I was already in my thirties when I opened the first page of my father’s favorite novel, The Count of Monte Cristo. He had been counseling me to read it for…oh, I’d say about twenty years. Of course, I hadn’t listened. He was my father, for heaven’s sake. What did he know about literature?

Just about everything, it turns out. He, Samuel Reuben, was of that breed of first generation Americans who read to be transported: From poverty. From drudgery. From life’s cruelties. From repetitive and unrelenting monotony.

I will set the scene: Young Sammy Reuben, living with Yiddish speaking Russian immigrant parents, two brothers, and a sister in a Chicago tenement. He started to work in his father’s clothing store on Maxwell Street when he was eight or nine years old. He owned and managed his own tuxedo rental store by age fourteen. But in the secret recesses of his mind, he had been abiding all that time with swashbucklers, escaped convicts, knights in shining armor, and brave and noble warriors.

Let me tell you about the three books that my father loved: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. The Wandering Jew, by Eugene Sue.

First things first. The Count! He was born a simple sailor named Edmond Dantès. In an act of vile treachery, he is denounced as a Bonapartist and consigned to the Château d'If, a bleak and terrible dungeon from which the wretched are never released. There, he encounters the Abbé Faria, a priest who imparts vast stores of knowledge, gives Dantès the map to a buried treasure, and provides the means for his escape. I can’t even begin to tug at the edges of the rest of the story, but I can briefly allude to Dantès first taking on the identity of Sinbad the Sailor, then the Count of Monte Cristo, and finally wreaking havoc on those who betrayed him. The book is thrilling. It has adulterers, bandits, children born out of wedlock, a beautiful poisoner, mind-altering drugs, Aladdin’s caves, Nubian servants, Sultans, unscrupulous politicians, and even a beautiful slave girl with whom the Count eventually falls in love.

Whenever I read The Count of Monte Cristo, I am the benificiary, not only of wonderful characters and a marvelously Machiavellian plot, but also the gift of imagining my own dear father as a youth—marriage, children, and adult responsiblities far off in the future—clutching this same remarkable novel in his hands as he plunges into the miracle of its pages, in much the same way that I do.

I was equally recalcitrant in starting Ivanhoe, which I must have read five or six time by now.

Ah, Ivanhoe!