There are two “dreams” in this inspirational story by W. D. Myers. The first is a father’s dream that his son follow in his footsteps and become a competitive basketball player; the second is the boy’s dream to be able to overcome his disability and return to the game. The “pushes” come when the boy is invited to join a wheelchair team, and the father overcomes his feelings of guilt and decides to help the team. Themes: guilt, courage, maintaining a positive attitude, family, father-son bonding, team spirit, how trying and doing one’s best is more important than winning. More…
The Holiday
This chapter from Lily Brett’s book Things Could Be Worse describes how several Jewish migrant couples meet at an inexpensive Australian holiday resort in 1950 and form a close-knit group that holidays together over the next thirty-two years. Despite their growing prosperity, they are still haunted by memories of the past. The group breaks up when a meddling member has a photograph taken that suggests the husband of one couple is having an affair with the wife of another. As couples take sides, relationships are destroyed for both members and their children. Themes include assimilation, friendship, memories, “Jewishness”, gossip-mongering, aging. More…
Women in Their Beds
Gina Berriault’s protagonist is a struggling young actress who has just begun a day job as a social worker in the women’s ward of a city hospital. With no qualifications or experience, she finds it hard to maintain clinical detachment and begins to identify with the suffering, often troubled women in the ward. She reflects on turning points in her own life, and concludes that women are shaped by the beds (a metaphor for common life experiences) they have chosen, or someone else has chosen for them, to lie in. Themes: empathy, choice vs. superstition/destiny, identity, aloneness, connection. More…
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas
In this story by M. R. James, a British antiquary comes across an old book written in Latin that tells of a German monastery in which a fortune in gold is believed to have been hidden. He believes the key to the treasure lies on a stained-glass window removed from the Abby and returned to England when the monastery was closed. He finds the window, decodes the message hidden on it and, despite the warning contained in the message, finds the gold. His only problem… dealing with the treasure’s monstrous guardian. Themes include treasure hunting, cryptography, fear, the supernatural. More…
Small Change
This impressionistic novella by Yehudit Hendel describes the psychological trauma experienced by an Israeli woman while imprisoned for a minor crime in post-World War 2 Switzerland. After growing up in an oppressive atmosphere dominated by a cold, autocratic father, her nightmarish ordeal is an allusion to Germany’s inhuman treatment of detainees during the holocaust. Although severely impacted by the experience, she is empowered to rebel against her cruel, obsessive father, who has cared more about his stamp and small change collections than his family. Themes: parent-child relationships, obsession, anti-Semitism, injustice, cruelty and sexual violence, self-empowerment. More…