We tried in the early years of the feminist movement to look under and behind the myths, the legends that always depicted the stepmother as cruel, th… - Adrienne Rich

I have to say that what I know I know through making poems.

In the permissive liberalism of academic Cambridge, you could raise your children to be as vaguely or distinctly Jewish as you would, but Christian myth and calendar organized the year. My sons grew up knowing far more about the existence and concrete meaning of Jewish culture than I had. But I don't recall sitting down with them and telling them that millions of people like themselves, many of them children, had been rounded up and murdered in Europe in their parents' lifetime. Nor was I able to tell them that they came in part out of the rich, thousand-year-old Ashkenazic culture of eastern Europe, which the Holocaust destroyed; or that they came from a people whose traditions, religious and secular, included a hatred of oppression and an imperative to pursue justice and care for the stranger-an anti-racist, a socialist, and even sometimes a feminist vision. I could not tell them these things because these things were still too indistinct in my own mind.

the freedom of that library-whatever its limitations-let me know that it's possible and necessary to be interested in everything: Hindu mythology, the mud-blotted villages of Chekhov's peasants in Czarist Russia, the sound of an eighteenth-century English poem ("I wander through each charter'd street / Near where the charter'd Thames doth flow") or Bible cadences ("Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son"); and the French Revolution. To assume that philosophy, history, foreign literatures in translation, novels, plays, poetry of many kinds belonged together in one room of the mind.