NEW BOOKS FOR JEWISH CHILDREN: A REVIEW
FRISCHER, RITA
NEW BOOKS FOR JEWISH CHILDREN: A REVIEW RITA FRISCHER Any librarian who deals with children's literature has to admit to a certain degree of chutzpah. True, we are professionally trained in...
...First, I read Leo Schwarz's version of "The Dead Citron" (The Feast of Leviathan, Rinehart and Co., Inc., 1956) and compared it directly with Shevrim's "The Dead Esrog...
...She described this as a "watered down version of much beloved tales" which seemed to her to have lost the true flavor of the master...
...First—The Latecomers Two interesting 1978 imprints which came out early in '79 and thus were not reviewed in last year's article on children's literature came from the Jewish Publication Society, inaugurating their new series of books for young readers...
...It's getting so I can't think of shtetl people in anything but black and white...
...But she also learns that occasional disagreements don't destroy love...
...With this in mind, I turn to the review of some, but not all, of this year's crop of books for children, paying special heed to the values present, if such there be...
...When Lori's self-consciously progressive school actually suspends her for smoking pot, grandfather sends her for an extended stay with his boyhood friend on an Israeli moshav near Haifa...
...After all, a child must read a book if he is to learn from it, and the most important message will never be delivered if the medium falls short of the mark...
...Dayenu...
...Sholom Aleichem...
...The Adventures of Yemima and Other Stories, was written by Abraham Soyer, writer and teacher of Hebrew, and was first published in Palestine 40 years ago...
...Like last year's A Mitzvah Is Something Special by Phyllis Rose Eisenberg and 1977's Our Snowman Had Olive Eyes by Charlotte Herman, which also showed special grandparent/grandchild relationships, I recommend this one highly...
...The illustrations are simply beautiful...
...Another look backwards is Miriam Chaikin's / Should Worry, I Should Care, this time to Gabriel Heatter's increasingly ominous news from Europe while Father Coughlin broadcast virulent anti-Semitism at home and money was always scarce...
...In the traditional versions, including Shulevitz's, the Jewish figure finds the treasure because, unlike the worldly captain, he has faith in the inner voice which prompts him...
...by Thomas di Grazia...
...Carnival and Kopeck and More About Hannah...
...He spoke Yiddish, observed the Sabbath, and was imbued with a deep sense of family responsibility...
...Also, several have moved away from past years' sojourn in the past and are confronting directly what it means to be a Jew in America today...
...Caught up as we are with the "Let my people go" approach to the oppression of Soviet Jewry, books like this may help our young people avoid simplistic thinking and realize that permission to emigrate may be the beginning of a struggle as well as the end of one, and that our responsibility does not stop with bumper stickers and protest marches...
...A last volume of stories...
...One Little Goat: A Passover Song...
...Yet the book has much to commend it...
...Illus...
...and, more important, it is from a base of strong family feeling that Beth is able to move beyond grief and vulnerability to a new, mature strength and compassionate understanding...
...We are all familiar with books at an adult level which point out our shortcomings with often vicious delight...
...Appropriate, perhaps, but hardly helpful to the spiritual richness we're trying to recreate...
...New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979...
...Suppose a holiday meal is described as consisting of non-Kosher foods or combinations...
...It makes available to young readers the bones of these holiday stories even if the meat is less than juicy...
...by Gabriel Lisowski...
...she has lost much of the rhythm and life which come through in Schwarz's version...
...These issues provoke much discussion and soul-searching, especially when awards time rolls around...
...A Sound to Remember...
...Birthday in Kishinev...
...Another book imprinted in '78 which didn't reach my library shelves until '79 was Uri Shulevitz's The Treasure, illustrated by the author...
...Dvora's Journey...
...New York: Holiday House, 1979...
...Orgel, Doris...
...Mark, Jan...
...The illustrations perfectly suit the folklore quality, making this old-world storytelling at its best...
...Houdini's determined struggle for fame, coupled with the ingenuity and endurance he brought to new challenges, should captivate young readers, as will the detailed descriptions of some of his most spectacular tricks...
...It is set in a strange new world in a terrify-ingly conformist and institutionalized future, yet the two central male figures bear Biblical names...
...An appendix includes texts of important human rights documents and a comprehensive bibliography...
...So must our children think ofthat bustling, colorful life in terms of black and white and muted gray...
...Her willful integrity touches a responsive chord in Moshe, a gardener, who emerges from his previous shell of silence to speak of ghettos in Prague and of the ineffable Name, and who admits to being able to read only from right to left...
...Done in the style of the Old Masters, this is possibly the best color work ever produced by this Caldecott Award-winning illustrator...
...Observance of Shabbat, kashrut and other traditions, an integral but unobtrusive part of the story, never stands as a barrier between the multi-ethnic neighbors depicted here...
...Greene, Laura...
...Today Last year's The Empty Chair by Bess Kaplan (Harper, 1978) focused on 10-year-old Becky, an immigrant child on New York's Lower East Side, and her struggle to accept her mother's sudden death and her father's remarriage...
...She also works as Resource Librarian at Hebrew Union College, and she is affiliated with the National Association of Jewish Libraries...
...Lori...
...By contrast, Harry Houdini, the great escape artist and magician, had little Jewish content in his life, but what there was has been carefully and subtly included in a complete and well-done biography by Florence Meiman White titled Escape...
...The Human Rights Book...
...Illus...
...Basing her narrator's story on an episode in her own life, she tells of one day, begun by a joyous twelfth birthday celebration and ended with the terror of the infamous Kishinev pogrom...
...P.L...
...So, too, parents, through the giving of carefully chosen books, can endorse certain values and encourage critical moral thought...
...New York: Viking Press, 1979...
...Illus...
...Her father is loving, but has needs Beth cannot possibly fill...
...New York: Harper & Row, 1978...
...His despair has affected Alec's mother, once the cheerful light of the family, and her vibrancy and youthfulness are fast disappearing...
...However, we can't make judgments in quite the way our charges do— because we are grown up...
...Ike and Mama and the Block Wedding...
...Blaine, Marge...
...by Lisa C. Wesson...
...Greenfield, Howard...
...Nostalgia for eight- to 12-year-olds...
...Soyer, Abraham...
...New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc., 1979...
...Do Jewish surnames make a story "Jewish...
...Does a book have positive Jewish value only when the characters maintain a strongly identifiable Jewish commitment throughout...
...Many careful details give this book for 10-to- 13-year-olds a nice immediacy...
...The premise is good, and Devorah is a pleasant enough heroine (although I do wish fewer of her cases concerned themselves with cold cash...
...Selected and Translated by Aliza Shevrim...
...And by what criteria should they be judged...
...Hubner, Carol Korb...
...This type of book has universal appeal since loneliness, fear of not fitting in, and vague worries about the threatening events of the grown-up world are common to every child in every era...
...Though primarily for grades 4 through 6, these tales are excellent for telling or reading aloud to all ages...
...If so, identifiable according to which authority...
...Chaikin, Miriam...
...Shevrim is overly wordy...
...To reinforce my initial reaction, I applied a double test...
...Captain Jiri and Rabbi Jacob...
...New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979...
...Sometimes the author's attempts to illustrate the most crucial problems in modern Israel become too representative and deliberate and there are occasional overwritten passages...
...It is important to remember that fiction can be used to illustrate Jewish values both in a positive and negative sense...
...A little wordy for its 10-to-13-year-old readers, it nevertheless sustained interest and dealt sensitively with a parent's death...
...Other Gift Considerations Adler, David...
...The latest Judaica Book News is especially encouraging, for the fictional works, including many reviewed here, are generally of high quality...
...The first of these, in keeping with last year's /?oois-influ-enced penchant for looking backwards, is Birthday in Kishinev, a first book by 80-year-old Fannie Steinberg appropriate for ages nine to 13...
...Let's consider just numbers, consulting two prime sources for current and past Jewish juvenile publications...
...Of the 21, seven are Bible stories (some of which, like Asimov's The Story of Ruth, could be argued for as literature to be included in my considerations), but only four are fiction or folklore...
...by Devorah Kramer...
...Illus...
...Most books for young people do not take this approach...
...Yet we presume to evaluate stories through the eyes and ears of a childhood left far behind (farther for some of us than for others) in an attempt to match the children we serve with the stories we love, so as to strike a magic spark...
...Fascinated by the world of tricks and illusion, Ehrich began his career in magic when he was 17, adopting the names of two famous magicians—Harry (Harry Keller of America) and Houdini (from Robert Houdin of France...
...Now, in A Tangle of Roots by Barbara Girion, we have a modern, believable 16-year-old, Beth Frankle, whose life is changed in an instant when her vibrant 38-year-old mother dies of a cerebral hemorrhage...
...Kaplan, Bess...
...True, we have knowledge of good character development, plot, setting, and theme, and we know that these, when really good, transcend all age brackets and reading levels...
...In Hirsh's update, both the captain and the rabbi yearn for a better life for those they lead and teach...
...Illus...
...The rabbi, with the captain's advice, teaches his yeshiva boys how to protect themselves against bullies...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1979...
...Her grandmother may be Orthodox, but she and her father are borderline Conservatives, and her involvement with a non-Jewish boyfriend breaks up because of his pique at the amount of time she is spending with her family after her mother's death...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1979...
...In Gloria Goldreich's Lori, Lori Mandeli, 16, is also the only daughter of another set of thoroughly believable modern parents, although a different breed...
...How about the observance of a holiday or two...
...Then, I asked an opinion of a Los Angeles Public Library children's librarian who had read Sholom Aleichem originally in Yiddish...
...1 would read the one aloud...
...Now, however, his father, an educated man with no job and no prospects, has lost all hope for his own future...
...Yet the Jewish rituals for mourning are here, and the community support...
...by Marilyn Hirsh...
...by Marilyn Hirsh...
...An elementary level Haggadah, brightly illustrated by Ronnie Foont, with the basic portions of the Seder in Hebrew, transliterated Hebrew and English...
...Kustanowitz, Shulamit E. and Foont, Ronnie C. A First Haggadah...
...not the other...
...The heroine's family, saved by a devoted Gentile servant, are kept from despair by their mutual love and their hopes for a new future in a new land...
...Tomorrow One of my favorite books this year was Jan Mark's The Ennead, a space fantasy that initially holds no promise of Jewish content...
...1979...
...The author has created a quiet, understated book in which Molly, with the support of her loving and teasing family, overcomes her loneliness, learns much about life and people, and copes with her first encounter with death...
...those which do deal with the shortcomings of Jewish people are often recognizably autobiographical and must be accepted with that in mind...
...In the latest Annual, the list for 1977-78 includes 42 entries, 31 of them for 1977...
...Blue, Rose...
...Rita Frischer is a librarian at Temple Ramat Zion in Northridge, California...
...But Alec's parents seem to have paid too high a price for freedom...
...However, if as Bialik once said, translation is like a veil more or less hiding the original from view, in this case I found the veil much too thick, distorting much of the earthiness, the tarn, and most of all, the underlying joy of life I had relished in past readings...
...When that happens—and it does often enough to make the profession one of the most rewarding I can imagine—the lucky librarian can watch, almost enviously, as her young reader eagerly moves on to encounter, for that wondrous first time, still other books which challenge his imagination, deepen his understanding and broaden his world...
...H illei taught in this way also: "What is hateful to you, do not unto your neighbor...
...His father had even said, "If it's hard for us, then it's easier for the children...
...The proportion of imaginative material is almost the same—in 1972, slightly less than half...
...He discovers that there is, indeed, a treasure, but not where he expected it to be...
...Ages 9 to 12...
...Many of the tricks of logical deduction are also interesting...
...New York: Bonim Books (Hebrew Publishing Co...
...Laura Greene's / Am an Orthodox Jew is not an elaborate work of imagination, but a simple, gentle little book containing a realistic description of the life of a modern-day Orthodox Jewish child...
...When they first considered leaving Russia, they had known the transition wouldn't be easy...
...New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979...
...Shulevitz, Uri...
...Cold Rain on the Water...
...Beth is only one of the contemporary and recognizable Jews who populate this book...
...It corf-firmed, she said, her belief in what the grandfather in her book had said: "Oh well, it just goes to show, there are many ways of being Jewish...
...Although those with first-hand memories of those days might fault the story for some idealization of poverty, this warm and humorous story of cooperation between neighbors and between generations could make a bored, modern, consumer-type kid, isolated in suburbia, yearn for the "good old days" he missed...
...This most unusual work is, I think, ideal for a Jewish science fiction freak of any age from 11 up, or for anyone intrigued by Orwellian prophecy with an Old Testament twist (and perhaps a bit of political comment thrown in...
...modernism—all integrated with contemporary news events—can be seen and understood more clearly through Lori's eyes...
...Girion, Barbara...
...Identification with the central figure in an absorbing and moving story can make a far deeper impression than any theoretical discussion about how a Jew should live...
...And how could any aspiring Thespians resist...
...The second of the '78 JPS offerings is The Secret of the Sabbath Fish by Ben Aronin, illustrated by Shay Rieger, artist and sculptor of Our Family fame...
...Looking at the Jewish Book Annual 1972-73 listing, we find a total of 33 titles, only 21 of them 1972 imprints...
...Also of value for teachers or learning resource centers...
...Travers, author of the Mary Poppins stories, once said, "I never wrote for children...
...I use all three versions for in-service classes for teachers to demonstrate how changing values can be reflected in children's books...
...A collection of puzzles, word games, magic tricks, number games and riddles with Biblical themes, this is not literature but is a nice Chanukah gift...
...This article was prepared in celebration of Jewish Book Month...
...New York: Harper & Row, 1979, Illus...
...by Shay Rieger...
...New York: Julian Messner, 1979...
...Ten of these are fiction, one-third of the total as against 1972's one-fifth ratio...
...Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1978...
...Racial hostility, terrorism, traditionalism vs...
...There is a bittersweet ending when 12-year-old Dvora is allowed to go off with her 14-year-old brother, Saul, so the two at least can begin to become Americans while the rest of the family stays in Germany to earn money for the last leg of their journey...
...The Secret of the Sabbath Fish...
...Moshe's reawakening to the meaning of his cultural and spiritual heritage becomes a power that breaks through Isaac's fear and Eleanor's anger, changing their lives forever...
...How the rabbi resolves the problem and turns Jacov's silence into an unforgettable moral lesson provides the touching conclusion of the story...
...The Bible Fun Book: Puzzles, Riddles, Magic and More...
...New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979...
...Snyder, Carol...
...Goldreich, Gloria...
...A place of stone and swirling dust, Erato offers no haven to artists, individualists or idealists: such threatening elements face deportation and certain death...
...Holiday Tales of Sholom Aleichem...
...This is a simple and moving story for all ages from eight up, emphasizing fortitude and faith...
...However, according to most of the children's librarians I know, it is proving a difficult novel to sell to today's child...
...1978...
...Should Worry, I Should Care...
...In rough red, gray and black drawings, Hirsh shows preparation of costumes and staging arrangements clearly enough to allow any class—or group of enterprising, unsupervised youngsters—to emulate her book's cast...
...Milton Meitzer, who won awards from both the Association of Jewish Libraries and the Jewish Book Council for his fine work on the Holocaust, Never to Forget, has here compiled a sharp picture of the "barbed wire world of today" in which millions of all colors and of all faiths share the terrible denial of their most basic human rights...
...by Karen Ann Weinhaus...
...by Gabriel Lisowski...
...Excellent for junior and senior high school ages...
...The Life of Harry Houdini...
...Isaac, an orphan, is struggling to survive on Erato, a planet in a new solar system which colonists are proceeding to destroy as they did the Earth...
...In 1978, the two organizations presented diametrically opposed selections...
...Why can't the fiction advocating Orthodox Judaism have this same organic, natural quality...
...The pace, the format, and perhaps most of all, the obviousness of intent, present a problem...
...The one, AJL, chose as its winner a highly readable work about an almost completely assimilated young Jewish girl in Vienna in 1938...
...The text is simple...
...Rose Blue, a children's author who has frequently tackled such modern dilemmas as treatment of the aged (Grandma Didn't Wave Back, Watts, 1972) and the true meaning of coming of age (The Thirteenth Year, Watts, 1977) deals in her latest novel, Cold Rain on the Water, with the problems of today's Russian immigrants, newly transplanted to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn...
...By the judicious use of fiction to enrich and enliven education, especially within the time-limited possibilities of an afternoon school Jewish setting, librarians (or teachers) can expose children to a variety of Jewish values without the didacticism that is the kiss of death when teaching ethical behavior...
...These shadows are of secondary concern to nine-year-old Molly, whose biggest worry is adjusting to a new neighborhood and finding new friends...
...Escape...
...by R. Egielski...
...She does, and the recipe, mingling symbols of pain and hope, provides a feast filled with "a strange fragrance, like the soul of Sabbath itself...
...The plots are generally extremely contrived and the presentation creaky...
...with photos...
...Meitzer, Milton...
...However, like so many of last year's books, it was set in a time and place unfamiliar to most of today's children...
...they depend on Lori's grandfather for advice, wear matching sweatsuits, bathrobes, and watches...
...New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1978...
...New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1979...
...And when Jacov's nervousness causes him to produce only silence instead of a stirring "Tekiah" blast on Rosh Hashanah, the disappointed villagers urge the rabbi to replace the boy on Yom Kippur with someone more capable and worthy...
...Steinberg, Fannie...
...Still, the strengths outweigh the flaws in this book...
...Removed from her "laid back" New York friends, Lori becomes close to her new Israeli friend, Rina, and quickly loses her veneer of pseudo-sophistication...
...Illustrations by Lisa C. Wesson help emphasize the warmth and joy of Aaron's family life and sense of belonging...
...Illus...
...Or your parents, or your siblings, or your children . . .) Most recent books do not take a negative focus, however, emphasizing instead those qualities we consider essential to being a mentsch...
...More Yesterdays Before moving to those of this year's books concerned with present-day Jewish life (and one which even tackles future Jewish life), let's look over those still concentrating on the good, or bad, old days in shtetl or settlement: Dvora's Journey by Marge Blaine is another tale of escape from Russia, but for me this one was, more than most, like reading a family history...
...This is a quietly funny book about, an interaction between generations that is all too rare today...
...Both believe in their dreams...
...It is a book which fills a need in our schools and should be highly desirable from that standpoint...
...New York: Judaica Press, 1979...
...Criteria forjudging the Jewish content of children's stories have always THesecReroF TH...
...However, it is a mystery to me why children's works written to introduce or expound Orthodox Judaism are most often, and most unfortunately, lacking in literary polish and aesthetic appeal...
...A Tangle of Roots...
...The first is the Judaica Book News, a glossy semi-annual periodical...
...Illus...
...Maybe that's the key...
...A nice gift and an asset to teaching Passover ritual...
...the^dog bites the cat with such zest, and the Angel of Death flies in (on a prop rack) with such elan] Following the curtain call, in which the multiethnic child cast shed their masks, come the song's music and words, an explanation of Passover's meaning and customs, and a few words about the song's origins...
...How Jewish...
...There is a different and offbeat version of this folktale to be found in Marilyn Hirsh's Captain J iri and Rabbi Jacob (Holiday House, 1976) where the captain and the rabbi learn from each other not only the location of treasure but a whole new approach to life...
...Illus...
...His stiff, traditionalist grandfather finds solace in the free practice of his religion...
...Speaking as a librarian, I hope you will use literature to touch the minds and hearts of your children (or students) with the lessons you want them to remember...
...New York: Bonim Books (Hebrew Publishing Co...
...1 On the other hand, the 1978 Jewish Book Council Award went to a carefully researched, painstakingly constructed historical novel which covered an important period of our past, replete with heroic figures, battles, and utter devotion to the cause of Jewish survival...
...How Many...
...New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1979...
...Some Songs and Stories A real asset to the Hebrew School library (my bias is showing), Marilyn Hirsh's One Little Goat: A Passover Song presents a picture book version of Chad Gad yah done as a play for children...
...Skolsky, ? indy Warshaw...
...An especially beautiful High Holy Days tale, A Sound to Remember, has been set by its author, Sonia Levitin, in a long-ago, far-away shtetl, but is actually based on an incident which occurred in a present-day Southern California synagogue...
...Illus...
...Aaron is a good kid, who knows he's supposed to always remember to do God's commandments when he sees his tzitzit, but who sometimes forgets anyway...
...by Charles Robinson...
...in 1979, slightly more—but the total number of books is almost doubled...
...Levitin, Sonia...
...A contemporary setting is used for Carol Korb Hubner's book The Haunted Shut and Other Devorah Doresh Mysteries, which is designed to give Jewish children their own Nancy Drew, a teenaged heroine who solves mysteries—as does Kemelman's Rabbi Small— through the use of impressively sharp reasoning powers, honed on the intricacies of Talmudic study...
...Illus...
...Illus...
...The black and white illustrations by Thomas di Grazia complement the material, but the young rabbi at my temple may have made a good point when he said wistfully, "Economics notwithstanding, I wish they would use color in these Eastern European children's books...
...The goat dies with such fervor (for eight pages...
...by Raphael Soyer...
...In Spring/Summer 1979, 32 titles appear, of which 18 are fiction or folklore...
...STIBBTfTH F?H BCN ?JRDNIN SH3YRieC?R 44/Moment presented a problem...
...Selected Bibliography Aronin, Ben...
...and by the end of the tale, the residual Judaism of one has provided the catalyst for the fate of the other...
...Perhaps a little less conscious emphasis on message and a little more on the joy of storytelling would be in order...
...Illus...
...When such works take a negative approach, they teach us what is most desirable in a family or social relationship by showing us clearly and painfully what is most destructive...
...It is certainly proof positive that in literature, as in life, "there are many ways of being Jewish...
...But are there sufficient books of Jewish import to serve this most valuable purpose...
...the second is the Jewish Book Annual published yearly by the Jewish Book Council of the Jewish Welfare Board...
...by Elaine Grove...
...Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur...
...New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978...
...Born Ehrich Weiss in Hungary, Houdini was the fourth son of a rabbi who brought his family to Wisconsin while Ehrich was still a child...
...Hirsh's story espouses constructive interaction between Jewish and Gentile worlds, and, in this post-Holocaust era of Israel's fight for survival, advocates enlightened self-defense over passivity...
...Works may have maximum or minimum Jewish content, may be textbooks, paperback reprints, or even paper coloring or activity books...
...Set during the post-Armistice economic reverses of 1919, the story centers on a One Hundred and Thirty-Sixth Street neighborhood project designed to give Rosie Weinstein a wedding to remember even though her father has lost his job and can no longer afford a hall or caterer...
...He works out kashrut problems with his non-Jewish best friend, giggles over blessings he thinks are silly, and ponders the unfairness of rules that keep his often resentful sister from sitting with the men in shut or being called to read Torah...
...Her central character, Alec, 17, loves his girl, Felicia, and American music...
...White, Florence Meiman...
...The author, who based her novel on her own childhood experiences, was touched, gratified, and mostly amazed that a Jewish group had chosen her book despite its realistic and non-judgmental view of many Austrian Jews of that era...
...New York: Harper & Row, 1979...
...1979...
...Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1978...
...Illus...
...I've said it before: we cannot hope to reach children through literature with even the most exemplary of values unless we can first get them to read (and enjoy) the books...
...Now, to our great good fortune, the author's daughter and daughter-in-law have translated these six delightful tales and his son, Raphael, a well-known American artist/illustrator (see Singer's Young Man in Search of Love) has enlivened them with handsome pencil drawings (in black and white, of course...
...Rather, she is to prepare it while thinking of the fate of the Jewish people...
...These figures, while admittedly far from conclusive evidence, seem to indicate that, yes, there are increasing numbers of Jewishly concerned books for children...
...Another sequel, Carol Snyder's Ike and Mama and the Block Wedding, has Ike and his friends playing an active part as resourceful Mama, of Ike and Mama and the Once-A-Year Suit, again comes to the rescue...
...The Life of Harry Houdini...
...He's a businessman, she's a lawyer...
...In this respect, this book (for ages 12 up) is reminiscent of Lange's The Year (Phillips, 1970) which also showed Israeli life from the viewpoint of an initially unwilling American teenager...
...The best may be that of Yemima, courageous and clever, who outwits a wolf and outfoxes a fox, but the others— with themes of unselfishness, virtue, kindness and bravery—are equally enjoyable...
...and, Lori says, they are more like kids themselves than like parents...
...Although Jewish values of loyalty, courage and honor permeate the work, there was no commitment in the daily lives of the protagonists to Judaism, and no hint of Kiddush Ha-Shem as fraudulent baptism becomes the only viable means of escape...
...Both list titles with brief annotations...
...The 1972 Spring/Summer edition of Judaica Book News shows 18 titles, only eight of which are fiction or folklore...
...Am An Orthodox Jew...
...New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979...
...When the rabbi inexplicably chooses slow, awkward young Jacov for the great honor of blowing the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a great tumult ensues...
...The Adventures of Yemima and Other Stories...
...Hirsh, Marilyn...
...If not, can a negative approach create a positive "backlash" reaction in the reader's mind...
...The Devil in Vienna...
...Good, kind Tante Mashe is instructed by Elijah, clad in the garb of a poor fisherman, not to fry or bake the prize fish he has sold her to be used as a meal for the poor...
...And the stories do have moral content, often presented sardonically in Sholom Aleichem's wry manner...
...He startles everyone by wearing a strange round cap to the obligatory church service, and he warns Isaac against becoming a golem for evil masters in this cold new world...
...Eleanor, an immigrant stone carver, figures in Isaac's scheme to assure his security, but she proves defiant and troublesome...
...I could see the problem...
...His sister, Natasha, is crazy over color TV and ice cream...
...Beth's aunt is a fashion model who nervously juggles many men, worries about fever blisters and attends Shabbat dinners only under duress...
...In addition to the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) Award, an older recognition of achievement (now known as the Charles and Bertie G. Schwartz Juvenile Award) is presented yearly by the Jewish Book Council...
...Based on a traditional tale also found in Martin Buber's Tales of the Hasidim (Schocken Books, 1948), this is the saga of a poor old man who obeys a voice heard in a dream and goes in search of treasure supposedly buried under the bridge to the Royal Palace...
...Though I don't read Yiddish, I have read many Sholom Aleichem stories in translation and have included such stories in adult book discussion groups, so I was delighted to see Holiday Tales of Sholom Aleichem, selected and translated by Aliza Shevrim especially for young readers...
...The Treasure...
...Without sloppy sentimentalism, they try to deal honestly with recognizable people, complete with strengths and human frailties...
...Both find treasure and, more important, share with each other ways to improve life...
...The Ennead...
...Hirsh, Marilyn...
...Also, to what extent does a positive Jewish stance compensate for lack of literary excitement...
...Each generation makes the next one better...
...The captain learns from the rabbi the value of education and begins to teach his men the secrets of mentschlichkeit...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...Another in Greenfield's series on Jewish holidays, this book explains the essence of our most Holy Days simply and well, emphasizing the moral and spiritual implications inherent in being a Jew...
...True, we are professionally trained in evaluative techniques...
...If this is true for every librarian, how much more so it can be for those of us who tend the still under-cultivated fields of Judaica librar-ianship...
...Translated by Rebecca S. Beagle and Rebecca Soyer...
...Illus...
...A"S her parents flee Russia to save their sons from the Tzar's Army, Dvora, like my mother and aunt, fearfully wades rivers and slips across dangerous borders, and watches helplessly as the adults make decisions which will affect her life forever...
...The boy grew up in a Jewish milieu even after his father lost his post as rabbi and turned to teaching...
...The Empty Chair...
...Adapted and Illus...
...New York: Holiday House, 1979...
...by Uri Shulevitz...
...In Mindy Warshaw Skolsky's Carnival and Kopeck and More About Hannah, a humorous and nostalgic sequel to The Whistling Teakettle and Other Stories about Hannah, Hannah learns that living close to someone, even someone as special as her wonderful, story-telling Grandma, can lead to problems...
...The Haunted Shut and Other Devorah Doresh Mysteries...
...In this retelling of a Yiddish folktale, Aronin traces the origins of gefllte fish, a gastronomic invention inspired here by the prophet Elijah himself...
...by Luba Hanuschak...
Vol. 4 • November 1979 • No. 10
