From K'tonton to the Torah
SARNA, JONATHAND.
FROM K'tonton to the Torah JONATHAN D. SARNA Recently Helen Sarna retired after 23 years as assistant librarian at Hebrew College, a college of Jewish learning in Boston. At the evening...
...You did not choose to employ your abilities, hiding yourself from all your books, not caring to know them or even their titles....My son, make books your companions, let their cases and shelves be your pleasure-grounds and gardens....Arrange your library in fair order, so as to avoid wearing yourself in searching for the book you need...
...When the manuscript of The Adventures of K'tonton was submitted to the Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia, it was rejected...
...We possess two versions of K'tonton's birth...
...While his friends celebrated Christmas, he celebrated Chanukah...
...Free love, when it comes to love of books, is encouraged, and Jews have consequently extended their romantic attachments to embrace a whole range of religious tomes from halachah to aggadah (law to lore) and from the siddur to the Passover haggadah...
...In later volumes K'tonton's piety diminished somewhat, paralleling a trend found in the American Jewish community...
...When the Moslems dubbed the Jews the "people of the book," they had in mind the one book—the Bible—that they saw as the focus of Jewish attachment...
...Oh, your Queen knows nothing but croquet and is dreadfully fond of beheading people...
...Francine Klagsbrun, in her introduction to the 50th anniversary volume, The Best of K'tonton, published in 1980 by the same Jewish Publication Society that had once turned the book down, speaks of K'tonton's "special combination of mischief and morality, of Jewish observance and universal values"—again, an ideal synthesis to which American Jews aspire...
...The unofficial version of K'tonton's birth, of interest only to historians, is somewhat more prosaic...
...And finally, the library eventually moved out of its original quarters, and, at about the same time, I did too...
...Always have your book in your pocket," he advised, presumably available to read at any spare moment...
...Whether he's swinging on a lulav or hiding away in a suitcase bound for Israel, his 'misbehavior' is always rooted in a deep love for family and tradition...
...Let me conclude by talking about an American Jew whose contribution to the love of books, especially in children, has been of inestimable value for almost 60 years without properly being recognized...
...Weilerstein had enough material for a book...
...Mom always made time for it, just as she has always made time for us...
...K'tonton was set in America and filled with fantasy, charm and exuberance...
...an imaginary dialogue between K'tonton and Alice of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: "Did you ever meet the Sabbath Queen...
...Ibn Tibbon was very worried about his son Samuel, however, whom he considered footloose and insufficiently bookish...
...We— children and adults—can enjoy his antics because in the end they reaffirm the things we believe in most strongly...
...Hence, he became known as K'tonton...
...The library grew and ¦ ¦ so did I. (The library grew more...
...and preserve them from damp and mice and from all manner of injury, for your books are your great treasure...
...He is far better known by his nickname—K'tonton—meaning very, very little—he is the Jewish Tom Thumb...
...My Sabbath Queen is the most genUe of souls...
...On the advice of an old woman, the wife bit off the end of an etrog—"a very fine etrog, a perfect sweet-smelling one, a citron which had come all the way across the sea from Palestine"—and before a year had passed a litde baby was born to her...
...The official version, first published in 1930, begins as follows: Once upon a time there lived a husband and wife...
...I refer to Isaac Samuel ben Baruch Reuben, a character who has charmed millions of Jewish children with his adventures and misadventures, who has taught children to be better Jews and better human beings and who has promoted love of books because he regularly reads and studies them and, more important, children enjoy reading about him...
...A rejection slip prompdy followed...
...Hai Gaon, a 10th century rabbinic scholar, considered it as important for a Jew to acquire a book—he did not specify the kind—as to acquire a friend or a plot of ground...
...Samuel calmed down and followed precisely in his father's footsteps...
...Weilerstein's husband was a Conservative rabbi...
...It wasn't a Bible story...
...The library gradually became more orderly and so did I. (The library has me beat by a long shot on that one, however...
...A good plan would be to set in each compartment a written list of the books therein contained....Cover the book cases with rugs of fine quality...
...In this case, mine were extended more...
...TO THE Torah Jm y personal development from the age of 10 coincided ^^Lfw with this library's development...
...In our day, love of books is more difficult to instill in our children...
...he is best remembered for translating Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed...
...We don't just study Torah, we embrace it, we kiss it, we dance with it...
...Ibn Tibbon possessed a large personal library and devoted his life to translating into Hebrew works that Spanish Jews had originally written in Arabic...
...it wasn't dripping with syrupy didacticism and it wasn't set in Europe or Israel...
...Klagsbrun continues: "Cute litde K'tonton is the child in us all, the mischief-maker who somehow outsmarts the serious grown-up world to which we're supposed to conform...
...Here was a beloved storybook character who was equal to non-Jewish characters in appeal and, at the same time, positively and proudly Jewish—so much so, in fact, that in the first K'tonton story, K'tonton actually wore "tiny arba kanfot," ritual fringes that stuck out "from under his blouse...
...In a sense, this is the American Jewish dream personified...
...More significantly, I think, the library has always been a kind of younger sibling to my brother David and me...
...Here we have the inspiration for the modern pocket book or paperback...
...I suspect that sometimes there has been jealousy on both sides...
...The person who read the manuscript for JPS—none other than the great Jewish scholar and linguist David Blondheim (who had no young children of his own at the time) found the story "unreadable, without probability" and "without fact...
...I know the Queen of Hearts," interrupted Alice...
...We remain the people of thehooV...
...Always know the case and chest where the book should be...
...This was the first K'tonton story and it appeared in the Women's League for Conservative Judaism's magazine, Outlook, in September 1920...
...Israel Davidson, then America's leading student of medieval Hebrew Literature and a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, was so impressed with the book that he published, under a pseudonym...
...His life was as exciting and wondrous as any Gentile's, without losing its Jewish character...
...I foolishly agreed to speak this evening on the love of books...
...He also called himself "a son of the Torah, a son of the written law and of the oral law," which he knew well enough to quote...
...He was exacdy the size of a thumb, not one bit smaller or larger...
...Ah," the wife said, "that I might have a child...
...Even when lost on the Island in the Sea, he remembered to say the Modeh Ani prayer upon waking...
...I, alas, moved much farther...
...To this day, she boasts of the library's growth and achievements as she boasts of ours...
...The young boy insisted on hearing the story...
...But K'tonton's pride in his dual identity never ebbed...
...Ibn Tibbon was unduly concerned about his son...
...Weilerstein didn't want to tell him about blood libel accusations, so she turned the tiny person into a thumb-sized boy, very much like her son, who took a ride on a chopping knife and wished he hadn't...
...Judah Ibn Tibbon, known as the father of translators, wrote an ethical will to his son Samuel at the end of the 12th century in southern France that exemplifies this loving attitude toward books...
...I shouldn't mind if he were no bigger than a thumb...
...Today there are instant books and books that are meant to last longer than an instant—hardly a state of affairs likely to inspire widespread bookloving...
...The Women's League published the book in 1935 and it became an instant classic...
...Three years later Mrs...
...Publishers of secular children's stories had long before discovered this formula for winning children's interest— think of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or, for that matter, Tom Thumb—but Jewish publishers felt that this was somehow not quite appropriate for a Jewish book...
...Books in Judaism are inextricably linked to the values of our tradition...
...This seemed like a wonderful topic at the time but it is so immensely broad and embraces practically every Jew who has ever lived, so I must be selective...
...When he was taken away to the circus, he struggled to keep kosher and he refused to work on Shabbat...
...Ibn Tibbon therefore utilized his last will and testament to pen his son this admonition: You, my son, deceived my hopes...
...Few, if any, recognize his name...
...Yet there's nothing threatening about K'tonton's activities...
...even today...
...indeed, interest in the Bible among contemporary American Jews is higher now than it has been in decades (which is why my father is invited to fly all over the country giving lectures and why my mother decided to retire so she could accompany him...
...I sometimes think that Ecclesiastes must have foreseen our age of desktop publishing when he complained, "The making of many books is without'limit...
...Every Friday evening as the lights are kindled, she visits the rich as well as the humble, and we sing songs in her honor...
...K'tonton has been immortalized by his biographer (actually, his creator)—a woman who has done more than any other American Jew to inspire a love of books among Jewish children—Sadie Rose Weilerstein, now 96 years old (See "Sadie Rose Weilerstein: K'tonton's Creator Still at Work," p. 61...
...We love books, rather than just one book, because no single book in our tradition, not even the Torah, is sufficient on its own to teach us all that we need to know...
...Happily, K'tonton survived...
...Once a year, on Simchat Torah, we may even have the opportunity to serve as its bridegroom—chatan Torah—a remarkable metaphor...
...Davidson understood one of the reasons for K'tonton's popularity...
...Here is the key that ties K'tonton to the Torah and the ethical will of Judah Ibn Tibbon...
...asked K'tonton at one point...
...The great books—whether great children's books or great rabbinic tomes—are loved because in some way they embody thei\ideals, practices and principles that bind the Jewish people together...
...One night the rabbi read aloud to his wife S. Y. Agnon's fabulous tale of Rabbi Gadiel Hatinok, a tiny rabbi, finger-sized but adult, who saved the Jewish people from a blood libel accusation...
...If the Jewish love of books began with the Torah, it did not, in our tradition, end there...
...Weilerstein's son asked her what his father was reading, she replied that it was "about a tiny person, so high," and she stuck up her thumb...
...For that we require an infinite number of books, great libraries like the Hebrew College Library to house them and, above all, devoted librarians to keep the library well running, well organized, current and user-friendly—as my mother has done for 23 years...
...There was only one thing queer about him...
...At the evening celebration in her honor, her son Jonathan, then a professor at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati (and now at Brandeis University, where his father Nahum taught for 20 years prior to his retirement in 1985) spoke...
...They had everything in the world to make them happy, or almost everything....Only one thing was missing and that was a child...
...When Mrs...
...The following is adapted from Jonathan Soma's remarks on that occasion...
...There is, of course, more to K'tonton's appeal as well...
...K'tonton was different from any other American Jewish children's book that had appeared before...
...IJonathan Sarna is ¦ ¦ 5'3" tall.—Ed.]) The library's hours were extended and so were mine...
...It was a dear little boy baby with black eyes and black hair, dimples in his knees, and thumbs just right for sucking...
...To begin at the beginning, the love of books, like all good things, starts, for Jews, with Torah...
...K'tonton represents, possibly for the first time in American Jewish children's literature, the ideal synthesis of American and Jew...
Vol. 15 • October 1990 • No. 5
