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I had a good time creating these characters...a grandmother and her grand-daughter in the garden.

Continuing our Authors Remember Their Grandparents series, today we welcome Elisa Kleven to the PaperTigers blog with a beautiful piece about her grandmother.

Elisa has illustrated two picture books that are about a little girl Rosalba and her grandmother – Abuela and Isla, both written by Arthur Dorros (Dutton Juvenile 1991 and 1995). These are magical stories in which Rosalba and Abuela fly hand-in-hand over New York (Abuela) and over the Caribbean island where Abuela grew up (Isla), powered, as it were, by the flights their imaginations take thanks to the stories that Abuela tells and Rosalba loves.

And, as Elisa pointed out to me, “Two other of my own stories that mention grandmas are The Apple Doll, when Lizzy’s mom tells her that her own mom taught her how to make an apple doll, and my very early book, Ernst, which features a kind, loving crocodilian grandmother.”

Elisa has two books due out later this year, her own The Friendship Wish (Dutton Juvenile, due October 2011), and One Little Chicken written by Elka Weber (Tricycle Press, due August 2011), which she says, “takes place in a little Jewish village, probably something like a prettified, peaceful version of my grandma’s.” Her grandmother’s influence on her work becomes very clear in her piece below, and once you’ve read it, I’m sure you’ll be as glad as I am to know that Elisa is now working on a new picture book about her Grandma Eva, for she sounds a very remarkable person.

To find out more about Elisa’s work, visit our Gallery and read her interview with PaperTigers – and visit her website.

My Grandma Eva (and what she found in clay)

My mother’s mother, the aptly named Eva Art, was a sculptor whose magical ability to conjure vivid people and animals from clay has colored my own world view. Delicate, quick to laugh, sensitive as a bird, Grandma Eva could also be deeply melancholy. She didn’t like to talk about her past. When I would beg her to tell me stories about her childhood in a little Jewish village in Ukraine her mouth would tighten into a sad, tense line.

This much I knew: she was sent at age fourteen with her sixteen-year-old sister to work with relatives in a tailor shop in America, and she never again saw her parents or seven brothers – all lost to anti-Semitic violence.

Her sculptures, however, tell many stories. She discovered her gift almost by accident: as a fourth grader, my mom received the assignment given to all California public school children, then and now, which was to make a miniature model of a California Spanish Mission. Excited by the challenge, Grandma helped my mother carve a tiny mission from a bar of Ivory Soap – and hooray! – her passion for sculpting was born.

Grandma quickly moved from mission-making in soap to shaping figures with clay. As she worked her fingers through the oozy, cool cl

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Last week I was lucky enough to spend some time in San Francisco where one of the highlights of the trip was a day spent sightseeing with PaperTigers’ managing editor and producer Aline Pereira. Our first stop was the outstanding Asian Art Museum, one of the largest museums in the Western world devoted exclusively to Asian Art. We wandered though the three floors of amazing exhibits and got to watch master Japanese bamboo artist Tanaka Kyokusho demonstrate his bamboo art. Tanaka mixes traditional bamboo techniques with a contemporary sensibility to create a unique style of his own. His bamboo baskets are amazing works of art. While the adults watched Tanaka’s demonstration, kids got to try weaving a pattern with various materials such as paper and raffia.

Our next stop was the San Francisco library to see an exhibit of artwork by author/illustrator Elisa Kleven. Elisa, currently featured in our PaperTigers’ illustrator gallery, is appropriately described by Aline as being a master of imaginary worlds. Her artwork is simply stunning with bright colors and so much detail that the illustrations feel as if they are moving and jumping off the pages at you.

Aline (l) and myself (r).

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Click to enlarge the photos and you can see the original illustrator manuscript for Abuela plus a puzzle!
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I purchased a copy of The City by the Bay: A Magical Journey Around San Francisco (written by Tricia Brown, illustrated by Elisa) to bring home to my children. Here’s my daughter Emma reading it to our dog Riley and a close up of her favorite page - fireworks and the Golden Gate Bridge. Emma took this book to school for Show and Tell where it was quite the hit! The kids loved the illustrations and the challenge of finding the dog, cat and baby on each page. Check out our PaperTigers’ gallery to see more of Elisa’s work.
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Abuela doesn’t want to be called abuela, instead she wants to be called Mamá. Mamacita if you are afraid of her.

Even thought her husband the indio soldier already died, Mamacita still runs the house like military barracks. She shouts orders to her hijos and hijas, to the entenada who is nothing to her but lives in the house since her mother gave her away as a child, to her brother with sombrero, to the service girls who never go home, to the daughter-in-law who goes home only sometimes if she is granted permission, to the parrot before it got eaten by a rat, to the dog Loba tied on the roof, to the chayote plants growing wild in the garden. Mamacita, bellowing with the big drum of her belly, likes to give orders, and the house obeys.

This house, long like a chorizo, smells like carnitas fraying in the stove and candles lighting the Niño Jesus inside a glass box above her bed. But when Mamacita unties her braids at night, tired of giving orders all day long, what she longs for is the dusty smell of soldado indio. The bed feels so lonely since he left. The only thing her cama is good for now is turning around at night and for dreaming—dreaming that she is a child again and people call her Jirafa, giraffe with her long neck rising her eyes above the coffee fields where she works carrying sacks with the strength of a man. To Mamacita the world beyond looks misty and smell like pork.

But Mamacita stopped dreaming a long time ago. So long ago that her old birthday has already arrived and people now call her a pajarito; a little bird with her gray feather plastered to her skin and her hooked beak dipping weakly to the ground. Yet Mamacita likes birthdays almost as much as she likes giving orders, so shaking the flimsy feathers of her wings, she celebrate her pajarito birthday giving more orders. She is almost turning a 100, so her orders are a wish. With faint chirps that take her breath away, as the candles die out, she asks that the day comes for her to sleep with her soldado indio again. And like everyone else, the days obey.

Daniel J. Wallace, M.D., is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the David Gefen School of Medicine at UCLA based at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In The Lupus Book: A Guide for Patients and Their Families 3rd ed. Wallace provides an accessible guide to what can be a very confusing disease, providing up-to-date information and advice to living a happier life with Lupus. In the excerpt below Wallace looks at how marriages suffer when one spouse has been diagnosed with Lupus.

Darleen and George were happily married for 5 years when Darleen was diagnosed with SLE. George had grown up with learning difficulties and had had limited educational opportunities. Darleen tried to tell him what lupus was, but he didn’t seem to pay attention. When Darleen was put on steroids and gained 20 pounds, George made fun of her appearance. One night her joints were so swollen that she couldn’t even get into the car to go to George’s friends’ house for dinner. George said that her joints looked OK to him and started yelling at her. Over the next few months, George started drinking heavily and lost interest in sex. Darleen was scared to talk to him, and one day he just didn’t come home. (more…)

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