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Action on the floor, Originally uploaded to Flickr by wkpspier


SHOW NOTES:

What's new in Jewish picture books? Follow me around the 2008 Book Expo America conference to listen in on publishers and authors talking about their new and forthcoming titles! I gathered so much audio that I'll be posting it over four episodes. Part 2 will be books for children and teens, Part 3 will be adult books, and Part 4 will be books (for all ages) relating to the Holocaust.

Part 1, Jewish Picture Books:

Tricycle Press
The Yankee at the Seder by Elka Weber

Marshall Cavendish
Cakes and Miracles by Barbara Diamond Goldin
The Hanukkah Mice by Steven Kroll
The Rabbi and the 29 Witches by Marilyn Hirsh

Tanglewood Press
The Miracle Jar by Audrey Penn

Sleeping Bear Press
A is for Abraham by Richard Michelson

Kar-Ben Publishing
Jodie's Hanukkah Dig by Anna Levine
Harvest of Light by Allison Ofanansky
Engineer Ari and the Rosh Hashanah Ride by Deborah Bodin Cohen
Sammy Spider's First Day at School by Sylvia Rouss
Sarah Laughs, Benjamin and the Silver Goblet, Miriam in the Desert by Jacqueline Jules

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Built By Angels by Mark Podwal

Blue Apple Books
Hanukkah Haiku by Harriet Ziefert

Holiday House
The Mysterious Guests by Eric Kimmel

Yale Strom, author:
The Wedding That Saved a Town by Yale Strom (Kar-Ben)

AUDIO:

Click the play button on this flash player to listen to the podcast now:


Or click MP3 File to start your computer's media player.

CREDITS:

Thanks to Yale Strom for permission to record and podcast his violin performance at Book Expo. Our regular background music is provided by The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band.

Books mentioned on the show may be borrowed from the Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel. (Or if they're too new to be in the library now, they will be once they are published!) Browse our online catalog to reserve books, post a review, or just to look around!

Your feedback is appreciated! Please write to [email protected]! Or even better, if you know of any new Jewish picture books I missed seeing at Book Expo, please post a comment!

In honor of Passover we have invited Irvin Unger, founder and CEO of antiquarian booksellers Historicana and publisher of the new edition of the Szyk Haggadah (which you will learn all about below), to tell us why this Haggadah is different from all the others.

Spring means renewal and, for Jews, around the world, it means Passover—the story of freedom. Specifically it recounts the Jews’ escape from the tyranny of the Pharaohs, but Passover speaks symbolically to the ongoing human need to control one’s own life. Jews use a book called the Haggadah to recount this story at a Passover dinner gathering—or Seder. There have been more than 3,000 Haggadahs created over the last millennium, reflecting the wide variety of countries and cultures that are home to the Jewish Diaspora.

As a former pulpit Rabbi who became a rare book dealer, I became aware of the art of Arthur Szyk (1894 -1951) nearly 20 years ago. Since then, I have been fascinated with this talented artist who devoted his life and his art to fighting injustice—first for the Jews of Europe and then for peoples all over the world. I first came to know Arthur Szyk’s work through his Haggadah. The original 48 water color and gouache images were done in his unique style of medieval illumination with deep colors and great detail and intensity.

Szyk was a Polish-Jewish artist, trained in Paris, who devoted a decade to creating his own Passover Haggadah during the time that Hitler rose to power. It wasn’t possible to have the books printed in Germany, but Szyk was able to secure a London-based printer and a noted Jewish-English scholar, Cecil Roth, to write a commentary on the book. Szyk settled in London in 1937, where he supervised the printing of the Haggadah.

Once the printing was complete, the Szyk’s family immigrated to Canada and then to New York, where Szyk became the most well known anti-Fascist political cartoonist in America, and perhaps the world. Having lived through the Holocaust, freedom was not merely an academic theory for Szyk—freedom was real, and he devoted his life’s work to supporting it. He said of his immense skills, “Art is not my aim, it is my means.”

I have spent the past two years securing the finest book artisans and materials available in the world to create and publish a new edition of The Szyk Haggadah. For the first time since its original printing in 1940, a new edition has been created using digital photography of the original artwork and digital printing to ensure that there are no intermediaries between the art and the printed page. This new technology has produced results that are stunning—colors are deep and true, edges are crisp and images leap off the page.

To do justice to the digital printing, I secured a world-renowned book binder to hand bind and edge the bindings with gilt, used Nigerian goat skins for the bindings, and had the gift box custom made and covered in Japanese rayon cloth. I am also working with a director to create a full length of documentary of the making of the Haggadah.

During this time, I have also worked with Jewish scholars to create a companion volume to The Haggadah containing essays that shed new light and nuance on the art and life of Arthur Szyk. It has been an honor and a labor of love to create this limited edition of The Szyk Haggadah, which will be delivered to the first subscribers in time for this year’s Passover celebration.

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Click the play button on this flash player to listen to the podcast now:


Or click MP3 File to start your computer's media player.

SHOW NOTES:

The Book of Life takes you on a virtual trip around the world for Passover!

> Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks discusses People of the Book, her fictional history of the Sarajevo Haggadah.

> Basya Schechter talks about her band Pharaoh's Daughter, which mixes world music and psychedelic rock with Middle Eastern sounds.

> Author Ilana Kurshan describes her compilation of translations, Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights? The Four Questions Around the World.

> If you like Ilana's book, you may also like 300 Ways to Ask the Four Questions from Zulu to Abkhaz by Murray Spiegel and Rickey Stein. It comes with a CD and a DVD to demonstrate the translations!

NEWS:

In our next episode we'll celebrate Israel@60! Don't miss it!

CREDITS:

Thanks to Dan Krimm for permission to use Ma Nishtana - The Blues Version! Our regular background music is provided by The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band.

Books and CD's mentioned on the show may be borrowed from the Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel. Browse our online catalog to reserve books, post a review, or just to look around!

Your feedback is appreciated! Please write to [email protected]!

As the genre of books on multicultural adoption grows in popularity, lists of such books, with sub-genres, are also proliferating. The Comeunity site offers book lists for kids and adults, along with other resources for adopting families. The AdoptShoppe site offers books specifically for kids from China, Korea, and Russia. Adopt Korea has a list for Korean adoptees. Adopt Vietnam has lists for fiction and non-fiction. Here’s another resource for kids’ multicultural adoption books and one of multiracial adoption books from PACT. Adoption counselor and author Betty J. Lifton writes on the subject, for children and for adults.

Multicultural adoptions have become so prevalent that an entire genre has emerged, for kids and parents alike. “One of the most frequent requests we have,” says Nicole Harvey of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, “is by adoptive parents of Asian kids looking for ways to orient their children to their birth culture.” She likes especially the complex and popular Cooper’s Lesson by Sun Ying Shin.

On our own PaperTigers, the genre is explored in a review of Three Names of Me and an interview with Cynthia Kadohata, Newbery award winner and an adoptive parent herself. Franki at A Year of Reading, also an adoptive parent, reviews Caroline Marsden’s When Heaven Fell. Scroll down for her interview with Rose Kent, author of Kimchi and Calamari, additionally reviewed and interviewed at PaperTigers. Cynthia Letich Smith’s blog Cynsations has a great list of books on multicultural adoption.

You don’t have to be an adoptee or adoptive parent to appreciate these books, of course. As our world becomes smaller and families more diverse, we all need inspiration and information from this vital field of children’s literature.