MARINA OPPENHEIMER BOOKS AND BLOG

  A pesar de que cuando elijo un libro para leer en general me guío por el título, algo de esta obra llamó mi atención. No me cupo duda de que no se trataba de un texto acerca de los distintos tipos de queso, así que decidí explorar qué había querido decir el autor con un encabezamiento semejante. El libro está escrito en un estilo juvenil, y sus personajes –dos ratones y dos hombrecillos— hacen juego con la escritura. Mientras que los ratones representan conductas instintivas, los hombrecillos, Hem y Haw, simbolizan el miedo al cambio y la capacidad de adaptarse a nuevas circunstancias de la vida. La trama es sencilla: ratones y hombrecillos vivían en la Parada de Queso C donde el queso abundaba. Desafortunadamente, un día el queso se terminó y tanto los ratones como los hombrecillos tuvieron miedo de morirse de hambre. Sin embargo, mientras que los ratones no perdieron tiempo buscando respuestas, y en cambio se abocaron a la tarea de encontrar una nueva parada de queso, los hombr...

  Although when I select a book to read, I usually go by the title, something in this book called my attention. I knew it was definitely not about different kinds of cheese, so I decided to explore what on earth the author meant with that wording. The story is written in a youth book style and its characters -two mice and two little people- follow suit. While the mice represent instinctive behaviors, the little people, Hem and Haw, represent fear of change and ability to adapt new circumstances. The plot is simple: mice and men where living in Cheese Station C where there was plenty of cheese for everybody. Unfortunately, one day the cheese was finished and mice as well as little people became afraid of starving to death. However, while the mice did not waste time looking for answers and instead started looking for a new cheese station right away, the little men were so used to that cheese that looking for a new station filled them with dread. Days went by and Haw started growing i...

  In chapter 4 of his book “ How Good Do We Have to Be, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes the following: “ The hardest part of writing this chapter for me was facing up to my memories of my own parents, now both deceased, and the buried resentments I still carry toward them for the mistakes they made .” As a reader, this sentence was for me the most significant of the entire text. I have deep admiration for authors who self-disclose their own emotional difficulties and don’t try to be experts in any matter. Author sincerity induces the reader to reflect on his or her own emotional journey, and that is exactly what happened to me. My parents were part of the Italian war generation who fled Italy for being deeply antifascist. They were lucky enough to end up in Argentina which, at that time, was a paradise for immigrants. Needless to say, Peron had not yet started to intervene in politics. Because my father had been raised by a very strict parent, when he became a father, he decided to ra...