early, but didn’t continue with. His poems are often multi voiced, experiments in ideas and play of language, drawn often from rabbinical, Judaic, kabbalistic ideas. From 1957, he lived in Paris with his family, after all foreigners were ordered out by Nasser.

Here’s what Jabes says of language:

God is invisible and his word is the only possible link with him
The covenant with God has to pass through his word
Man is alone, faced with a text – be it the bible or profane words. We have no other reality than the reality books confer on us.

On writing:

why render that experience through fiction? First because we are only fiction. We are only the idea we have of ourselves.

On identity:

To claim French culture as my own in Cairo nearly took the place of a real filiation. In Paris, the earth opened up under my feet. To recognise a filiation, meant to amputate myself.

To a chauvinistic nationalist, anyone belonging to a minority is a foreigner

I think that is my favourite line in the book as it speaks to a recurring theme.

On Ideology:

No cause can bear blind faith, and I think that today one has to be on guard more than ever against all ideologies

On time:

We cannot imagine ourselves outside of time, outside of an event. The whole of our culture brings us back to allotments of time.

On the outsider and writer:

I found it even harder to join a literary group because the support you get from a group diminishes the risk that is essential to writing.

To take the wrong door means indeed to go against the order that presided over the plan of the house… I am not sure one can enter a written work without having forced one’s own way in first.

Books by Jabes are difficult to find. And eye-wateringly expensive when you do. A friend lent me a few recently. And they are difficult reading.

I’m staying by the beach for a couple of weeks while a friend takes a trip to India. To my surprise this book was on the shelf alongside old hardbacks of Clarice Lispector’s work. I had to read it and take notes as I will never find it again. show less

This is a good book to use if a classroom is learning about sea turtles. This is a story of a grandmother telling her grandson how his mother saved sea turtles. It went into detail of how a mother comes on shore to lay their eggs. Although, there had been many new houses build around that area and the eggs were in great danger. This book tell hows his mother saved the turtles. This book also has very detailed illustrations.

a great resource for teachers about the development of young children. Discusses stages and accomplishments for children at different ages. provides ideas to help prompt development for children.
4 books

discusses the key values that all children should have and how they can be achieved in the classroom
1 book