Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarmé

I was born among books. They have always been my natural environment. I cannot imagine myself living in a room without at least one bookcase in it. That is not only a cultural necessity, but also a physiological need.

Here they are, my books, looking at me from the bookcases. Some of them I brought long, long ago from Moscow, others were bought in the cities I’ve lived in or visited. There are some that are older than me: I inherited them. Others have been bought recently. There are volumes that are falling apart from long and repeated use; there are quite a few new ones... I look at them and remember where I acquired them, remember people and events connected with them. Here are books that my father illustrated: Ibsen, Anatole France, George Sand. And here is Gulliver’s Travels with illustrations by Granville.

The first drawing of mine that I remember was a copy of this book’s cover: a giant in old-fashioned clothes stands with his legs spread wide, and crowds of Lilliputians scurry between them. Here are albums by artists that I keep looking into, and here are some that I’ve only perused once or twice. Unpaid bills huddle by the collected works of Leo Tolstoy. An invitation to an exhibition by an artist friend is stuck between Flaubert and Don Quixote. The etchings of Rembrandt stand between the engravings of Dürer and Callot. A wad of old letters has settled snugly next to Chinese philosophy, and an album by Tom Wesselmann winks amiably to Nabokov...

Occasionally I try to put my bookcases in order, to arrange the books according to some system. But all my efforts end in failure, the books resist, and I forget where I’ve put the book I need. There is no room on the shelves for new books. I squeeze them in on top of the others, or leave them lying about on the tables...

Books are the first to greet me in the morning, when I can’t be bothered with them. In the evenings, under the electric light, when I try to find something new and interesting in them, they look at me sullenly... They are all my books, I know each one of them. Like a diligent yeshiva student, who repeats the same texts from the Talmud again and again, I go back again and again to the same books...

Naftali Rakuzin, 1981 - 2012