A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show.

If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

Well, my friend Eckhart was a kid growing up in Israel.

His mom would tell him a story every night before he went to sleep.

But it was almost always a story that you would invent, like right then, on the spot.

Never read him any children's books.

And for my mom, the idea of telling her stories from children's books was very much like

kind of ordering a pizza instead of making us a dinner.

It would mean that she doesn't love us enough.

So almost every night, it was a custom-made story with flying camels or a room that people

would walk into and lose the power of speech and also develop made-up things.

But always, Eckhart says, the details and the feelings in the stories echoed whatever

was going on in Eckhart's life that particular day.

Eckhart's mom did this for Eckhart because her parents had done it for her, when she was

a little girl in Poland during World War II.

During World War II, the greatest gifts that she got from her parents were the stories

that they told her.

Because they couldn't give her food, they couldn't give her clothes, they could only tell

her stories and they would put all the love and knowledge and imagination in it.

So those stories would be amazing.

And she would tell me that when they would begin the story, she would be afraid that she

would fall asleep in the middle.

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