I did not expect to find, while I was reporting on an arch-Communist playwright in Berlin, a children’s book for my 3-year-old daughter. But I did, for a very Eastern Bloc price of just €6. The author of poems like “Venus and Stalin,” Peter Hacks also wrote children’s stories. This one, The Bear at the Hunter’s Ball, is his most famous.
It’s an inappropriate book for little ones on a few levels. It’s the only book on Dalia’s shelf that is also a Stalinist allegory mocking Khrushchev’s fecklessness. But that goes over her head. What I found a little harder to explain in reading is all the drunkenness: from the first page, where the bear dressed as a hunter stumbles through the woods after having had a couple shots of Bärenschnapps (“made of honey, vodka and heavy spices”). Then he meets a drunk hunter, they stumble to a drunken hunters’ ball and drink huge amounts of beer (“the Bear drank an amount that was like a floodwater that tears a bridge from its moorings”). Then, in a stupor, they all stagger out to find a bear to shoot. Hilarity ensues.
Did I mention this is my daughter’s favorite book? Yes, the googly-eyed illustrations by Walter Schmögner are brilliant. But she loves the story, even though I give her a somewhat lame G-rated version: I tell her the bear and the hunters are just REALLY happy to have so much juice.
Maybe that’s the right thing to do, maybe not. I have a feeling many parents would just hide the book. When she’s older, it could make a great springboard for talking about drinking: After all, they may be super-happy, but they make absurdly bad decisions. That’s drinking in a nutshell. But at what age would that be a good idea? 8? 10? 13?
She’ll certainly have noticed me drunk before then, if she hasn’t already. But I don’t feel a great need to walk her through my own drinking so much as preparing her for hers.
It reminds me of a far less successfully executed book that I used to keep conspicuously placed on my Time magazine office bookshelf, perhaps as a way of planting my flag as a native Californian — It’s Just a Plant: A Children’s Story of Marijuana.
It’s an intensely didactic book, published about five years ago but still selling as a bit of a cult classic. As one Amazon reviewer put it, though, it’s far better as a gag gift for parents than as something you’d actually read to your kid. The story: young daughter wakes up to find her parents smoking weed, and the next day (Halloween, no less), the parents walk around the city with her explaining what a normal and natural plant marijuana is, complete with toking yutes on a street corner who explain why they like to get high, and a cop who comes up only to tell everyone that dope may be illegal but good people are trying to change those laws. Ugh.
If there is a book out there like The Bear at the Hunter’s Ball — clever, engaging, entertaining — but with weed instead of beer, I might go for it. You don’t have to make a virtue of it, but weed happens, so you also don’t have to totally shield a kid from its existence (although don’t give them too much secondhand smoke, dumb-ass).
Either way, at this age, reading is healthy, right? Even if it’s about the unhealthy things adults do.
