Excellence in Jewish picture books

I’ve been plagued by a thought for a while, and here it is: I’m dissatisfied with the Jewish picture books I’m seeing. They aren’t good enough.

Let me put it this way: I want a Jewish picture book that will win the Caldecott, not the Sydney Taylor Book Award. Let me be even more demanding: I do not want five books that are STBA level; I want one book that’s so good it can’t be passed over for the Caldecott, no matter what else has come out.

Hear me out.

I was shelving picture books and lamenting that Amy Schwartz, author and illustrator of 13 Stories about Harris and 13 Stories about Ayana, is no longer around to make her beautiful picture books. And as I thought that, I mused for about the thousandth time, at a conservative estimate, about how unJewish not only her books but also those of many of the best Jewish children’s book authors are. Here are some other particularly notable Jewish authors and illustrators of picture books, past and present: Ezra Jack Keats, Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak, Trina Schart Hyman, Anita Lobel, Arnold Lobel, Paul O. Zelinsky– shall I go on? Now, among all of these, we have scant titles that are very Jewish.

And I don’t really care about that, or not too much, for two reasons. The first reason is that the titles that those authors did create are so very, very good I feel confident they put forward the books that they needed to make. I feel no sense of loss, because what they made shone so brightly. Second, and more importantly, I think that much of what the brilliant author of this incisive article by Jesse Green, The Gay History of America’s Classic Children’s Books, said about gayness in early American kids’ lit could apply in terms of Jewishness. In a subtle way, it did come into some of those early books, through anxiety, marginalization, humour, and trauma, and when it was explicit, as in the case of Sendak’s illustrations of I.B. Singer’s stories and Trina Schart Hyman’s art for Eric Kimmel’s Hershel books, the quality was superlative, unmissable.

Further, in that period, there really were some giants who did work that’s been, I think, largely forgotten today, which is a shame not only because I think the work is staggering in its quality but because I think we can learn from the style. Uri Shulevitz illustrated Sholem Aleichem’s Hanukah Money, a vividly glorious book, a book beautiful in its dank ugliness, a book I can’t imagine anyone publishing today because where’s the plot? (It doesn’t need a plot. Plots are strictly optional.) It’s superbly, honestly human, and precipitates the reader into a world with the same distinctness as Canadians might recall from Roch Carrier’s Le Chandail de hockey. I can’t think of an American equivalent right now and have an inkling that this is an area where Americans might be missing out. As for Margot Zemach, though she did many books that were not at all related to anything Jewish, much of her notable work, including It Could Always Be Worse, came from Yiddish literature. (Modern Israeli author-illustrator Einat Tsarfati’s It Could Be Worse is absolutely stellar, and distinctly unJewish. This is absolutely fine. Not every book needs to be Jewish.) Hanukah Money and It Could Always Be Worse are examples of books you’ll almost certainly find in a good public library or maybe on an older relative’s bookshelf. Both are very shtetl, very Eastern European. And if you don’t know to look for them, they probably won’t find you.

In other words: through about the 90s, there were occasional Jewish picture books from Jewish authors and illustrators that were scintillating, published by mainstream publishers. A few are still around, others are harder to find. And some are in a style that go far beyond what the pedestrian story-arc-and-main-character books of today would do.

Today, we have fewer and bigger publishers. We are seeing a plethora of books published. And the Jewish books, by and large, are not Caldecott material; certainly there hasn’t been an explicitly Jewish Caldecott achievement (with the cautious exception of the 2009 Honor for Uri Shulevitz’s How I Learned Geography, very perhaps, depending on how you define “explicitly Jewish”) since Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins received a Caldecott Honor in 1990. That’s pretty measly.

And I wonder. The Jewish authors and illustrators are there, they’re doing good work. Sometimes they’re doing really, really excellent work and sometimes they’re doing good work and sometimes they’re doing subpar work, just like everyone else. But of their really, really excellent work, a lot of it isn’t Jewish, and the range of topics is slim.

Where is that slimness coming from? My best guess, and I think my best guess is a decent guess, is that we’re not pushing for excellence in Jewish kids’ lit; we’re pushing for being seen at all. For what’s called “representation.” My issue is that I’m selfish and demanding: I don’t want to be represented for the sake of being represented. I want good books. I want, in fact, excellent books overall, and I want a subset of those excellent books to be Jewish (and everyone else; I’m talking to Jewish stuff because that’s me, that’s all).

I said “we’re pushing for being seen at all.” Who is “we”? We, the audience. We, the parents and grandparents– and maybe the librarians and teachers, too. The people with the buying power. (Not the kids, by the way. The real crux of every issue in children’s book publishing, from quality to book bans and beyond, is that the true audience– the kids– don’t have the buying power. What do the kids want? They want to have fun, want to be challenged, want to enjoy their books.) Well, teachers and parents want something for their kids that’s Jewish, that ticks the representation box, and the mainstream publishers look and say, “OK, let’s do another Chanukah story.” (Or, worse, another historical fiction about the Holocaust. I’ll get there later, but I don’t want to get too angry too early here.)

I think kids deserve better. Note: I did not say Jewish children. I do not want a book “good enough” to qualify as representing Jewish children for Jewish children, patting them on the heads and saying, “You’re seen now.” I do not want books “good enough” to read for Chanukah in a classroom, assuming that the two kids over there are now included in the rest of the room. I want excellent books, end of story, period, for kids. And I want a subset of those to include Jewish stories. Note that Jewish history encompasses upward of 3000 years and we turn up all over the globe.

I’m not going to go into an analysis of recent Jewish picture books. For one thing, I don’t want to get into arguments about whether a given book is or is not really good, or… That’s not what I’m here for. My argument is, quite simply, that as readers we can and should look for better from publishers, overall, and publishers should seek more excellent books, including Jewish ones.

Why do I think that the current crop isn’t good enough, by the way? I’ve already linked twice to my previous piece on excellent books, and I’m linking again. It explains my standards. I read a lot of books. I read a huge number of picture books. And I know that I know about books. I simply think we could be doing better, because I read books and I know books. So I’m going to state below what we have quite enough of already, what I do not want to see more of, and then I’m going to go into what I think we could do differently.

What do I not want? I don’t want more holiday books right now. We have quite enough for Chanukkah, and, simply put, no Chanukkah books published since that 1990 Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins have been better than it, so if that manuscript submitted to you isn’t better, and you’re not planning on getting art by someone as good as Trina Schart Hyman (I won’t ask you to find better, since you can’t, she’s the pinnacle), then write back to that author and ask if they have a different Jewish story. If you must get one that’s linked to a holiday, make sure it’s a truthful, excellent story. See below.

If not about a holiday, what might a different Jewish story look like? It will not be Holocaust fiction!!! Publishers, hear me: We have other stories than Chanukah, the Holocaust, or Chanukah during the Holocaust. And here I’m going to repeat a paragraph, cut and pasted, from my earlier piece on excellent books:

If a book fails to tell a full truth to the audience, that will be discernible. That’s something I’ve talked about before, too. It’s absolutely key. You will sense the absence, swept aside. Silence is not absence and is not untruth: On the Trapline employs silence deliberately, a knife in the heart. Absence, elision, is often untruth.

Holocaust historical fiction is (almost always) untruth; it is (almost always) a lie to the reader. All those people unmentioned, off the page? We feel that absence, that elision. Be absolutely careful there.

This is what I, as a Jewish reader and Jewish parent, hear when I see nothing Jewish but Chanukah and the Holocaust: I hear that you have no idea who I am and you’re not interested.

Of the notable Jewish authors and illustrators mentioned above, two are actually Holocaust survivors, Uri Shulevitz and Anita Lobel. Anita Lobel and her younger brother were hidden and ran and hidden and caught and sent to concentration camps. I know this because, by word of mouth, I found out, astonished, that she’d written No Pretty Pictures, the memoirs of her life during the Holocaust in Poland, and I immediately found and read the book. Despite moving in children’s book circles for years, I had never heard of the book before. I have seen many historical fiction novels about the Holocaust, and heroic rescues, and the ghost of Catherine de Medici somehow helping rescue Jews– which I guess is ok to put in a book these days? But I hadn’t heard of these memoirs. I can only guess that they’re too uncomfortably real, whereas historical fiction puts it at a safe distance, because it’s an untruth, a safe lie. A way to represent Jewish tragedy without having to learn the galling truth. That’s why they’re safe to give kids. And safe for adults. Because adults– again, the ones with the buying power– don’t like fear and discomfort. Death is scary enough, but killing someone is far worse. Putting yourself in the shoes of the killer or the killed is horrifying, a sickening truth to have to get to know. I know, because I read the No Pretty Pictures. I felt I owed it to Anita Lobel, and I owed it to myself. I am not glad I did it; it was intensely painful, and gladness doesn’t enter into it. I am not glad that I read a book that was so clearly and unflinchingly delineated, so precise in its description of the suffering inflicted on real human beings, flawed non-innocents, real children, true people in all their living imperfection, that I was left shaking and nauseous when I finished, seeing my own children in my mind’s eye and desperately needing to hold them, to feel them alive. Because that is what the horror of the Holocaust was. It was sadism and murder and starvation. Why would I be glad to read it? Why would it be comfortable?

And why do you want to publish fiction about this?

I am, however, satisfied with having read the book. I can say, unequivocally: enough with the safe, untrue fiction. Only write fiction that tells a truth that nonfiction can’t. This goes so far beyond children’s books, of course. It’s a bigger issue. If you enjoy imagining Jews being killed and heroically saved, that is something you might think about interrogating. Here’s how to handle the Holocaust: You, the adult, should read actual testimony from survivors. You, the adult, should not hand pared down, sanitized versions to children. Just tell them the truth, be honest about what you’re omitting and why, and tell them to wait until they’re old enough to handle the full material. Publishers, teachers, and parents should note that not everything in the world needs to be turned into “a book about” in order to delegate teaching hard things to kids. You are allowed to have conversations.

As for interrogating why you turn to these topics repeatedly? I want to ask you to do just that, actually. And I want you to consider whether an integrally Jewish story could be excellent enough to read, even as a non-Jew. I think it can.

Here’s a story.

It is the first century of the common era and the Romans have laid siege to Jerusalem. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, seeing that the conquest of Jerusalem, which would surely entail the destruction of the Second Temple, is inevitable, recognizes that if the Temple, the very seat of Jewish practice, is destroyed without any other plan in place, Judaism itself is at stake. And so he makes a plan: he has himself smuggled out of the city in a coffin. It is a desperate act. He has himself brought to Vespasian, then a commander of the Roman army, and, after correctly prophesying that Vespasian will be made emperor, he is granted three wishes, and asks for the safety of the city of Yavne and for the school there, for all the students of Rabban Gamliel. He also asks for a physician to treat Rabbi Tzadok, who had fasted assiduously to save Jerusalem, though ultimately unsuccessfully. The school at Yavne ultimately saved and preserved Judaism; once the Temple was destroyed, the methods of Jewish observance tied to it were beyond reach, but Yavne and all the sages there saved our ability to be Jews.

There would have been no Jewish history as we know it after the Temple if it hadn’t been for the radical heroism of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and the steady, assiduous brilliance of the rabbis of Yavne who doggedly built a rooted, staggering corpus of Jewish learning that asks and answers questions Jews up until today study and discuss as we practice Judaism, even after the Temple establishment was smashed and looted by the conquering Romans, including that very Vespasian.

What of that is the rooted truth of history and what is storytelling and mythos? Does it matter? That is the story of us, of Jews: myth and drama and desperate cleverness and history, all rolled in one story that’s more than the sum of those bits and pieces.

Here are the steps. First, see excellence in a story; Second, write it. Jews? As you do that, perhaps, wonder: can there be excellence in a Jewish story?

Teachers, parents, book-buyers: Ask for better books. Publishers: Please, I’m begging you, no more dull, sappy schlock “about Chanukah,” or anything of the kind. No more. If you don’t have a real manuscript in your hand, an excellent one, one that demands of you that you find only the finest art for this one– look further! You’ll find one, I promise.

I don’t want to settle for less any longer.

I don’t want you to print me another one thinking it be considered, maybe, for the Sydney Taylor Book Award. That at least it’ll be representation.

I want you to think you’re going for the Caldecott. I want that for every book you acquire, and that should include the Jewish ones.

Don’t let’s make decent books. Let’s make brilliant, stupendous, fantastical, scintillating, laughing, feeling, excellent books.