"Ha'hor merehov hatafran" ("The Hole from Hatafran Street") by Maya Dank, illustrations by Tamar Nahir-Yanai, Rimonim Publishing, 23 unnumbered pages, NIS 54

"Meshalim philosophim li'yeladim" ("Les Philo-fables") by Michel Piquemal, illustrations by Philippe Lagautriere, translated into Hebrew from the French by Reuven Miran, Achuzat Bayit Books, 106 pages, NIS 72

"Ha'i shel Yashka" ("Yashka's Island"), written and illustrated by Yossi Abulafia, Am Oved publishing, 30 unnumbered pages, NIS 45

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Since we believe small children consider books a very good Rosh Hashanah gift, we have chosen to deviate from our usual practice this week and, instead of devoting the column to a single book, we are mentioning several that might make good holiday presents. All of these books require time, in the good sense of the word: They encourage a "slow reading" that takes pleasure in itself, and they linger in the memory long after the book has been put away.

"Ha'hor merehov hatafran" ("The Hole from Hatafran Street"), intended for children of approximately 4-7 years of age, is the product of a fragile and welcome new trend in Israeli children's publishing: Alongside the big publishing houses, which are gradually merging into mega-corporations (and perhaps as a reaction to this process), there have emerged small-scale children's publishing ventures that emphasize the uniqueness and high literary quality of their titles. Many of the books published by these smaller presses deliberately challenge the well-entrenched axioms of local children's publishers regarding books for younger children who cannot yet read on their own.

This book defies at least two such presuppositions. One is that children have no patience: In order to keep them sitting still while listening to a book, the story has to be short and lead with skillful resolve to the happy ending. Maya Dank and illustrator Tamar Nahir-Yanai take their time.

The book tells a funny story, wise and ludicrous in the way of Jewish folk tales, with many contemporary touches. Its heroes are the diminutive tailor Michel (nicknamed Etzba'on, a Hebrew version of Tom Thumb) and his best friend, a centipede named Ephraim, who lives in a closet in the sewing room. Based on a fascinating and absurd discovery (many things can fall out of a hole in the pocket, but one thing will never fall out: the hole itself), the two friends come up with an invention: a hole-catcher that turns strainers into bowls and can fix any holes [following in free translation - ed.]: "What can we say? What can we tell? / Thanks to them the world now goes on very well / But beware! There are risks / This may end in sad tears, / You can fix up your teeth / but just don't seal your ears."

Aside from the story itself, Dank's book takes an evident pleasure in the very use of words: It exhausts the various possibilities of delighting the ear with very musical rhyme and meter, and with punning jokes at the expense of its heroes, and thus turns the whole scene of reading to children into a unique event well worth the effort it requires.

The other fashionable presupposition challenged by the book is that children do not like to think quietly, alone. As a result of this assumption, most of the literary impact of contemporary Israeli children's books is focused on reading aloud and relies on the mediation provided by the grownups. Very little creative effort is devoted to the quiet moments that come after reading. Dank's book, by contrast, stimulates kids to think after the reading is done, without any adult help, out of a pure love of contemplation. While they laugh, those interested will find here a chance to ponder the interesting nature of absence and its eternal dependence on that which is present.

"Meshalim philosophim li'yeladim" ("Les Philo-fables") also leaves a lot of room for later contemplation and it, too, savors time, which becomes a kind of meta-theme that runs through the reading. The book contains some 50 short tales taken from different cultures and periods, and from different literary genres; some of them are very well-known, others are not. In most of the stories there are actually two dimensions of time and several storytellers, since the tales are brought to us "according to" or "as told by."

One example is the wonderful story "Alexander and Bucephalus," about the wild horse Bucephalus whom no one dared to mount, until Alexander the Great came along and realized that the jumpy animal was simply afraid of its own shadow. At the end of the story it says that this is "an ancient story as told by the French philosopher Alain [Emile Chartier, 1868-1951] in his book 'On Happiness.'" In other tales there is no mention of an author, but they, too, contain a double time element: An Indian tale, a Middle Eastern legend, an African fable, or simply a "Chinese story" or "an Armenian story" - are all recounted here, anew. Sometimes it is a "story based on a legend," like the chilling tale called "The Hat," about a collective and self-fulfilling prophecy of fear, told "according to a Tibetan legend."

The only condition upheld all through the book is that the stories, each of them no more than one or two pages long, all provoke thinking, a lot of thinking. In other words, alongside the two other dimensions of time in the book, there is also a third: The time of reading the stories and thinking about them.

Regarding this third time, the book gathers together many kinds of reading: You can read alone, you can read one story - or a lot of stories - at one time, you can read to young children in a classroom setting, you can read to someone at home, you can read in a literary way or you can rely on the "philosopher's workshop" that Piquemal has added to each story, offering a philosophical perspective that often raises more questions that it answers. You might start a conversation about what you read, or else think about it quietly to yourself. In this sense, the Hebrew title given to the book, "Philosophical Fables for Children," might be misleading: The stories are not fable-like, in the sense that they do not point you toward one dominant reading, with one preferable lesson to be learned, and one "right" way of thinking. Much remains open here, as thoughts that might stay with the reader for a long time afterward.

Two kinds of reading

Like Piquemal's book, Yossi Abulafia's "Ha'i shel Yashka" ("Yashka's Island") is intended for two different kinds of reading. Children who recently learned to read can tackle the book quietly and alone, while others can listen to it read out loud by an adult. In both cases the act of reading takes time, since it requires a careful scrutiny of the illustrations, which add a great deal of literary information to the verbal narrative and color it with a humorous, sympathetic hue.

As in the other books, here too the reading continues long after the book has been put away, in thinking about the characters and especially about old Yashka, who refuses to abandon his creative dreams even after he comes face to face with a sobering reality. Yashka spends many years building himself an airplane out of junk, hoping to travel to a distant island that was promised to him as a child. Instead he travels a much shorter distance and discovers the marvels of his own backyard. Still, he does not for a minute give up on the magic of fantasy. He returns from his flying adventure ("aeronautics," as he calls it) a bit defeated, but immediately embarks on a new plan: "'What, didn't I tell you about the submarine?' asked Yashka and smiled a mysterious smile."

The mysterious smile that ends Abulafia's story opens up the plot, challenging yet another well-known literary convention: that children need the ending to tie up every last strand of the plot, since loose ends make them uneasy, even nervous.

Here the author-illustrator breaks away from another common assumption of children's publishers: that children like and need to read about their peers, that is, about other children, so that they might identify with the plot and be swept into it. But we discover in this book that identification and empathy do not always require a literary character who is a "peer." Abulafia's book places an elderly hero at the center, and the two children in the story, Udi and Tamar, observe him from the side with love and some concern, just as we do.

Dr. Yael Darr's book "Called Away From Our School-Desks: The Yishuv in the Shadow of Holocaust and in Anticipation of Statehood in Children's Literature of Eretz Israel, 1939-1948" is forthcoming from Magnes Press.