Tonight marks the start of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. This is the first year in almost a decade that I haven't had the Jewish holidays off work, and I'm thinking wistfully of the holiday book collection at my old job and wishing I could get my hands on some of them now, to share with my daughter and to think about myself.
The central concept of Yom Kippur is tshuvah. Though tshuvah is generally translated as "repentance," it literally means "turning": turning from sin--however you define that, whether it be hurtful behavior or not living up to one's own potential--to something better. Trying, and failing, and apologizing to whoever you hurt, and trying to make restitution if you can, and then getting back on that horse and trying again.
This is a concept that even--or maybe, especially--young kids can understand, and there are several decent children's books on the topic. One perennial favorite is Gershon's Monster, by that doyen of Jewish holiday books (and Anansi stories, while he's at it) Eric Kimmel. Instead of repenting or apologizing for any of his little thoughtless acts, Gershon sweeps them up and puts them in the cellar. On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, he tosses them all into the sea. Eventually all the un-dealt-with sins become a huge monster that threaten what is dearest and most precious to him. There are echoes of King Lear and other old, dark tales in this simple story, but it never seemed to bother the enraptured kids who sought the book out by name even in the off-season. I think they recognized the power and truth behind it. Or maybe they just liked the big scary monster, as illustrated by Caldecott Honor medalist Jon Muth.
Jacqueline Jules's The Hardest Word is more nakedly didactic, but still enjoyable. The Ziz (an imaginary huge bird creature that apparently has its origins in Jewish mythology), after destroying a vegetable garden, must do repentance by finding and saying the very hardest word of all. Any guesses what it is? (hint: it starts with an "S.") Kids enjoy this one, too, and can identify with the well-meaning but hapless Ziz.
For my money, though, the best book about tshuvah is a title doesn't even refer to Yom Kippur, or to Judaism at all. In Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse, by Kevin Henkes, Lilly goes through all the important steps of true repentance after drawing a mean picture of her teacher, Mr. Slinger, in a burst of temper: She owns up to what she did, she feels true remorse, she makes restitution by drawing a nicer picture and writing a story and bringing in home-baked cheese balls, and she apologizes in person. She even does the hardest thing of all, which is to confront the evidence of her wrongdoing when Mr. Slinger gently brings out the dreaded picture and asks what she thinks he should do with it.
I'll be thinking of Lilly tomorrow night when the final shofar blast sounds and everyone cheers, and then the whole congregation--like Mr. Slinger's class--eats some tasty snacks. Tshuvah like hers deserves a celebration.
Showing posts with label people of the book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label people of the book. Show all posts
Friday, September 21, 2007
Monday, April 16, 2007
Artifacts from the Whirlwind
There's a lot of controversy about the age at which children are ready to learn or read about the Holocaust; I've heard different educators say with equal conviction that 5th grade is too young and that you can discuss the topic with preschoolers if you do it sensitively. My own opinion leans toward the wishy-washy "it depends on the kid" side. Five Owls has a good article on the subject here. The author, Lisa Silverman, also published an excellent article on Holocaust picture books in a recent issue of School Library Journal.
Today our school observed Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Memorial Day. For the 4th grade class, I pulled out a bunch of those picture books and put them on the tables for silent reading. I read them Keeping the Promise: A Torah's Journey, which tells the story of the miniature Torah that Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon took into space with him on the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia mission in 2003. The Torah had been given to profesor Joachim Joseph as a Bar Mitzvah present when Joseph was a 13-year-old inmate at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The Rabbi who gave him the Torah asked him to promise to tell the story, and he passed it on to Ramon so that the entire world, watching broadcasts of the shuttle voyage, could hear that story.
When the book was finished, I asked the class if they thought Ramon shouldn't have taken the Torah into space with him, given that this precious artifact is now lost forever after the shuttle crash. Which is more important: the object, or the story? Both, they said. But it's better to have the story and no physical Torah than to have the object but not know the story that goes with it.
Then we read a book about an artifact whose story has been lost and can only be imagined: Who Was the Woman Who Wore the Hat? The author, Nancy Patz, saw a woman's hat in a glass case at a Holocaust museum in Amsterdam. The display had no label and no explanation. She found herself drawn to the image of the hat, and wondered about the woman who wore it: what was her life like? How did she like her coffee? What happened to her? She drew the hat on the heads of various imagined women, juxtaposed with images of people being rounded up, peering from trains. The result is a spare, haunting picture book. Because the book is physically small it would be hard to share with a large class. but this 4th grade happens to be small also, so they gathered in and listened thoughfully until the book was over.
Do you have to know someone's story to remember them? We wondered afterwards. Or can you remember by imagining? They had a lot to say on the subject.
Another Holocaust book based on an artifact is Hana's Suitcase, by Karen Levine. It's too long to read aloud in a single sitting, but makes a great longer-term read-aloud. I'm pretty jaded about Holocaust books, but this one knocked me back with its clear, sensitive writing, and with the true story it relates: about one girl caught up in the Holocaust; about a group of Japanese students devoted to learning and teaching about an event far from them in time and space; and about the teacher who's determined to solve the mystery of the suitcase. The author manages to write about a scary, painful subject without either sensationalizing or holding back, and makes historical research seem pretty exciting, in the bargain. A remarkable story.
Today our school observed Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Memorial Day. For the 4th grade class, I pulled out a bunch of those picture books and put them on the tables for silent reading. I read them Keeping the Promise: A Torah's Journey, which tells the story of the miniature Torah that Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon took into space with him on the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia mission in 2003. The Torah had been given to profesor Joachim Joseph as a Bar Mitzvah present when Joseph was a 13-year-old inmate at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The Rabbi who gave him the Torah asked him to promise to tell the story, and he passed it on to Ramon so that the entire world, watching broadcasts of the shuttle voyage, could hear that story.
When the book was finished, I asked the class if they thought Ramon shouldn't have taken the Torah into space with him, given that this precious artifact is now lost forever after the shuttle crash. Which is more important: the object, or the story? Both, they said. But it's better to have the story and no physical Torah than to have the object but not know the story that goes with it.
Then we read a book about an artifact whose story has been lost and can only be imagined: Who Was the Woman Who Wore the Hat? The author, Nancy Patz, saw a woman's hat in a glass case at a Holocaust museum in Amsterdam. The display had no label and no explanation. She found herself drawn to the image of the hat, and wondered about the woman who wore it: what was her life like? How did she like her coffee? What happened to her? She drew the hat on the heads of various imagined women, juxtaposed with images of people being rounded up, peering from trains. The result is a spare, haunting picture book. Because the book is physically small it would be hard to share with a large class. but this 4th grade happens to be small also, so they gathered in and listened thoughfully until the book was over.
Do you have to know someone's story to remember them? We wondered afterwards. Or can you remember by imagining? They had a lot to say on the subject.
Another Holocaust book based on an artifact is Hana's Suitcase, by Karen Levine. It's too long to read aloud in a single sitting, but makes a great longer-term read-aloud. I'm pretty jaded about Holocaust books, but this one knocked me back with its clear, sensitive writing, and with the true story it relates: about one girl caught up in the Holocaust; about a group of Japanese students devoted to learning and teaching about an event far from them in time and space; and about the teacher who's determined to solve the mystery of the suitcase. The author manages to write about a scary, painful subject without either sensationalizing or holding back, and makes historical research seem pretty exciting, in the bargain. A remarkable story.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Passover with Pearl
Chicken Spaghetti has kindly written a Passover Books post, for which I am exceedingly grateful, because I was feeling like I should but the effort of preparing for Passover and writing about Passover at the same time was threatening to make my head spin. And the Passover Book List [PDF] that she links to has more books than I ever would have thought of.
However, there is one Passover book that demands to be written about in detail, both because it's so excellent and because there is one very, very strange thing about it. And that is Pearl's Passover, by Jane Breskin Zalben.
Jane Breskin Zalben has written and illustrated a whole slew of adorable picture books, many of them about Jewish holidays and rites of passage. Several feature a little bear named Beni and his family, who, in various books, celebrate Chanukah and Purim and Rosh Hashanah and go to a wedding and that kind of thing. The stories and illustrations are sweet without being cloying, understated without being boring, give enough information about the holidays to satisfy the curiosity of non-Jewish kids while giving Jewish kids enough plot to hang their interest on. And many of them are small, just the right size for small kids to browse through themselves. All in all, a totally charming series.
Pearl's Passover is a nice mix of plot, crafts, recipes, and Passover information. In short, read-aloud-able chapters, Pearl and her family celebrate Passover with their relatives, including cousins Harry and Sophie, the "two terrors from Teaneck." In between each chapter, Zalben gives instructions for making crafts like place cards, reclining pillows, Miriam's Timbrels, and a seder plate.
Last year at about this time, my daughter and I were cozily reading away on the couch when we got to the seder plate part and were brought up short. See, one of the objects on the seder plate is a lamb shank bone, to symbolize the lamb's blood that the Israelite slaves used to mark their doors right before escaping from Egypt, so the Angel of Death would pass them over. Kind of a gory little detail, but my child is a veteran of religious school and a big fan of the Kids' Cartoon Bible (a terrific Bible-story version that's not as well-known as it should be), and she wasn't shocked by that. No, what stunned us both was that, see, well, it suddenly dawned on us that Pearl and her family were all sheep. Literally. Some of Zalben's books are about a bear family, but there's a whole other series, including this one, that are about a sheep family.
So this sheep family in this book celebrating a holiday where the liberation of the Jews hangs in part on the slaughter of...sheep.
"That's a little weird," my child offered. I agreed.
We paged forward to the part where Pearl's grandpa (also a sheep!) is retelling the story of the ten plagues. It's the tenth plague, Death of the Firstborn, that prompts the sheep's blood thing, which supposedly alerted the Angel of Death not to kill the firstborn in the marked houses. But Grandpa, understandably, glosses over this part, explaining only that Moses told his people to "mark [their] doorposts."
After that, we had to put the book down and do something else for a while. We just couldn't look at any more pictures of sweet little Pearl and her family. It was like reading a retelling of Lord of the Flies starring pigs.
Aside from this one disturbing aspect, Pearl's Passover is pretty close to the perfect Passover book for kids. You can skip the crafts and read the story; you can skip the story and do the crafts. You can use it as a pre-Seder primer: it's got a map of the exodus from Egypt, and a list of the fifteen steps of the Seder, and important Passover songs like the Four Questions and Dayenu and Chad Gadya all transliterated with musical notation, and it has a glossary at the end. It's fun and cute and great to read aloud.
Just don't be surprised if after reading it your child does a double-take when she sees that shank bone on the Seder plate.
However, there is one Passover book that demands to be written about in detail, both because it's so excellent and because there is one very, very strange thing about it. And that is Pearl's Passover, by Jane Breskin Zalben.
Jane Breskin Zalben has written and illustrated a whole slew of adorable picture books, many of them about Jewish holidays and rites of passage. Several feature a little bear named Beni and his family, who, in various books, celebrate Chanukah and Purim and Rosh Hashanah and go to a wedding and that kind of thing. The stories and illustrations are sweet without being cloying, understated without being boring, give enough information about the holidays to satisfy the curiosity of non-Jewish kids while giving Jewish kids enough plot to hang their interest on. And many of them are small, just the right size for small kids to browse through themselves. All in all, a totally charming series.
Pearl's Passover is a nice mix of plot, crafts, recipes, and Passover information. In short, read-aloud-able chapters, Pearl and her family celebrate Passover with their relatives, including cousins Harry and Sophie, the "two terrors from Teaneck." In between each chapter, Zalben gives instructions for making crafts like place cards, reclining pillows, Miriam's Timbrels, and a seder plate.
Last year at about this time, my daughter and I were cozily reading away on the couch when we got to the seder plate part and were brought up short. See, one of the objects on the seder plate is a lamb shank bone, to symbolize the lamb's blood that the Israelite slaves used to mark their doors right before escaping from Egypt, so the Angel of Death would pass them over. Kind of a gory little detail, but my child is a veteran of religious school and a big fan of the Kids' Cartoon Bible (a terrific Bible-story version that's not as well-known as it should be), and she wasn't shocked by that. No, what stunned us both was that, see, well, it suddenly dawned on us that Pearl and her family were all sheep. Literally. Some of Zalben's books are about a bear family, but there's a whole other series, including this one, that are about a sheep family.
So this sheep family in this book celebrating a holiday where the liberation of the Jews hangs in part on the slaughter of...sheep.
"That's a little weird," my child offered. I agreed.
We paged forward to the part where Pearl's grandpa (also a sheep!) is retelling the story of the ten plagues. It's the tenth plague, Death of the Firstborn, that prompts the sheep's blood thing, which supposedly alerted the Angel of Death not to kill the firstborn in the marked houses. But Grandpa, understandably, glosses over this part, explaining only that Moses told his people to "mark [their] doorposts."
After that, we had to put the book down and do something else for a while. We just couldn't look at any more pictures of sweet little Pearl and her family. It was like reading a retelling of Lord of the Flies starring pigs.
Aside from this one disturbing aspect, Pearl's Passover is pretty close to the perfect Passover book for kids. You can skip the crafts and read the story; you can skip the story and do the crafts. You can use it as a pre-Seder primer: it's got a map of the exodus from Egypt, and a list of the fifteen steps of the Seder, and important Passover songs like the Four Questions and Dayenu and Chad Gadya all transliterated with musical notation, and it has a glossary at the end. It's fun and cute and great to read aloud.
Just don't be surprised if after reading it your child does a double-take when she sees that shank bone on the Seder plate.
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Sound the Graggers! Eat the Hamentaschen! Read...um...what?
Costumes, raucous silliness, noisemakers, candy, treats, even special cookies--sounds like a great time, yes? Well, it is. Today is the Jewish holiday of Purim, and not only does it feature all the above elements, but it sports one doozy of an origin story (also found in the Book of Esther in any handy Bible).
So you'd think the shelves of libraries and bookstores would be groaning under the weight of all the terrific kids' books about Purim. And you would be so wrong. I work at a Jewish day school, and while we have more great Chanukah stories than anyone could read during the entire month of December (including several by the King of Chanukah Books, Mr. Eric Kimmel), and even a respectable selection of appealing Passover tales, I can barely count the attractive, kid-friendly, read-aloud-able Purim books on my fingers.
And most of those merely retell the story of brave Esther, wicked Haman (boo! booooo, Haman!), good Mordechai, and dopey King Ahashuerus. Granted, it is a fantastic story--Queen Esther the Morning Star, by Mordecai Gerstein, is one of the best versions--but it's as if the only Christmas books you could find to read to kids were retellings of the Nativity: no Grinch, no Santa, no Nutcracker, no nothin' but little baby Jesus in the manger over and over again.
Then there are the books that pretty much just recount how the holiday is celebrated. You'll find these for a lot of Jewish holidays. They tend to go something like this: "I love to celebrate Purim! My friends and I get dressed in costumes. We wave our graggers when we hear Haman's name! We eat special cookies for Purim; they're called Hamentaschen..." While these can be helpful for introducing a non-Jewish audience to Purim, or for preparing very young children as the holiday approaches, they're a yawnfest for most Jewish kids over the age of four. One that the preschoolers at my school enjoy is Sammy Spider's First Purim, by Sylvia Rouss and Katherine Kahn. Sammy Spider introduces several Jewish holidays in his series of books, and while they don't get much beyond the superficial symbols, they're a fun read.
For a long time, the only Purim book I could find that actually tells a good, original story and has decent illustrations was Cakes and Miracles, by Barbara Diamond Goldin, about a blind boy who is inspired by a dream to make and sell special Purim cookies to help his widowed mother. Another strong story is Raisel's Riddle, by Erica Silverman, a Cinderella variation set around a Purim ball. They're both a bit wordy for younger grades to sit through, though.
Then, last year, the Purim book of my dreams appeared: The Mystery Bear, by Leone Adelson. It's short, it's simple, it has big, bright illustrations (by Naomi Howland), it's about Purim, it's not set in ancient Persia, and it's got a real, Honest-to-G-d plot, which I can recount in one sentence: Hungry bear cub wakes up early from hibernation, wanders into Purim celebration, and is mistaken for a costumed reveler in a bear suit; hilarity ensues.
It's perfect. Hebrew school teachers can read it to their classes; public librarians and public school teachers can throw it into the program for a multiculti twist on hibernation and springtime; I can give it to the first grade teachers; and everyone can be happy.
Now, if only I could find a halfway decent book about Lag B'Omer...
So you'd think the shelves of libraries and bookstores would be groaning under the weight of all the terrific kids' books about Purim. And you would be so wrong. I work at a Jewish day school, and while we have more great Chanukah stories than anyone could read during the entire month of December (including several by the King of Chanukah Books, Mr. Eric Kimmel), and even a respectable selection of appealing Passover tales, I can barely count the attractive, kid-friendly, read-aloud-able Purim books on my fingers.
And most of those merely retell the story of brave Esther, wicked Haman (boo! booooo, Haman!), good Mordechai, and dopey King Ahashuerus. Granted, it is a fantastic story--Queen Esther the Morning Star, by Mordecai Gerstein, is one of the best versions--but it's as if the only Christmas books you could find to read to kids were retellings of the Nativity: no Grinch, no Santa, no Nutcracker, no nothin' but little baby Jesus in the manger over and over again.
Then there are the books that pretty much just recount how the holiday is celebrated. You'll find these for a lot of Jewish holidays. They tend to go something like this: "I love to celebrate Purim! My friends and I get dressed in costumes. We wave our graggers when we hear Haman's name! We eat special cookies for Purim; they're called Hamentaschen..." While these can be helpful for introducing a non-Jewish audience to Purim, or for preparing very young children as the holiday approaches, they're a yawnfest for most Jewish kids over the age of four. One that the preschoolers at my school enjoy is Sammy Spider's First Purim, by Sylvia Rouss and Katherine Kahn. Sammy Spider introduces several Jewish holidays in his series of books, and while they don't get much beyond the superficial symbols, they're a fun read.
For a long time, the only Purim book I could find that actually tells a good, original story and has decent illustrations was Cakes and Miracles, by Barbara Diamond Goldin, about a blind boy who is inspired by a dream to make and sell special Purim cookies to help his widowed mother. Another strong story is Raisel's Riddle, by Erica Silverman, a Cinderella variation set around a Purim ball. They're both a bit wordy for younger grades to sit through, though.
Then, last year, the Purim book of my dreams appeared: The Mystery Bear, by Leone Adelson. It's short, it's simple, it has big, bright illustrations (by Naomi Howland), it's about Purim, it's not set in ancient Persia, and it's got a real, Honest-to-G-d plot, which I can recount in one sentence: Hungry bear cub wakes up early from hibernation, wanders into Purim celebration, and is mistaken for a costumed reveler in a bear suit; hilarity ensues.
It's perfect. Hebrew school teachers can read it to their classes; public librarians and public school teachers can throw it into the program for a multiculti twist on hibernation and springtime; I can give it to the first grade teachers; and everyone can be happy.
Now, if only I could find a halfway decent book about Lag B'Omer...
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