Deborah Heiligman is the author of almost thirty books for children, from picture books (fiction and nonfiction) to middle grade biographies and including Charles and Emma: The Darwin’s Leap of Faith (Henry Holt, 2009) and her first novel, Intentions (Knopf, 2012). Charles and Emma was the winner of the first YALSA Excellence in nonfiction award, a Printz honor, a National Book Award finalist, and an LA Times Book Prize Finalist.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): In your acknowledgements, you mention your long road to creating Intentions. What made you stick with it? What exactly is a book in a box?
Deborah Heiligman (DH): First the easy question!  A book in a box is exactly that—in my case it was a large plastic bin, the kind you might put blocks or tinker toys or Legos in. In fact, that’s what we had in that box before I stole it from the playroom for my book. I had been working on Kavanah (the working title) since the Clinton years, and I had so many drafts and research materials and notes, it overflowed my file drawer, so I put it all in the box. And it stayed in there, under my desk, while I wrote other books, many other books, and while the Lego builders grew up.

I never forgot about my book in a box, though. I would take it out once in a while, and noodle it. I talked about it, thought about it.  I moved the box from Pennsylvania to New York. I kept all the files on my computer, too—transferring it from computer to computer—three at least! It was a part of me, and it needed to be written. So I guess that’s the answer to your other question. I had to write it. It was a child that needed me to birth it!

But it underwent so many changes. Back in the 90s when I was working on it, it was set in the 1970s. I had a Holocaust subplot, a Viet Nam war protestor subplot, and it did not have a Randy subplot or a Jake backstory (being elliptical on purpose so as not to give anything away). I had more characters—a rabbi and a cantor; a mean best friend and a nice best friend. I had to give out a lot of pink slips.

TWM:  What was your greatest challenge in writing this book?
DH: The biggest challenge was overcoming my insecurity, really. I had written so many books, but not one novel, and it loomed large. I didn’t think I could write a novel. But it was finishing Charles and Emma, which one could call a nonfiction novel, that finally gave me courage. Notice I didn’t say the success of C & E, I said finishing it. Then my next greatest challenge was having the guts to publish it. I was scared it would be really controversial.

TWM: What was your greatest satisfaction?
DH: I wrote the book I wanted to write. Which is HUGE. And it is a book from my heart, my soul. Quite a satisfaction, really.

TWM: If you had to start from scratch right now, would you have done anything differently?
DH: I wouldn’t get in my own way. What I mean is, I would push through the insecurity faster. I hope I do that next time.

TWM: Intentions has great meaning for a Jewish audience, yet the book is published by a mainstream house. Can you talk about the strategy you and your agent used in placing the manuscript?
DH: I don’t think we really thought of it as a Jewish book, but as a book about a particular person in a particular world. That said, the editor who pounced (my agent sent it to maybe seven, some of whom rejected it), is Jewish. Not only that, but she went to Brown and concentrated in religious studies just like I did! (Though her specialty was early Christianity, and mine was Judaism.)

TWM: How important was your writing group/circle of writer friends to creating this book?
DH: My old writers group on Pennsylvania saw many pieces of it over the years. And my newer friends in New York read whole drafts, as did a few from my old group and even some far-flung friends. I also had readers from a class I took, and great encouragement from them and the teacher. The support was invaluable, as I think I make clear in the acknowledgments. (Does it sound like I’m shouting from the rooftop?)

TWM: The book starts off with a bang. How did that sanctuary scene come to you?
DH: A bang, so to speak. Hah. You know I can’t remember exactly how it came to me, but I knew I wanted Rachel to have a really upsetting experience in which her idol comes crashing down in a spectacular fashion. I was writing it during the Clinton-Lewinsky debacle and also during the Neulander trial. Remember the New Jersey rabbi who had his wife killed?  So I pretty much knew that what she witnessed had to be BIG. But guess what? For many drafts that scene was in the MIDDLE of the book. Too much leading up to it. Too much set up, back story. Then finally I realized that I needed to—as they say—start with an earthquake and build from there.

TWM: Did you debate about using strong language in the book or was it always clear that was Rachel’s language?
DH: Both. I wrote it as I thought Rachel would speak, and sold it that way, and then I worried about it. A lot. But I was the only one who worried. I had at least half a dozen conversations with my editor about the F-bomb. I remember three of her answers clearly. The first time I worried about it with her, she said, “We are putting 14 and up on the book. If you do, you don’t have to worry. You can do anything.” Another time I worried about it with her, she said, “Deborah, the F-bomb is the least of your worries.” Which was not, in fact, that reassuring! The last time we talked about it, she said, “I think you are focusing all your worries about the book on that word. If you want to take some out, you can. But I wouldn’t take them all out. It’s TRUE and REAL.” So at the last minute I did go through and I took out every instance where I thought it was gratuitous. I think I took out two. Maybe.

TWM: Do you have other novels in the works? What’s next for Deborah Heiligman?
DH: I am currently working on a nonfiction book about Vincent and Theo, those rollicking Van Gogh brothers. I have two picture books coming out next year: a nonfiction one called The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos,  Illustrated magnificently by LeUyen Pham; and the third in my series about Tinka, called Snow Dog, Go Dog, illustrated again by the terrific Tim Bowers. And YES, I have actually three novels—not in a box, but in files, and in my head. But Vincent first.

Please visit Deborah Heiligman’s website for more information.

A freelance illustrator and journalist, Yael Levy has been published in numerous venues, including The Jerusalem Post during her three-year stay in Israel just east of the bustling capital city of Tel Aviv.

She holds a degree in Illustration from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. But it’s the questioning journalist inside her that has launched a new career in writing literature. Her debut novel Brooklyn Love homes in on Levy’s interest in the underlying thoughts and expressions of the Orthodox Jewish culture.

A native New Yorker, Levy currently writes for The Times of Israel about her experiences as a Jewish mother now living in Atlanta. She is also studying for a Masters in Law at Emory University.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): How did you come up with the idea for Brooklyn Love?
Yael Levy (YL): I was writing freelance articles for City Lights, the weekend edition of the Jerusalem Post when my editor asked me for an article on how Orthodox Jews date. Thinking about how best to approach the project, I played around with different fictional characters and realized I couldn’t do the topic justice in one article — what I had to write, was a book!

TWM: Were there any obstacles in writing this novel? If so, how did you overcome them?
YL: Many obstacles came up writing this novel though working through them over the course of many years is what helped me hone my craft and skills as a writer. The first challenge was taking a first draft and then trying to figure out how to polish it so it would be ready for publication. This led me to taking classes at Gotham Writers’ Workshop, studying many books on writing, joining the Shomer Shabbat Children’s Book Writers’ & Illustrators group and volunteering for a few years in P.R. for their annual conference. I also formed an online critique group with some fabulous women I met through SSCBWI, and all of these experiences contributed to helping me grow as a writer and a person! Later, when the book was ready in terms of my writing, I had to learn how to present a very closed community to the broader American public. This led me to studying the romance genre and ultimately taking a one year mentorship with some of the top romance writers in the country. It was an amazing experience and while the process of becoming an author was very long and difficult– I am happy with the outcome.

TWM: The book includes several character viewpoints. How did you decide on using multiple points of view? How did you decide whose to use and when?
YL: I wanted to express a community, made up of people with somewhat different experiences, so it was important to show various viewpoints.

TWM: Did you have a favorite character? (I did.) Why?
YL:  I love Hindy because she is so kind…I wish I was a better person like that! I also love Suri — she is very complicated though has her reasons.
[TWM note: Hindy was my favorite.]

TWM: What was your greatest satisfaction in writing Brooklyn Love?
YL: When young adults tell me they read my book and that it has them thinking differently about relationships…If even one person makes a better decision in how she relates to others (especially in terms of dating!) then I feel all the years of very hard work was justified.

TWM: Your novel is layered with several themes — Holocaust legacy, ethics, career vs. learning, and more. Did you have these in mind as you wrote or did they come about organically?
YL: It was an organic process. I was compelled to express what it was like being a young adult and trying to find a spouse and pursue one’s dreams in the context of that community and ended up discovering how much all these other broader issues affected the lives of individuals.

TWM: What’s next for Yael Levy?
YL: I have two books coming out this year which are lighter romantic comedies, both with Crimson Romance:
A. Starstruck: What happens when a frustrated Jewish homemaker’s life (literally) collides with a soap opera star.
B. Touchdown: What happens when a difficult New York Jewish woman gets murdered on her wedding night, becomes a dybbuk and possesses the soul of a Southern football hero– refusing to leave only if he helps her break up the wedding between her fiance and the witch who killed her.

Then I plan to finish up a Women’s Fiction novel based on a memoir I’ve been working on (page one was a winner of the memoir contest on this blog!) although I’ve decided to craft it into fiction in order to be free to express what needs to be said. I’ve found trying to write a memoir to be stifling in terms of wanting to protect others’ privacies…so it is much easier to use that as a springboard for rich fiction.

Finally, I have a YA rom-com set in the same community as Brooklyn Love, about a religious teen who dreams of going to a prom, only she isn’t allowed to fraternize with boys, let alone dance with them!

I guess the theme that ties all my work together is that I enjoy writing about a much lighter side to Orthodoxy than is ever expressed in the media — and yes, there are American Orthodox teens who dream about going to a prom!

Visit Yael Levy at her website for more information.

You’ve now come to the final stop along the 2013 Sydney Taylor Book Award blog tour, the culmination of a full week of insightful and inspiring award-winning author and illustrator interviews.

Read about the blog tour and all 2013 Sydney Taylor Book Award blog posts.

The wrap-up and virtual roundtable

Imagine, if you will, all the award winners seated at a dais table with mics, poised to answer questions from the press. We have nine participants:

Sydney Taylor Book Awards

• For Younger Readers — Author Linda Glaser Hannah’s Way
  (illustrator Adam Gustavson was unable to participate)
• For Older Readers — Louise Borden, author of His Name Was Raoul Wallenberg
• For Teen Readers — Deborah Heiligman for Intentions
  

Sydney Taylor Honor Books

• For Younger Readers — Author Sheri Sinykin and illustrator Kristina Swarner for Zayde Comes to Live and author Linda Leopold Strauss for The Elijah Door: A Passover Tale (illustrator Alexi Natchev was unable to attend)
• For Older Readers — Author Ann Redisch Stampler and illustrator Carol Liddiment for The Wooden Sword: A Jewish Folktale from Afghanistan
• For Teen Readers — Author Doreen Rappaport for Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust

The seating’s a little crowded, but we’ve saved room just for you. The energy’s high, although we know this will be a somewhat long discussion — there’s so much to talk about!

We begin…

The Whole Megillah (TWM): Thank you all for joining us today and congratulations on your great achievement. Let’s just dive right in. What are your recommendations for great Jewish kids lit?

Kristina Swarner: Two very different books that I really loved as an older kid were Alan and Naomi, by Myron Levoy, and Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself  by Judy Blume. Two equally different and equally impressive picture books are The Golem by David Wisniewski and Joseph Had A Little Overcoat by Simms Taback—one spooky, the other joyful.

TWM: What trends do you see coming our way?
Ann Redisch Stampler: I see the world of Jewish children’s books as wide open.  I see publishers open to books that deal specifically with Jewish phenomena, such as Jewish holidays and worship, all the way to books with characters who happen to be Jewish, but whose Jewishness is not central to the plot or theme of the story.  Novels dealing with thorny problems and novels that are light and hilarious; fiction and non-fiction; prose and books narrated in verse; fabulous graphic novels; books that address topics like bullying that have tremendous relevance to American culture as a whole; and books that deal with topics that some would prefer to sweep under the rug, such as sexual abuse within our community; all have a place in our literature, and have found their way to publication and wide readership.

My advice to writers or people building book collections as regards trends would be fuhgeddaboutit.  Write what you’re moved to write; acquire books that speak to you and that you think are good.  (Although, as I respond to this prompt, I have a sudden vision of a really hot vampire in a kippah.)

Deborah Heiligman: I wish I knew! But I think librarians are going to be more important than ever. Because if we transition to more and more e-books and fewer bookstores (I am not saying I’m in favor of this!), the gatekeepers are going to be more crucial in getting the right books (in any format)  into readers’ hands. And I think that’s already true for Jewish literature for children and teens.

Doreen Rappaport: I cannot predict trends but I hope that publishers will seek out books reflecting the true multicultural world we live in to broaden everyone’s understanding of the beauty of our differences.  And I still love the feel of paper in books.

TWM: What are your next steps in your literary career?
Linda Glaser: Currently, I have two Jewish themed books under contract—a board book and a picture book. I’m very excited about both of them. Aside from that, I’m working on a bunch of other stories—in various stages of revision—hoping that some of them will eventually become books.

Rappaport: To continue to write books about people and events that challenge stereotypes and myths, that show children what human beings are capable of, and to introduce them to “not-yet-celebrated” people who fought against the odds and made a difference.

I am equally committed to meeting with children and adults in public and private schools and synagogues to talk about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. I have been incredibly gratified already when visiting schools to see how much interest and children have shown about this subject.

Heiligman: I have two picture books coming out this year. The first is a biography of Paul Erdos, the great Hungarian (Jewish) mathematician. It’s called The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos.  The other is a picture book, the third in a series, about Tinka our late great golden retriever. It’s called Snow Dog, Go Dog.  I plan to dedicate it to our new dog, a Cairn Terrier whom we named Ketzie. (Yes, I know that Ketzeleh means little cat. We didn’t know that when we named her that—it’s a term of endearment in our family. She’s a great dog who might need therapy to deal with her name.)  I am working on a nonfiction YA about Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo. On the side I’m also working on a novel that has strong religious themes. I probably shouldn’t say more than that.

Louise Borden: Publishing is in a huge sea change right now but people will always want to read good stories regardless of the format. I’m grateful to be working with some terrific and encouraging editors. I’m researching two new projects, both set in France during World War 2. One may be fiction and the other may be nonfiction.  Things are still evolving in the structure of these books. The audience will probably be grades 4 to 6 for both books. One of these books involves escape and courage and I’ve written 40 beginning pages using the first person voice. The other project is still on the back burner of my desk while I’m gathering more research. No first draft yet! I only work on the text of one book at a time but sometimes do beginning research for something that I’m hoping to write about. I’m also working on a manuscript for very young readers. AND. . . I’m continuing to speak in schools to students about the creative life, the writing process, and how I work as a writer.

Swarner: As long as I keep getting great stories to illustrate, I’m happy! I’d like to write and illustrate my own book at some point, once I’ve built up my courage.

Stampler: I’ve been moving into new areas as a writer, and it’s been challenging and fun.  Drawing from folklore beyond my own tradition is new for me, and I’ve just published a picture book that isn’t a folktale, a cat story set in modern-day Tel Aviv, The Cats on Ben Yehuda Street (Kar-Ben, 2013).  I don’t seem to be able to escape completely from some of the conventions of folktales, but writing a picture book with a story I actually made up, taking the story wherever I want it to go, has been wonderful! My first novel, Where It Began (Simon Pulse, 2012) published last year, and I’m in the process of revising the second. So I guess my next steps are to explore new traditions in folktales, to be open to writing picture books that aren’t folktales, and to continue to write novels that explore more facets of the modern teenage experience.

Carol Liddiment: At the moment I am working on the illustrations for a book called Rabbit’s Revenge. This is to be the first children’s book ever to be published in Nyungwe (The language of Mozambique ). As Mozambique has a population of around 400,000 people I am amazed at this situation, and very honoured to have been chosen for this project.

TWM: What insights did you get into Jewish life as you wrote/illustrated your book?
Glaser: I was inspired to write Hannah’s Way after reading a small anecdote in a museum exhibit in Minneapolis called “Unpacking on the Prairie: Jewish Women in the Upper Midwest.” The entire exhibit, gave me tremendous insight and respect for the Jewish women who came before us and paved the way for a much more comfortable life for the rest of us. I think of Hannah’s Way as part of their legacy.

Heiligman: I read a lot of books while I was working on Intentions, and I talked to many people, most especially three rabbis (whom I thank in the acknowledgments). I learned about the concept of kavanah and I thought a lot about forgiveness and atonement.  I think Jews are much more about atonement and Christians more about forgiveness, but those two things are two sides of the same coin. Since I wrote the book I feel like I have been living with much more kavanah than ever before.

Rappaport: I learned about the incredible tight-knit world of the shtetl and of the variety of Jewish experiences during the twentieth century up to the Holocaust.  I became more connected to understanding my own “variety” of being Jewish and feeling a new pride in Jewish accomplishment. I have always understood the importance of “the book” and learning for Jews, but I marveled upon learning that even in the ghettos and camps, starving and weakened Jews were writing their histories and teaching their children their heritage. I remembered in the 60s the incredible pride that my black friends felt when the stories of African-American resistance, resiliency and accomplishment finally appeared in books.  I felt similar pride when uncovering the courage and inventiveness of the Jewish resisters.

Borden: Reading about the suffering of Jewish families in Budapest during World War 2 was quite heartbreaking and overwhelming at times. Separation, deportation, death and survival. In a small way, as I worked at my desk, I was a witness to their suffering as I read deeply and widely about this time period in Hungary. Such courage of Hungarian Jewish families during these desperate and evil times!

Stampler: The Wooden Sword (Albert Whitman, 2012) is the first folktale I’ve worked on that comes from outside my own tradition.  My family is mostly from Eastern Europe; the version of The Wooden Sword I loved comes from the Jewish community of Afghanistan.  The opportunity (and necessity) to learn about centuries of Jewish life in Afghanistan gave me a deeper appreciation of the tremendous diversity of Jewish traditions, and of some of the commonalities that bind us together.

Sheri Sinykin: I knew nothing about the Jewish view of the afterlife when I set about to write this book for my child-self, who was terrified of my mother’s impending death.  As I read about and interviewed several rabbis, I became more peaceful about the circle of life.  I hope this emotional shift has been reflected in the text of Zayde Comes to Live.

TWM: Let’s talk about the award itself. What does the Sydney Taylor award/honor mean to you?
Glaser: Awards are wonderful affirmations—especially big ones like the Sydney Taylor Award. I’m deeply grateful to the Sydney Taylor Award Committee for selecting Hannah’s Way. I honestly hadn’t expected it. As you know, there are so many wonderful Jewish children’s books published each year. So I am thrilled that Hannah’s Way has received this honor. I put my heart into the story. And I hope that because of the award, Hannah’s Way will reach many hearts.

Heiligman: This Sydney Taylor Award means more to me than I can even say. But I will try! I’ve been working on Intentions for almost two decades, off and on. (It used to be called Kavanah, by the way.) There were many reasons why it took me that long to finally finish it and (thankfully!) get it published. One of my biggest challenges was the character of the rabbi, as you can imagine.   I wanted to show that moment in a kid’s life when her idol (in this case a rabbi) falls off of his pedestal and threatens her faith and her belief in the goodness of people. But I wanted to do so in a way that was realistic and not offensive. I needed to portray a flawed rabbi, but I didn’t want him to be one dimensional. I wanted the reader to come away with the insight (among other things) that good people can make mistakes, that there is a lot more gray to life and to every person than we want to believe, and that we can go on after that realization. I wanted to write a portrait of a flawed rabbi that was honest and nuanced.  But I was really concerned that I would offend people in the Jewish community. I kept talking with my rabbi friends and my editor (who, like me, is Jewish and majored in Religious Studies at Brown) to make sure that I was showing a rounded picture of this moment. Growing up, my Judaism, my Jewish life, meant so much to me and gave me such joy and happiness, that I wanted that to come across in Rachel’s life, too. So this award is such validation and affirmation, that when I heard about it—Aimee can testify to this!—I cried. With joy and with relief.  Then my husband and I celebrated with a dinner of  bagels and lox— and Veuve Clicquot!

Rappaport: First of all, it’s wonderful to be honored by librarians who are the lifeline to books for all our children. It means that I successfully found a way to communicate by the written word this important and still too neglected subject of Jewish resistance.  The AJL committee has honored not only my work but the incredible people, including children, whom I wrote about.

Borden: I feel that Raoul Wallenberg’s life story and moral compass has been affirmed by people who care deeply about literature, Jewish life, and  young readers. Thank you for this great honor. I hope that my writer’s voice will add to the conversation among students about standing up against evil. Yes, one person can make a difference in the world. There are many terrific books that have not received awards this year. . .I applaud those books as we all work together in the children’s book field to bring stories of courage, hope, and universal meaning to young readers.

Liddiment: Ann, Abby ( editor)  and myself all worked extremely hard on this project. Winning awards is obviously a nice recognition that all that hard work was appreciated.

Stampler: This award is like an encouraging voice, saying that I can  move successfully into folklore that resonates for me, beyond the boundaries of Eastern Europe.  I don’t plan to abandon tales from my own tradition, but I feel encouraged to reach beyond borders in ways I hadn’t fully embraced.

Sinykin: The Sydney Taylor Honor Award means respect and professional validation after over twenty years of publishing in relative obscurity.  I am humbled and grateful to be recognized for this book, in particular. I always hoped Zayde Comes to Live would be a source of hope and healing for young children, as well as a bridge to a difficult, inter-generational conversation. This award helps shine a light on one path to that painful but necessary discussion about death.

TWM: And now for the final question for today’s discussion: Will anything be different now that your work has been recognized by the Sydney Taylor Book Award?
Heiligman: I hope that I will be able to speak with Jewish teens about this book and the questions and issues it raises. During the writing of the book I visited one of my rabbi friends and sat in on his confirmation class. He’s so wonderful with them, and they were so honest with him, I kept thinking: these are my readers. I was jumping up and down inside. I hope that as the book becomes better known (which this award will help happen, thank you so much!) I will be able to hear what Jewish teens are thinking and feeling, and talk with them about how they are dealing with growing up Jewish today.

Rappaport: Since the book was published, I have received many emails from strangers thanking me for writing this book.  Relatives of Jews who were murdered or survived have thanked me for giving them and their children these stories so the world could know not only the nightmare of the Holocaust but the courageous and inventive ways Jews rescued themselves and other Jews. The award will help my book reach a larger audience in both the Jewish community and in all communities. The events and people I wrote about need to be shared and integrated into the study of world history. The people I wrote about are heroes whom children and adults need to learn about and cherish.

Borden: On the long days at my desk, I will feel the gracious presence of Sydney Taylor and the community of Jewish libraries cheering me on. Thank you for your belief in Raoul, in his courageous work on behalf of those in need, and in my work.

Sinykin: Who can say what the future will bring?  But I do hope my novel, Saving Adam, about a Jewish family in crisis in 1963, might be looked at with fresh “editorial eyes” now that my work has been honored with this Sydney Taylor Honor Book Award for Younger Readers.

Linda Leopold Strauss: There’s one thing that I hope will be different.  I learned as I was presenting The Elijah Door in schools that today’s young children are almost totally unfamiliar with the shtetls of Eastern Europe.  Although it wasn’t my conscious intention in writing the book, I hope The Elijah Door (and the attention brought to it by the Sydney Taylor honor) will introduce these children to a culture and traditions too rich to be sacrificed and forgotten.  And for those Cincinnati-area readers who want to have their memories refreshed,  Alexi Natchev’s remarkable original hand-colored woodcuts of the village and villagers in The Elijah Door are currently on display at Hebrew Union College’s Skirball Museum.  Alexi will be at the closing of the exhibit on March 31 and will discuss and demonstrate his woodcutting techniques.  The event is family-friendly, free, and open to the public!

The Whole Megillah thanks each of you for participating in this roundtable discussion. Readers, please check out the preceding blog tour and get to know these winners and their works even better — their techniques, their approaches, their inspirations. And thanks to all the wonderful bloggers who volunteered their time and space to interview these Sydney Taylor Book Award winners.

Louise Borden is the recipient of the 2013 Sydney Taylor Book Award for Older Readers for His Name Was Raoul Wallenberg. She found the time to share her story with The Whole Megillah while moving.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What attracted you to telling the story of Raoul Wallenberg?
Louise Borden (LB): Growing up, I’d never heard of Raoul Wallenberg. Then in the 1980s, when his name appeared a few times in the press (and I read a biography of RW by Kati Marton),  Raoul became my hero. Some years later, after I began writing books for young readers, I carried a hope that I would write his life story and share his remarkable legacy with kids. In my nonfiction projects, I’ve written about individuals who have made a difference in the world. People like the Wright brothers, John Harrison (of longitude fame), Bessie Coleman, and Margret and H. A Rey. Raoul Wallenberg fascinated me because of his childhood in Stockholm, his schooling in America, and his bold actions on behalf of others. He was an individual with a true and deep moral compass. I can’t imagine our world today without these inspiring people . . . and by writing about RW, I could enter the times and be a witness to his courage and compassion. Many years ago I kept hoping for his safe return from the Soviet Union.

TWM: What led you to write about him in verse?
LB: All of my books — more than two dozen of them — are written with the same style of broken lines. I like white space combined with text. I hope that even my books of nonfiction have a narrative cadence to them. The sound of writing is important to me and I work very hard to make each word count and each word contribute to the rhythm of the line. Achieving spareness when writing about a complex subject is a real challenge for me!  I think that kids can understand complex subjects (longitude, Hungary’s situation during WWII, etc.) when the lines are not lost in dense paragraphs.

TWM: What was it like to meet with his family?
LB: As I was beginning my research, I learned about the wonderful RW Committee in Ann Arbor that annually awards a medal to a person who has made a difference in the world. Through them, I was given addresses. I wrote to Nina Lagergren, and also to Nane Annan and sent them some of my books.  I met with Nane in NYC, and several months later met Nina  and Gunnar in Stockholm (my first of three trips). Later I would meet Guy von Dardel and his wife Matti in Geneva, and also spent a day in Paris with Louise von Dardel, Guy’s daughter. We toured artists’ studios in her neighborhood and had an amazing day. RW’s family were welcoming and kind and always, encouragers. Very few books have been written about Raoul for young readers and his family feels that his legacy should be shared with the coming generations.

I spent time alone with Nina in Stockholm, touring RW’s old addresses. . . talked with Gunnar and Nina at their home about their time in Berlin during 1944, various events in WWII, etc.  In RW’s life story, there were so many names, and dates, and a complicated chronology to sort through. I read many books about Raoul (some contain inaccuracies) and also attended a fascinating symposium in Budapest about Raoul, attended by Hungarian and Swedish scholars. (This was when Nina carried the flag from the Swedish Legation back to Budapest from Stockholm. Seeing that flag first hand was unforgettable.) Spending time with Raoul’s beloved sister and brother was incredible. . . such amazing individuals! I feel so lucky, and have connected with Nina in a lovely friendship.

Also —  hearing in Nina and Gunnar and Guy’s own words about these long ago events was a rich and important source for my research. I’m so sad that Guy was never able to see the finished book. Gunnar saw some of the early drafts of the manuscript before his death, and we discussed a few corrections. Meeting Raoul’s family has changed my life.

TWM: What were your greatest challenges in researching and writing the book?
LB: Raoul’s story is indeed inspiring but it is set in a very complicated landscape. And in a time which seems like ancient history to most American kids. I had to understand the political events and issues such as neutrality, Hungary’s alliance with  Germany, etc. and then tell the story in a clear and compelling way that kids could understand. I’d written other books about this time period, set in Europe, so that prior knowledge and reading helped. I have boxes of files, photos, letters, and many books that I’ve gathered over the years of research. I wish I could speak and read Swedish!  And Hungarian!  Nane provided a translation for a charming book about RW’s childhood written by Maj von Dardel. First hand accounts and letters are so important in giving a writer details that are crucial to good storytelling. I was a bit daunted by the task — and had chosen a long writing journey. At one point I told my husband how hard it was for me — reading about the atrocities committed in Budapest and the plight of Jewish families.  And he replied :  “Think how hard it was for the people you are writing about.”  And so I kept all of these courageous people by my side as I typed away at my desk: RW and his colleagues, and thousands of unknown Jews in Hungary.  They were my encouragers.  I was telling their important story. And my editors at Houghton Mifflin were also my great encouragers. They believed in the book as I did.

And of course the last section of the book was very difficult: RW’s tragic disappearance. I wanted to give an accurate picture without overwhelming my readers with all the conflicting and contradictory information which has layered the story for many decades.

TWM: What were your greatest satisfactions?
LB: When I received my first bound copy from my editor, I removed the jacket to see RW’s distinctive and important signature. In my mind, it so defines the book. And after I sent a copy to Nina, she called me to say how pleased she was. That was a huge satisfaction.  And teachers telling me that their students had read the book and had claimed Raoul as their hero! Receiving the Sydney Taylor Award was a thrill and a surprise. . . not the award so much as the fact that others in the children’s book field believed in the book as readers. . . and understood how important RW’s legacy is. I usually write the book that I want to read — but that hasn’t been written yet.  So always holding that bound book in my hand is exciting. I open it, and turn the pages and become the reader. There it is — the book that I’d been hoping to find with all the information that I wanted to know. After working in children’s publishing for more than 20 years, it’s still startling to see my name on the jacket.

TWM: How was the photo research done?
LB: The book was originally to be illustrated — by a wonderful Danish artist who had lived in Copenhagen during the German occupation. But after a wait of three years, he was unable to do the project due to his age and the death of his wife. We had intended to have a six page spread of a timeline at the end of the book – using tiny photos.  So after a discussion with my editor, I went through many photos (in my boxes!) and created a large dummy book, with photos on various pages. I xeroxed photos in different sizes, etc. I even inserted blue pages in the dummy to separate the sections as a design idea.  I made several of these dummies and carried them with me during my travels as I commuted between Cincinnati and DC.  I kept revising the text and adding new photos, etc. It was an exciting but as I said earlier, a daunting process.  Because once we had chosen the photos we liked best, THEN I had to go out and get permission.   Obtaining the Hazai Bank photo is a story in itself! Whenever the photo permissions got overwhelming, again, I thought of the thousands in Budapest, and I kept persevering.  This was the first time I’d ever been involved in getting photo permissions. It’s a tedious process. The book about Margret and H. A. Rey involved choosing scans from the de Grummond Collection but nothing on the scale of this book about RW.

TWM: Did anything surprise you during the research, writing and/or production of this book?
LB: I just kept taking small steps.  One by one. This is how many of my books unfold. First the hope to write the book. Then background reading — my “gatherer” stage.  Then travels.  Wonderful surprises happened: randomly meeting a Michigan classmate of RW’s, being able to meet family members, attending the symposium in Budapest ( I went to this beautiful city twice), and totally by chance, meeting Elena Anger (Per’s widow) in Stockholm when I was with Nina one afternoon. What are the chances?  I also was able to speak with Tom Veres’s widow on the phone almost ten years ago, shortly after Tom had died. And I met Gabor Forgacs in Budapest and Andy Nagy in Ann Arbor. These were unexpected connections to the story , connections that I treasure.  Another great surprise:  staying at the Esplanade Hotel in Stockholm — the same building where Kalman Lauer and RW, and also Iver Olsen, had their offices!   The design team at HMH came up with the idea of the flags. . . very cool. Another surprise:  Walking near Dupont Circle one day, talking with my sister (who had been to the symposium with me in Budapest) on my cell phone and looking up and seeing I was standing by a house where Carl Lutz (Swiss consul)  had once lived! Serendipity! It seemed to follow me many places and renew my writer’s faith.

TWM: What advice would you have for writers of nonfiction in verse?
LB: All of my books are written in a similar style of broken lines.  I hope that even my books of nonfiction have a narrative cadence to them.  The sound of writing is very important to me.

This style is like my fingerprint as a writer although I’m not sure it’s for everyone. Many more children’s book writers are using this structure  both in fiction and nonfiction. I was very fortunate to have the legendary Margaret K McElderry as my editor for 13 books. She allowed me to write with broken lines in my nonfiction as well as my fiction. MKM was born in 1912. The same year as Raoul!  Although I wrote the book for Houghton Mifflin, and signed that contract shortly after MKM retired from Simon and Schuster, she was aware of the project and, like Nina Lagergren, was a great encourager. Again, I’m only sad that the book was delayed a few years and so I was unable to hand Margaret a bound copy.

Recently — because it has become a small trend —  I’ve seen books that use this structure of “prosetry” as a librarian friend of mine calls it but the text lacks a poetic quality. Perhaps those books would have been better written in more traditional paragraphs. Not every reviewer or librarian is going to like (or understand) this style. Someone (an adult) asked me last summer why I wrote RW with such short sentences. I wanted to tell her to go read a really wonderful book on writing recently published by Verlyn Klinkenborg called Several Short Sentences about Writing.  I found it to be a wise, and affirming book. It’s one of my new favorites to share with other writers. Also a book called Telling True Stories — it’s a great book for nonfiction writers, whether you write in verse or not. I didn’t really think that my books were told in “verse”. . . then one day I saw that The Journey That Saved Curious George was shelved in the poetry section of a library! That was a shock!

I would tell writers to always read their work aloud and to look at books with this structure to see if it fits seamlessly with their voice. Voice is so crucial . . . and so individual. You can hear a strong voice when it is there in the text.  It sometimes takes me awhile to find the right voice when I’m starting a book. I would tell writers to be patient, and to trust the emotional heart of their texts. Somehow the right voice for that piece of writing will emerge.

About Louise Borden

Louise Borden is the author of more than two dozen published picture books, with several currently in production. A history major in college, Borden attended Denison University. A 2005 nonfiction title and ALA Notable, The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H. A. Rey (illustrated by Allan Drummond), involved groundbreaking research in France and the use of primary sources from the Rey archives at the De Grummond Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Contemporary school classrooms, the winter landscape of Holland, Boston on the eve of the American Revolution, a submarine lost on patrol in the Pacific, and the rescue of soldiers at Dunkirk appear in Borden’s fictional books about ordinary people who become heroes. She has also written biographies and nonfiction.

A lifelong reader, Louise has spoken about the writing process in more than 600 schools across the country as well at conferences.

In 2008, Louise appeared in a documentary on Dunkirk that aired on the Weather Channel. She has also been interviewed by The New York Times, USA Today, The Writer magazine, the BBC, and NPR.

Louise and her husband Peter have three grown children, and four grandchildren. The Bordens have recently returned to Cincinnati, OH after five years in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): When did you know you wanted to write?
Jordan Sonnenblick (JS): Oh, I’ve known forever.  Everyone on my mom’s side of the family was a writer, and I wanted in!  My maternal grandfather, Solomon Feldman was an especially huge influence.  He was a high school biology teacher by day, and wrote biology textbooks by night.  I grew up and became an English teacher who wrote novels after the kids went to bed.

TWM: What writers have inspired you?
JS: My two biggest influences were Frank McCourt (who was actually my high school creative writing teacher before he became famous) and Kurt Vonnegut. Both  wrote very funny books about bitingly sad topics, and I have tried to emulate that aspect of their work.

TWM: What goes through your head when you write? You’re known for achieving emotional depth – do you consciously think about how you want your readers to feel?
JS: Not really.  I try to hear my character’s voice in my head and tell the story that comes.

TWM: How did you come up with the idea for Curveball?
JS: I have a son who is now in high school.  When he was in middle school, his two biggest worries were A. whether he would fit in in high school, and B. that he would get an athletic injury and be unable to play high school sports.  Essentially, Curveball is my attempt to allay my son’s worst fears by showing him that even if part “B” came true, he would still be okay.

TWM: Are you a photographer? How did Pete’s alternative “career” come about?
JS: When I came up with the basic idea for Curveball, I was not a photographer.  However, my Grampa Sol, who had been very much a photographer, had just passed away.  I spent several months learning everything I could about photography.  I even went out, spent thousands of dollars on a great camera and fancy lenses, and shot my son’s basketball, baseball, and soccer seasons as research for the book.  That became part of my mourning process, and of course my grandfather made his way into the book via the character of Pete’s grandfather.

TWM: Tell us about your research for the book. How did you work with the staff at Phillipsburg High School?
JS: I spent a day there, which was a ton of fun.  I sat in on a journalism class and a yearbook work session, and followed the yearbook photographer around the building as he shot a bunch of posed and candid photos.  I also asked some followup questions afterward, via email.  The kids and teachers were great.

TWM: Did you experience any special challenges in writing this book?
JS: Not really.  Of all my books, this may have been the most enjoyable.  The photography part, especially, was lovely, because I felt I was retroactively growing to understand my grandfather by learning a skill he had possessed.

TWM: The day Pete had to dissect the pig and he ate a pork sandwich – how did that part of the plot come about? What reaction were you hoping to get from your readers? From your Jewish readers?
JS: I hadn’t been consciously thinking as a Jew at all when I wrote those parts.  I don’t keep kosher, and never have.  Also, Peter Friedman is named after a (Jewish) childhood friend of mine who also ate pork culturally, so the Jewish angle of having the character of Peter Friedman eat pork or dissect a pig didn’t even cross my mind.  And when I was a high-school freshman in bio class we dissected a pig.  That part came up in the plot for the high-school realism, rather than for any Jewish culture-clash.

TWM: What was the inspiration for Grampa and his challenges with Alzheimer’s?
JS: Grampa Sol again.  In real life, he died at 98, but suffered from vascular dementia, which in his case was much, much slower than Alzheimer’s.  He began to forget things in his late 70s, and was essentially not there at all by 92 or 93.  Many of the incidents in the book are only slightly changed from how they played out with my grandfather.  Those parts were painful, yet cathartic, to write.

TWM: Did writing Curveball differ in any way from writing your previous novels?
JS: The biggest difference was in the amount of actual, physical research I did.  Then there was also a stylistic challenge.  I feel that the photographic aspects made me think more metaphorically about the freezing of time, snapshots, et cetera.  Also, there are the three snapshot sections of the book, which are told in third person.  I had never written in anything other than first person before, so there was a bit of a stylistic stretch for me.

All in all, I felt great about the growth experience of writing the book.

About Jordan Sonnenblick

Jordan Sonnenblick was a public school teacher for 14 years, but always wanted to be a writer, so one day in 2003 he sat down and started his first young adult novel, Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie, which was published by Scholastic in 2005.  Jordan was as surprised as anybody when the book took off. It received several starred reviews, was named to the American Library Association’s Teens’ Top Ten List, sold more than 450,000 copies, and has been translated into 12 foreign languages.  Jordan followed Drums with five more acclaimed books for teens: Notes from the Midnight Driver,  Zen and the Art of Faking It, After Ever After, Curveball: The Year I  Lost My Grip, and Are You Experienced?

Jordan has also written the Dodger and Me trilogy of funny fantasy books for middle-grade readers, which includes Dodger and Me, Dodger for President, and Dodger for Sale, all published by Macmillan.  His website is the cleverly-named www.jordansonnenblick.com.

Maryann MacDonald is the author of the newly published Odette’s Secrets (Bloomsbury), the story of a young Jewish girl in France forced into hiding during World War II.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What drove you to write this book in verse?
Maryann MacDonald (MM): When I first sat down to write Odette’s Secrets, I tried to write it as straight biography.  This seemed too dry.  Then I remembered that Odette loved poetry.  She believed the beauty of poetry was one of the things that helped her to survive her experience in the Vendee.  She married the poet Bert Meyers and later in life, wrote poetry herself.  So, I began writing her story in first person in free verse, trying to find the childhood voice of Odette, a poet-to-be.

At this point, since I was imagining Odette’s voice, the work became fiction, although I did not make up any of the events mentioned in the book.  What I did was add detail, such as giving Odette’s doll a name, and putting into words conversations alluded to in her memoir.

TWM: Did you feel at any time that an editor/publisher might say, “We don’t want any more Holocaust books?”
MM: Of course!  But I was convinced this was a Holocaust story with a difference.  When I learned the surprising fact that 84 percent of French Jewish children survived the Holocaust, I wanted to know how this had happened.  I learned that a majority were hidden, forced as Odette was to reinvent themselves and often “hide in plain sight” in order to survive.  How on earth were young children able to do this so successfully, I wondered?  And how did they readjust to their true identities after the war was over?  This was the Holocaust story I hadn’t heard before, the story of resourceful children displaying resilience and courage in the face of extreme danger.  This was the story I wanted to tell.

TWM: How important was it for you to be in France and retrace Odette’s footsteps?  How did a knowledge of French help?
MM: I’ve always been a Francophile.  Paris is so beautiful, yet has witnessed so much ugliness.   Many of its buildings still bear the scars of WWII.  I guess I’ve always wanted to understand better and come to terms with the evil things that took place in France during the wartime period.   So I did a lot of reading before I began writing this book, and explored the city asking questions.  I did the same after I discovered Odette’s memoir, reimagining what had happened in her life, both in Paris and in the countryside.   A knowledge of French came in handy for these tasks.  My French also helped in my research, especially in the countryside, and in talking to the Raffins, the family that had hidden Odette in the Vendee.

I wanted to see things, as much as I was able to, through Odette’s eyes.  I wanted my story to be as true to hers as I could possibly make it.  For these reasons, it helped me a great deal to be in the place where the story happened.

TWM: Is this book a departure for you?  What obsessed you so much about Odette’s story?
MM: I don’t think of this book so much as a departure as a progression.  I have always been interested in children’s responses to their difficulties.  A former editor of mine once asked me, jokingly, “Do you specialize in trauma?”  But without a problem, it seems to me, you haven’t got a story!  So all of my books, although they may perhaps on the surface seem lighthearted, are based on problems.

A few years ago I wrote (with my sister, Ann Ingalls) a book called Little Piano Girl, the story of the childhood of jazz musician Mary Lou Williams.  She was a woman who faced poverty and sexual discrimination to become the most respected female instrumentalist ever in jazz.  She transcended the pain in her life by “playing it out,” as she put it, on the piano.  I loved her response, and Ann and I thought this was a big part of what made her story worth telling.

Odette’s persistent exploration of her identity, intensified by her wartime experiences, was what fascinated me about her story.  As young as she was, she observed and took in everything that happened around her, coming to her own individual conclusions.  I just fell in love with her developing intellectual and emotional honesty.

TWM: In what ways did working with Odette’s son, Daniel, help you with this book?
MM: I could not have written this book without Daniel.  He is a lovely person, a filmmaker.  But I didn’t know this when I found his number in the Paris telephone directory.  With my heart in my mouth, I dialed and left a message, explaining who I was and that I wanted to use the facts of his mother’s life to create a book for children.  Then I waited.

A few days later, Daniel called me back and invited me to lunch in his sunny apartment on

Odette with her mama

the rue Rambuteau.  He listened to my request and made his decision almost immediately.  His mother, he said, had often talked in schools and libraries to children about her wartime experiences.  He was sure she would want her story to live on.  As her literary executor, he gave me permission to write the story of his mother’s childhood.  He shared his grandmother’s autobiography (originally written in Yiddish), some of his mother’s poems, and many family photographs with me.  I was thrilled!

I also greatly appreciated Daniel’s willingness to read various versions of the manuscript and discuss his concerns with me.  In the end, I wanted this book to be one that honored his mother’s memory as accurately as possible.  Daniel helped me to do this.

TWM: Do you think it was chance to find Odette’s autobiography in the stacks?  Or was it bashert as we say in Yiddish?
MM: The longer I live the more I see something mysterious at work in my life…when I need or am interested in something, that thing often seems to find its way onto my radar screen.  Different people might call this chance, serendipity, grace or bashert.  No matter what you call it, the results are the same.

TWM: What was your biggest surprise in researching the story?
MM: The most delightful surprise was being invited into the house Odette lived in in the Vendee by Jacques Raffin, one of her long-ago playmates!  I expected to find the village, but not the exact house where Odette lived, and I certainly didn’t anticipate meeting anyone she knew.  But when my husband and I happened upon the house, Monsieur Raffin saw us from his window.  He welcomed us graciously and showed us the kitchen where the soup had simmered and the garden where the pet pigeons had cooed.  Once again, I was thrilled!

TWM: What was your biggest surprise in writing the story?
MM: I found that the more I worked on this story, the more I loved it! I never tired of it, even though I reworked the words incessantly right up until the time the final draft had to go to the printer.  I was so grateful to my editor, Brett Wright at Bloomsbury, for his unbelievable patience with me in this respect.  He is very detail-oriented himself, and this was a great gift.

Maryann MacDonald, photo taken by
Stefan Falke

TWM: What was your greatest satisfaction?
MM: My greatest satisfaction with Odette’s Secrets has been the wonderful response I have gotten to this book from readers.  I have had many great reviews, including a starred one in Kirkus, demonstrating to me that professionals understand and appreciate Odette’s story.  But one of the most meaningful responses so far has come from Odette’s sister, Anne-Marie Miller, born after the war and living in California.  Ms. Miller wrote to me and told me I had captured Odette’s voice and spirit.  Could a writer ask for anything more?

TWM: Did you ever feel at a loss as the book’s author because you aren’t Jewish?
MM: In the first flush of enthusiasm for writing this book, I signed up for the Jewish Children’s Book Writing Conference in New York.   When I got there, I discovered myself to be the only shiksa.  I did wonder then whether I my passion for this story might be considered inappropriate.

But in the seventies I remember seeing a popular advertising campaign showing people of all kinds – old and young, dark-skinned and light – eating sandwiches made with rye bread.  The slogan underneath the posters was, “You Don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.”  I think this was a successful slogan because people responded to its underlying message:  “We are all human; we feel things the same way.”  Similarly, I think you don’t have to be Jewish to love Odette and her touching struggle to save herself, body and soul.

Learn more about Maryann MacDonald>>>

As a representative of the Association of Jewish Libraries, I had the unique opportunity to interview Austin Ratner about his new novel. His previous novel, Jump Artist, received the Jewish Book Council Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2011.

Barbara Krasner (BK): On behalf of the Association of Jewish Libraries, hello and welcome, Austin. Thanks for joining me in this cyber discussion about your second novel, In the Land of the Living.
Austin Ratner (AR): I appreciate the opportunity for an interview and for your thoughtful questions.

BK: What inspired the idea for this book?

AR: When I was in college, I consulted my creative writing teacher about a problem I imagined was unique to me: I had lost my father when I was so young I could not remember him, yet I had a recurring urge to write about him, his death, and how he lingered in my thoughts and feelings. I asked my teacher if he had any advice and I was surprised by his response. He told me that he too had lost his father in his earliest years and that everything he wrote related in some way to this loss, but he cautioned me against trying to write about it directly. As I get older and more experienced with the difficulties of writing and selling fiction, his advice seems only more sensible. Nonetheless, I could never quite exorcise the urge to write directly on this topic. That is what In the Land of the Living is about: a traumatic loss in early childhood and how it can dominate the thoughts of a person for the rest of his life.

BK: In what ways was writing In the Land of the Living different from writing The Jump Artist?

AR: While The Jump Artist also dealt with the lingering effects of emotional injury, it was in many ways a more straightforward story. It was about one discrete period of an adult man’s life. The premise of In the Land of the Living meant linking together two lives—a father and a son—that only intersected on earth for a few years. That posed technical challenges to me as a novelist.

BK: What was the greatest challenge? The greatest satisfaction?

AR: For all the lip-service paid to the importance of child development in our society, I do not find most people to be particularly psychologically literate about it or particularly interested in thinking about it. I view it as a personal victory that I was able to write directly and truthfully about the underserved theme of childhood loss and its residua, and to get it into print with a major publisher in both the U.S. and France. It’s the most civilized response I think I could mount against this particularly helpless experience. Several years ago, when I wrote about the theme more autobiographically in The New York Times Magazine, I heard from all kinds of people who felt as I did. I hope I speak for them as well as to them.

BK: What thought process did you use to set up Isidore as a knight (and the chapter headings)?

AR: Picaresque medieval romances like Le Morte D’Arthur use grandiose chapter titles that confer legendary significance upon everything the knights do. I used such titles in Part I of my novel in the same spirit that Cervantes uses them in Don Quixote: to satirize quixotic, heroic, romantic ideals—or at least to draw a contrast between them and the more sordid and brutal reality. Whereas Don Quixote often undermines the heroic ideal by comic failures, the brutal reality of what happens to Isidore undermines the heroic ideal in a particularly tragic way.

BK: The relationship between Leo and Mack fascinates me—how one event can shift the foundation of a relationship. How did this come about? Was it difficult or easy to write? What led to the choice of Leo as your protagonist?

AR: The relationship between the brothers I think is really important to help aerate the protagonist Leo’s internal warfare with his own past. With Mack in it, the narrative is not only about Leo and his past but about another person too, and Leo’s interactions with his brother are a narrative strategy for telling the story of Leo’s relation to his own past in a dynamic, living, present-tense sort of way. Brothers share a certain history, and so a brother can be a living representative of one’s own past, and a way of interacting with one’s own past in an external way.

BK: One of the characteristics I’ve noticed about your writing is your specificity, for example, the scene in the New Haven Public Library: “But this library couldn’t save him, with its shabby little collections, its early closing time, its oblivious teenage librarian doing her homework, making fat redundant loops of blue ballpoint ink on some wide-ruled notebook paper.” Does this come naturally to you or do you insert these details strategically?

AR: We recently started reading Charlotte’s Web to my younger son. Its details create a persuasive fictional dream in a way that many other children’s stories don’t. Charlotte’s Web is of course by E.B. White, the master himself, co-author of Elements of Style. That classic writing primer says: “The greatest writers—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare—are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.”

BK: What do you want readers to take away from In the Land of the Living?

AR: If I’ve emulated E.B. White’s use of detail, I couldn’t aspire to the beautiful simplicity of his story structure—and the reason perhaps goes back to the decision not to back away from a direct, realistic treatment of childhood loss despite this subject’s enormous psychological complexity. Literature has perhaps moved on from the deep introspection of modernism, but the emotional terrain of childhood loss requires such deep modernist introspection, wherein a persuasive fictional dream of inner life occupies the foreground and a diverting story the background. I hope readers enjoy the story and the humor in In the Land of the Living, but the more important thing to me is whether readers experience a persuasive fictional dream and feel they’ve encountered another real consciousness in the book. A persuasive fictional dream is always more diverting to me than a conventional story anyway.

BK: Tell us a bit about yourself. How did you go from med school to the Iowa Workshop?

AR: This question always makes me think of Gonzo in The Muppet Movie. He tells Kermit and Fozzie he’s going to Bombay, India to become a movie star. They tell him: you don’t go to Bombay, India to become a movie star, you go to Hollywood, where we’re going. Gonzo says, sure, if you want to do it the easy way. I always wanted to be a writer, but I did not take a direct path. There are worse paths, though, than the one that leads through a medical career. Somerset Maugham said that medical school was the ideal preparation for any fiction writer.

BK: What’s your typical writing schedule? In other words, how do you write?

AR: When I am not crippled by self-doubt, I write automatically, like I eat and breathe and sleep. The trick for me is to combat the doubt. Then the words come and work gets done and something gets created.

BK: Thanks, Austin, for a great interview. I can’t wait to read your next work.

For more about Austin Ratner>>>

At the 2011 Highlights Foundation workshop, “Writing Jewish-themed Children’s Books,” I had the pleasure of meeting four talented writers: Lois Barr, Marcia Berneger, Dede Fox, and Joan Seliger Sidney. I’d like to introduce them to you through this interview.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What attracts you to Jewish themes?
Lois Barr (LB): They are never easy.  There are no easy answers.  I was raised in a mixed up household, Kosher when my Bubby was with us and very Southern trayf when she was not.  I didn’t learn Hebrew as a child but as an adult I’ve studied both Hebrew and Yiddish.  The Bible gives us tough questions.  Why oh why did Abraham take his son up the mountaintop, and why did he listen to Sarah and send Ishmael and Hagar off into the desert?

Marcia Berneger (MB): One of the first things people tell you is to “write what you know best.” My Jewish heritage is an important part of me. I also teach religious school at my synagogue, where I share our traditions and the wonderful stories that explain them. Many times ideas come to me while I’m teaching: Sammy spider talks about the holidays, Feivel talks about the old country. What kind of story might the frogs who lived in Pharaoh’s Egypt tell?

Joan Seliger Sidney (JSS): My Jewish heritage and background: Although my parents came from Orthodox Jewish families in Zurawno, Poland—a paternal great-uncle was a shochet—at fifteen, my father rebelled, cut off his peyes and when he married, refused to let my mother keep kosher.  Nonetheless, my parents sent me to a local Talmud Torah, which fed into Marshalliah Hebrew High School, three times a week besides regular high school.  Ultimately, in summers I worked at different Camp Ramahs (Hebrew-speaking); also, during my first year and a half in college, I attended classes very part-time at the Jewish Theological Seminary.  But for the most part, my Jewish-themed writing has been inspired by my mother’s stories of growing up in Zurawno, my parents’ three-month adventure from Yugoslavia to America during the Holocaust, and other Holocaust testimonies.  At the same time, I write to keep my mother’s world alive and to bear witness to the Holocaust.

Dede Fox (DF): There are many skilled writers hoping for publication. When I ask myself what’s unique about me, what do I have to offer that no one else can offer, I always come back to my experiences as a Jewish Texan. Really, how many Jewish writers have daughters who raised pigs for Future Farmers of America (and donated to a food bank)?

TWM: Why you choose to write in the genres you choose; how does writing in one genre affect the other?
 LB: I choose fiction when I have lots of time to develop things and when there is a strong element of plot although sometimes I do narrative poems. I choose poems when the language or images are most important to the piece.

I hope that I am more careful about language in my stories because of all the editing and workshopping I do with my poems. Of course, I bring the adage of “show don’t tell” to my poems when they tell stories.

MB: I write picture books, both secular and Jewish-themed. I also have a transitional chapter book mystery series and an early middle grade Jewish-themed mystery. I don’t really choose the genres. Once an idea pops into my head, I write its story down. I just keep writing until I’ve finished. Only then do I know which genre it belongs to. I was a teacher for 34 years, so many of my picture books are about young children (ages 5-7) and the problems that affect them. Sometimes they are Jewish-themed, sometimes not. I also love writing fractured fairy tales. So far the only real cross-over between genres is my Jewish Gingerbread Man (The Hamantash Mensch).

JSS: Mostly, I write poetry because it’s my greatest challenge and seems most naturally to take me where I need to go, though my best writing in other genres is always a process of discovery, too.  I began writing picture books after the birth of my first granddaughter—I now have five adorable granddaughters, from eight to twenty-one months!—and completed the first post-MFA semester in picture books at Vermont College (2008) to learn more.  Poetry is really the language of picture books, too, through its images, rhythms, and concise language.  I also have written a memoir essay and a few short stories.  No matter the genre, writing is an ongoing quest for emotional truth.

DF: Turning my attention to poetry in 2006 has improved my prose because my writing is now more lyrical, concise, and subtle. I pay more attention to connotation and the sounds of words. When I write non-fiction, I focus on personal interviews and recording factually accurate content. Those practices provide context for my other writing. Sometimes I’ll pre-write in one genre and move into another genre. Going back and forth between genres helps me to find The Place My Words Are Looking For.

TWM: What insights have you gained as you write about your Jewish heritage?
 LB: I’ve learned a lot of Jewish history. I learn history best when I have to research it and when I ask questions as to how characters would feel and behave under certain circumstances. For example, I was working on a YA novel about a young girl whose family is among the first to go farm the land in Argentina. Despite the fact that I’ve read all the Argentine writers who came from the Jewish Colonies and visited Moisesville, I’ve had to do a lot more reading. I’ve studied flora and fauna to get a sense of how they would plant, what birds she would see and hear. I’ve read folklore from the time to get a sense as to how the locals would have reacted to their new Jewish neighbors. I’ve read military journals about exploration in Argentina in the 19th century and found some interesting anecdotes and information about the terrain.

I’ve worked out issues in my mind about my identity.  My poem, “Bialystok Impasse,” published in the New Vilna Review, dealt with my ambiguity about going back to see where my ancestors lived.

MB: When I explore a story idea with a Jewish theme, it expands my knowledge about that particular topic. For example, I often have to research the details that go into my stories. I might have to analyze what’s going on to flush out a character’s personality and/or motivation. And I love putting myself into my stories to feel what it must have been like, living long ago in Modin or in Pharaoh’s time.

JSS: The more I write about my Jewish heritage, on an emotional level, the closer I come to knowing the world that’s vanished, including the grandparents I never met.  This may sound bizarre, but at times while writing I’ve actually felt the presence of my deceased maternal grandmother as well as my deceased parents channeling me information, which made me realize how connected I am (and probably we all are) to my ancestors, that they really do continue to live through my writing, even the ones I never met.  The older I become, the more I’m drawn to my Jewish heritage as well as the stories of Holocaust survivors.

DF: I have gained so many insights by writing about my Jewish heritage that I have expressed them in multiple ways, including a new YA manuscript called Emet and a creative nonfiction called Confessions of a Jewish Texan which Poetica Press will publish in June 2013.

TWM: What have been your greatest challenges in writing on Jewish themes?
LB: There is no right or wrong on many issues, but people have very strong reactions to anything having to do with faith and ritual.  I have a poem about Elijah which is almost a rap poem and I am not certain I ever want to see it published.

MB: These themes have been around for hundreds of years. When writing about a holiday or even a Jewish twist on a contemporary theme, it has to be unique. Creating characters with their own distinct voices telling their own versions of a story is quite the challenge.

JSS: Since much of my material is a mix of memory and creative imagination, it’s frustrating when a prospective publisher turns down my picture book, saying “It’s too old-fashioned for today’s market” or “You start in the present but go back to the past then return to the present.  That’s too hard for young readers, they need a simple chronology.”  Or when my character brought back something from the past, the editors said, “You’re confusing reality for the reader.”  Editors have also told me, “We’re not interested in Holocaust books any more.”  Evidently, I haven’t found the right editor.

DF: My greatest challenge to writing on Jewish themes is the same as my greatest challenge to writing on any theme—finding enough time and energy to care for my family, manage a household, work as a full time librarian, and write.

TWM: What have been your greatest satisfactions in writing on Jewish themes?
LB: Any time I write about my grandmother and my mom and their issues, I have lots of success.  And, of course, I’m always honored when asked to write a Dvar Torah.

MB: I love it when I’ve finished a story (including its countless revisions) and it came out the way I hoped it would. Of course that’s true for all stories, but I usually read my Jewish-themed ones to my students. It’s fun to watch their reactions. I now have a story about Rosh Hashanah, one for Passover and one for two for Purim. My little Gan-Alef students performed my Purim story (The Hamantasch Mensch) for our congregation this year Purim. That was incredible!

JSS: Writing books that really matter to me, that I look forward to sharing with readers of all ages, have brought great satisfaction.  Although I’m still looking for a publisher for my non-fiction biography of a local Holocaust survivor, many readers of the manuscript have been very moved by both the story and my writing.  My most recent satisfaction was to win the grand-prize in the 2013 Whole Megillah Picture Book Contest, which I hope will lead to publication.  My story, Elsa’s Pillow, is a fictionalized version of my mother’s journey from Yugoslavia to America.

DF: What I’ve discovered about my family enhances my commitment to being an active Jew. My relatives sacrificed a lot to insure our family’s survival and provide for our religious freedom.  I’ve also learned many Jews are truly People of the Book, talented wordsmiths.

TWM: Where do you gain your inspiration? 
LB: My grandmother, who adored me as the first born grandchild, until I hit puberty and became a “snake in the grass,” is a fountain of stories and strong sensory memories.  I remember her noodles hanging from the kitchen chair. I remember her telling me that beef fry tasted exactly like bacon, and I remember telling her she said that because she’d never tried bacon. Now I obey the laws of kashruth, at least I’ve eliminated pork, shellfish, bottom feeders and mixing milk and meat.  But my bubby’s strong faith, her attachment to ritual, and her ability to survive continue to amaze me.   Because of my Bubby and my parents I celebrated Passover with family and friends and I waited with great joy to open the Passover order.  The tin chest of Svetochne Tea went to my dollhouse and I remember delicious jams that we only had at that holiday.  Of course my bubby and my mother did all the work.  When I order my fish already chopped from the market, I am aware how easy I have it. I complain about opening the blender when I make the chrain but they grated the horseradish by hand. These and other strong memories and struggles and my adult’s sense of gratitude all inform my writing.

MB: The inspiration for my picture books has definitely come from my teaching religious school. But my latest project, my early middle grade mystery, was written entirely during the Whole Megillah’s NaNoWriMo ["Write Your Own Megillah"] this past winter. I was terrified to write such a long (18,000 word) manuscript but kept at it, with lots of encouragement, and finished it. Very inspiring!

JSS: As I’ve already said, my inspiration comes from my mother’s stories, in addition, imagined or channeled stories, plus lectures, interviews and videos of Holocaust survivors.

DF: Inspiration is everywhere, but my interest in people—their motivation and histories—is a catalyst for much of my writing.

The Barn – the Conference Center for Highlights Foundation workshops

TWM: Why did you sign up for the Highlights workshop?
 LB: I wanted to write children’s books and I had a book about a child from a mixed marriage wanting to invite the baby Jesus as a guest to a sukkah. Needless to say, the story shocked some and interested others.  It did not please the visiting editor. I had begun to write (and continue to write) books for my granddaughter. Neither she nor the few publishers who take unsolicited manuscripts have been terribly impressed so far, but I’ll keep trying.

MB: I had been playing around with a few Jewish-themed ideas and the workshop appeared just at the right time in my writing career. I wanted to learn all I could about writing for the Jewish market. I did — but took home so much more than that.

JSS: I wanted to meet other writers and editors of Jewish-themed children’s books, to get their feedback on some of my manuscripts, and make connections which could lead to a published book.  I also wanted more information on what editors were looking for.  Lastly, I hoped an ongoing community of writers would emerge.

DF: Because I have attended the Highlights Summer Workshop at Chautauqua, I knew the quality of any Highlights program would be exceptional. The foundation hires the best teachers and encourages an egalitarian atmosphere that brings out professionalism in all participants. Also, I met Barbara Krasner, at Chautauqua. She introduced me to other Jewish writers and was generous with her time and expertise. Although far from home, I always feel very much at home at Highlights’s events.

TWM: What did you get out of it — how did it help?
LB: I got lots of ideas for poems and other stories. I had truly memorable time getting to know such different and interesting writers.  I felt I gained a lot of background and grounding in children’s writing from Barbara and the guest editors and writers.  The most important thing I gained was a support group of writers whose work I love to read and who are very generous about reading and critiquing mine.

MB: Well, of course I learned so much about the market for Jewish-themed writing. I was able to chat with editors and with fellow writers. We (the writers) formed a support group that continued for most of the year. The Highlights workshop encouraged me to expand my writing for the Jewish market, working with themes from many genres covering picture books through middle grade. Prior to the workshop I’d written a few Jewish-themed stories. Since then, I’ve added six more picture books with Jewish themes and my middle-grade mystery (plus the start of two other middle-grade novels) to my repertoire. At least two of those picture book ideas popped into my head during the workshop. You really started the ball rolling for me!

JSS: The workshop was a very enjoyable experience with fellow writers giving constructive feedback.

Although one of the editors really liked one of my picture books, her colleague turned it down after overlooking it for half a year and ultimately needing her nudge—his was the chronology comment.  This was an obvious disappointment after all the enthusiasm everyone showed but it’s my problem, not the workshop’s.

The experienced guest editor, who critiqued my verse novel-in-progress, gave me a very different perspective on audience, characters, plot.  She suggested writing for a young adult reader, not middle-grade, introducing contemporary themes like incest, which she saw as potential in my story.  Unfortunately, instead of exploring her advice, I was so taken aback by her different vision that I abandoned the project.  This interview is making me realize it’s time to go back and see where the novel wants to go, not where I was leading it.

DF: Where do I begin on what I learned?

• We studied the Jewish market and needs of various publishers.
• We learned about exceptional children’s books for Jewish readers.
• We shared our writing in read-arounds, which helped with revision.
• I began a lengthy “to do” list for writing and submitting
• We wrote down personal goals for the coming year.
• I enjoyed the camaraderie of writers with shared beliefs and experiences, a bonus for a Jewish Texan since we make up only.6% of the total state population.
• I learned more about targeting submissions to fit the needs of Highlights readers. I have a non-fiction “What the Pros Know” article coming out in the July 2013 issue and have sold a Jewish-themed craft.
• Several participants continue to support each other online; we offer suggestions for revision and kvell at each others’ successes.

About Lois Barr

A professor of Spanish, Lois Barr chairs the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Lake Forest College.  Her poems, essays and stories have appeared in zines, literary reviews and anthologies around the country.  She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in fiction and poetry. She has written extensively about Latin American Jewish Literature and was co-executive producer of a documentary, “Isa Kremer: The People’s Diva,” which aired at festivals around the world and on public television around the country.

About Marcia Berneger

Marcia is married and the mother of two wonderful sons. She has a houseful of pets including two small dogs, a cat, and a bearded dragon. She has retired from a long and much-loved teaching career, teaching first/second grade and working with children who had learning challenges. She now has time to devote to her passion, writing stories for children. Marcia’s work has appeared in Boys’ Life Magazine and Highlights for Children. Her picture book, Buster, has just been acquired by Sleeping Bear Press.

About Joan Seliger Sidney

Joan Seliger Sidney’s Body of Diminishing Motion: Poems and a Memoir was published by CavanKerry Press. Her poem, “Malka at Ninety,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Joan has received individual artist’s poetry fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center, also a Visiting Faculty Fellowship to research at the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. She’s Writer-in-Residence at the University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, and also facilitates Writing for Your Life, an adult workshop.  Her manuscript, Elsa’s Pillow, won the grand-prize in the Whole Megillah’s 2013 Picture Book Contest.

About Dede Fox

Highlights Magazine has published several of Dede Fox’s  nonfiction articles and photos. Her writing credits include The Treasure in the Tiny Blue Tin, a children’s novel listed in Linda Silver’s Best Jewish Books for Children and Teens. Dede’s poetry appears in many literary magazines and journals, including the Summer 2013 issue of Poetica, which will also publish her book Confessions of a Jewish Texan in May. A Washington University alumna and school librarian, Dede has taught with Houston’s Writers in the Schools and will present at the Association of Jewish Libraries Conference in June.

The Whole Megillah caught up with Leanne Liebermann and her editor Sarah Harvey to talk about the new YA novel, Lauren Yanovsky Hates the Holocaust (Orca, 2013, 240 pp.).

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What was your motivation for approaching the topic of hating the Holocaust?
Leanne Lieberman (LL): Like Lauren Yanofsky I too was sick of hearing about the Holocaust. I had read enough books, seen enough movies and felt there were other aspects of my Judaism that I wanted to explore. I declared myself “done with the Holocaust.” Then, a grade six student of mine made a swastika armband during a French class I was teaching. I was really taken aback. The student knew that the Nazis had fought in World War Two but didn’t know about the atrocities they had committed against Jews and many other people. The student apologized for making the armband and I tried to forget about the incident, but I was still troubled on many levels. It bothered me that this boy didn’t know about the Nazis, and it also bothered me that I let this get to me. Did everyone need to know about the Nazis, even eleven year olds? Ultimately I knew I would have to write a book to sort out my feelings about the Holocaust.

TWM: The relationship between Lauren and Brooke feels typical of a best friend relationship in high school where each girl develops her own interests. Can you please describe how you came up with Brooke and how you developed her as a character?
LL: Brooke started with an anecdote I remembered from high school about a girl I knew who put sugar in her dad’s gas tank to mess with his car after her parents divorced. She was actually a good girl, but a lot of her friends had a rougher side to them, and the character of Brooke developed out of that story, about a girl whose parents get divorced and who starts hanging out with a rougher crowd of kids. Brooke is important in the book because as you say teenage friendships often change very quickly and Lauren finds her friends’ changing interests to be challenging.

Leanne Lieberman

TWM: Similarly, the relationship between Lauren and her brother, Zach, is very tender and his story makes for an endearing subplot. How did you develop Zach and his story line?
LL: The story of Zach’s bar mitzvah was an integral part of the book because I wanted Lauren to have another path into her Judaism. Since Lauren isn’t very interested in being Jewish, it had to come through her family. When I started the book and I was thinking about a sibling for Lauren, I remembered a story about my younger brother hiding under the bima from the rabbi during his bar mitzvah lessons. That anecdote, of a young boy hiding from the rabbi, wove its way into the story and then I started asking, why is the brother hiding? It became clear to me that Zach had a lot of quirks and special needs.

TWM: Let’s talk about Jesse, Lauren’s love interest. How did you develop him?
LL: Jesse was first modeled on a cute boy I remember from high school who played basketball and sat near me in biology. I sometimes begin a character based on someone I know and then as I develop them, they take on their own personality and traits. I didn’t really know that boy in high school, so I had to imagine him. In my mind, as I imagined him talking, he became the cocky character of Jesse.

TWM: What was the rationale behind using first person for Lauren’s voice?
LL: I wrote Lauren in the first person because I wanted that intensity of her voice and to show the process of her decision making. As soon as I started writing her character I could hear her voice in my head and I wanted to share it with readers.

TWM: What was your goal with this book?
LL: My goal with this book was to think about Jewish identity and what affect the Holocaust has on Jewish teens today. Lauren is an extreme example because her father is a Holocaust historian and her life has been more immersed in Holocaust education that most teens. Still, standard Jewish education has a strong emphasis on Holocaust history, often at the risk of short-changing other interesting time periods. I wanted to think about what happens to a Jewish teen when there is too much emphasis on tragedy and how that can overshadow other aspects of Jewish heritage.

TWM: What emotions did you want your reader to feel?
LL: I wanted readers to feel Lauren’s conflict, to understand what it feels like to want to fit in and then have to stand up for your religion or culture. Lauren is sick of hearing about the Holocaust, but she doesn’t want the Holocaust to be belittled either. I think a lot of teens (and adults too) feel a tension between their cultural and secular lives.  This tension can obviously be negative, but it can also be fascinating and I wanted my readers to experience these emotions along with Lauren.

TWM: The narrative has a soft side, e.g., Lauren’s relationship with her brother, and a hard side, e.g., cutting school, drinking and smoking, setting fire to the book about Mengele’s twin experiments. Was this mix intentional? If so, why?
LL: Yes, this mix of hard and soft sides of Lauren was intentional because Lauren is a multi-dimensional character and she has a pretty complex life. She’s a teenager exploring her boundaries, experimenting with alcohol, but she also cares for her family.

TWM: What challenges did you encounter in concepting and writing this book?
LL: The book was originally longer and Lauren had a greater obsession with fire. My editor worried that Lauren sounded like a pyromaniac. I had to cut a lot of it out as it was too heavy-handed, and also a little hard to believe.

TWM: What satisfactions did you feel as a result of writing this book?
LL: I was really pleased that I was able to wrestle some of my conflicting feelings about the Holocaust and Jewish identity into a novel. I was especially pleased that my father liked the book. Although he is not a Holocaust historian like Lauren’s father in the book, he reads a lot of Holocaust books and it was important to me that I wrote a book that he was proud of.

TWM: Now let’s turn to Leanne’s editor, Sarah Harvey at Orca. Hi, Sarah. What attracted you to Lauren Yanofsky Hates the Holocaust?
Sarah Harvey (SH): I was attracted to LYHH by the quality of the writing, the originality of the story and the strength and humour of the main character. Also, I like working with Leanne.

TWM: What appeal do you think the book has to mainstream readers?
SH: If by mainstream readers, you mean non-Jewish readers, I think that LYHH has broad appeal in that it deals with issues that many teens can relate to—changes in friendships, new love, family problems, bad hair days—as well as the larger ethical and moral issues that arise because of Lauren’s heritage.

TWM: Were there any particular challenges in developing/publishing the book?
SH: We were always aware that some of the subject matter might be controversial (Leanne doesn’t shy away from that, and neither does Orca) so there was quite a lot of discussion, with Leanne and in-house, about making the book as appealing as possible to a wide range of readers, without diluting the powerful material. That said, we all did what we always do—made the book read as well and look as good as possible.

Lesléa Newman introduced herself to me after my Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) panel on “The Whole Megillah: The Jewish Experience in Children’s Books.” I was so honored to meet her and we discussed an interview for this blog. Here are the results.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): When did you first believe you were a writer?
Leslea Newman (LN): I’ve always believed that I was a writer, ever since I was quite young. My first validation came when some of my poems, written as a teenager, were published in Seventeen Magazine. I actually got paid for them! I knew then that I was on my way…

TWM: What inspires you to write?
LN: Life inspires me! My own experiences, stories I hear or read about, my dreams, my hopes, my fears, my imagination. And since I make my living as a writer, a dwindling bank account is always very inspiring!

TWM: What is special about writing on Jewish topics for kids? For adults?
LN: When I was growing up, I never read a children’s book that had any Jewish content or featured any Jewish characters. That felt very alienating to me. Why wasn’t there a picture book about a family like mine? As an adult, I could do something—write books—so that Jewish children can see themselves and their families in works of literature. That is very gratifying. For children and for adults.

TWM: What are the greatest challenges?
LN: The greatest challenge comes from not feeling “Jewish enough.” In other words, I have very little Jewish education (though I did become a Bat Mitzvah at the age of 48) and I often feel like I don’t know enough to write about Jewish life. Luckily I have many experts to call on to check my work and make sure I am not making any errors.

TWM: The greatest satisfactions?
LN: When a child comes up to me and says that one of my books is his or her favorite book, that is the greatest feeling in the world.

TWM: You’ve used Yiddish in your children’s books. Please tell us about your own introduction to Yiddish and what led to using it in your books.
LN: “Yinglish” or English sprinkled with Yiddish phrases and Yiddish syntax is the language I grew up hearing in Brighton Beach (a section of Brooklyn, NY). It is the language of my grandmothers. The poet Czeslaw Milosz said, “Language is the only homeland,” and I agree. When I hear Yiddish words or phrases, I feel home in a way I don’t feel at any other time. When I use Yiddish words or phrases, I am writing from my deepest authentic self.

TWM: What similarities exist between writing picture books and writing poetry?
LN: Both forms use economy of language. Neither form allows for one wasted word. You have to say a lot in a very short time. And a lot of the same literary devices are often used such as rhyme and repetition. Most importantly, when I write poetry or picture books, I have to dig deep down into my emotional core and write from the heart.

TWM: Do you have a preference for any particular form of writing?
LN: Poetry has always been my first love. These days I’ve taken to writing formal poetry: sonnets, sestinas, pantoums, villanelles. But I enjoy writing prose as well. As long as I’m writing, I’m happy!

TWM: You’ve published more than 20 picture books, many of them involving Jewish holidays, and you have a new book coming out about holidays. Please tell us more about that.
LN: Here Is the World: A Year of Jewish Holidays is a picture book that starts with welcoming a child into the word, and continues through a year’s cycle of Jewish holidays. It’s told in verse and contains an explanation of holidays as well as a craft or recipe for each one. It is forthcoming from Abrams Books for Young Readers.

TWM: Please also tell us more about October Mourning, your novel in verse in response to the murder of Matthew Shepard. Why a novel and why verse? What were your greatest challenge and your greatest satisfaction in writing this?
LN: In 1998, Matthew Shepard, a gay college student was kidnapped, robbed, brutally beaten, tied to a fence, and abandoned. He was found 18 hours later and brought to the hospital. He died five days later with his family by his side on Monday, October 12 which was the start of Gay Awareness Week at his school. I was the keynote speaker and I arrived on campus the day he died. I made a vow to his friends that I would do something to carry on his name. Since the case has been documented very well (by the New York Times and other newspapers) I didn’t want to write a journalistic account. As a poet, I felt I could use my imagination to access the voices of the silent witnesses such as the fence Matt was tied to, the stars that watched over him, a deer that kept him company all through the night, and others. What could I learn from writing in these voices? October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard answers that question. (See the book trailer.)

TWM: What is your greatest learning as a teacher of writing?
LN: That there is always more for me to learn!

About Lesléa Newman

I first heard poet and memoirist Joy Ladin speak at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in 2012 in Chicago. I heard her again at the same conference in 2013 in Boston. If you don’t know of Joy and her work, you should. She writes with an emotional depth I can only envy and praise.

About Joy Ladin

Joy Ladin, Gottesman Professor of English at Yeshiva University and the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution, is the author of six books of poetry: last year’s The Definition of Joy, Forward Fives award winner Coming to Life, Lambda Literary Award finalist Transmigration, Alternatives to History,The Book of Anna, and Psalms. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life:  A Jewish Journey Between Genders, was a finalist for a 2012 National Jewish Book Award, and a Forward Fives winner. She is also the author of a book-length study of American poetry, Soldering the Abyss:  Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry (VDM). Her work has appeared in many periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and North American Review, and has been recognized with a Fulbright Scholarship.

The interview

The Whole Megillah (TWM): When did you first realize you were a writer? Joy Ladin (JL): I started thinking of myself as a poet almost as soon as I learned to write, which I did at the usual time for the 1960s, around age six. From the first, I felt that I was exercising great power when I wrote, that writing enabled me to create worlds instead of merely enduring the givens of existence. The givens of existence I found hardest to endure were sex and gender, specifically, the maleness of my body and the identity and life that went with it. Writing was a way of existing that seemed to me to be outside sex and gender; the only part of my body I needed to write was my hand, and once the words were on the page they spoke without any body at all to frame or constrain them.

TWM: Who inspired you and why?
JL: When I was a kid, I kept re-reading Valiant Companions, which told the story of the relationship between Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. I don’t think I knew why I kept reading the book then, but now I see so much in it that points toward the person I needed to become: Helen Keller’s courage, dignity and persistence in overcoming crippling difference; her creation of empathy and understanding of that difference through writing; Anne Sullivan’s commitment to teaching as a means of helping students grow into their best selves; and the image of two indomitable women sustained by mutual love.

TWM: In your memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders, the depth of emotion blew me away. Were you conscious of the depth you were creating? How much of your talent as a poet contributed?
JL: Thank you! I was trying to be as honest and precise as I could be in narrating the emotional journeys entailed by living for so long as someone I wasn’t, slowly becoming my true self, and facing the consequences of my becoming for the people who loved the man I had pretended to be, and for the relationships (both personal and professional) that were based on the premise of my maleness. I wanted to document what was going on in me without losing sight of what was going on for those I loved; I don’t know how successful I was, but I think that ambition to keep multiple emotional realities in mind helped deepen the memoir. I had grown up thinking of poets as being responsible for creating language for realms of human being and experience for which there is no ready language. The memoir gave me a very specific realm in which to attempt that work, work driven not by some abstract sense of where language falls short but by my own desperate need for language to help me and others understand what and who I was.

TWM: Did writing help you through your transformation? If so, how?
JL: From the first stumbling efforts at writing about transition, I knew that the writing process was a crucial part of my transition. Writing had always been my way of being my true self; as I wrote about transition, I saw that it was my way of developing the life-story that is the backbone of a sense of self. My life as a man had no story, as far as I was concerned, no trajectory, no triumphs, no goals. It was sheer endurance. But if I was going to become a person, I needed to learn how to narrate myself, how to tell myself and others the story of where I had come from and where I was going. Writing the memoir — and, of course, therapy! — were my primary means of doing that. In fact, my therapist urged me to write a memoir. The writing process enabled me to practice being a person in many ways, and also — because even though I wrote most of it in the midst of transition, I wrote it in the past tense — writing enabled me to imagine a perspective beyond the anguish and turmoil of transition, a perspective from which a narrating “I” who wasn’t in constant crisis could look back and reflect on the process of becoming. Writing also gave me something to do other than killing myself, a way of transcending circumstances that I sometimes didn’t feel I knew how to live through.

TWM: What drives you as a poet?
JL: I’ve been driven by different impulses over my almost four decades of writing poetry seriously, but whatever is driving this or that project or poem, writing poetry always thrills me. It doesn’t matter whether I’m writing well or badly, whether what I’m working on becomes a poem or scrap paper. There is something about the feeling of poetry surrounding me, buoying me, welling up through me, that makes me feel ecstatically alive.

TWM: In Book of Anna and Transmigration, two books of your poetry, you use collage. Can you tell us more about that approach and your choice and use of it?
JL: In both books, I adapt modernist poetic techniques I explored in detail in my dissertation (now a book), Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry. I love formalist analysis, and when I studied the emergence of modernist poetics in American poetry between 1850 and 1925, I found that what’s usually called “collage” turns out to include a number of different approaches to language, two of which, discourse fusion and discourse splicing, I used in Anna and Transmigration. In discourse fusion, two or more distinct kinds of language — say, self-help lingo and tax instruction — are fused into sentences that sound like coherent utterances, even though readers can see the different kinds of language jostling within them. In discourse splicing, different kinds of languages are juxtaposed in grammatically and often visually distinct blocks, but are still presented as though they represent some sort of coherent overarching perspective. I learned to recognize different kinds of language, and to work with the different worldviews and values they imply, from studying Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, but Dickinson and her modernist successors didn’t need critical theory to develop those techniques.

I turned to these techniques in Anna because to her, after her concentration camp adolescence, no language or worldview seemed whole or honest. She would fuse and splice different kinds of language to dramatize how inadequate they were, to play them against one another, and, by the end, to fumble toward a larger language composed of their fragments. Some of the poems in Transmigration uses the same techniques, but for very different purposes: as I tried to write my way toward a new self and life as a woman, I wanted a poetic language that came from outside me, from that future, and cajoled and guided and sometimes shoved me toward it. I tried to create that language by splicing and fusing language I found in women’s magazines, which, if you include everything from the headers to the contest instructions to ads to anti-depressant warnings, offer an enormous range of language to choose from.

TWM: Can you tell us more about your persona poetry?
JL: I haven’t written persona poetry since I started living as myself. The persona poems in my first book, Alternatives to History, were conscious attempts to explore the way human souls worked without having to reveal my own. Some of them were also efforts to exorcise a certain kind of masculinity I inherited from my father and grandfather, a definition of masculinity as acceptance of the utter futility of life. Since my father stopped talking to me right after college, those poems were, I think, also attempts to feel close to him even though, as it happened, he would never speak to me again. The latest persona poem in the book, “Fossilized Happiness,” represented another kind of attempt to escape constraint — in this case, the constraint of short lyric utterances that “worked” in workshop terms but seemed to me to say little because they were unmoored from character and situation. My own life didn’t afford that sort of context to my poems, because it wasn’t a real life but a hiding from life.

The Book of Anna started out of utter boredom with the way I was writing — I just wanted to “write like someone else,” and Anna was the someone else who presented herself. But over the five years I worked on discovering her character and story and learning how she needed to write it, it was also clear that though Anna was designed to be not-me (she really isn’t!), she was also the first extended opportunity I’d given myself to imaginatively live within a female point of view. Anna isn’t “a woman” — I’ve never known anyone like her — but her sex and gender were important parts of her story and her voice. I think that work both eased me toward gender transition, and helped me put it off by giving me a place to escape the facade of maleness for a while.

TWM: Please share with us your transition from persona to an “I” narrator.
JL: When I finished Anna, I was nearing the end of my ability to live as a man. Fortunately for me, the book found a publisher just in time to qualify me to apply for early tenure — I got tenure when I was literally falling apart every time I presented myself as a man. I wondered what I would do when I could no longer write as Anna. I wrote more persona poems, mostly in male voices, poems collected in a still-unpublished manuscript called Impersonation. I wrote lyric poems complaining about life, and one long, very strange sort of persona poem in the voice of the prophet Habakkuk kvetching to God about the Babylonians, a not-very-veiled way of complaining about the post-9/11 imperial America of George W. Bush. Then I started to face the fact that I couldn’t simply hide and repress my gender identity any more, that I had to find other ways to deal with it. That decision didn’t directly lead to anything but Google searches, but it was the beginning of my gender transition. As my explorations of my gender identity progressed and my marriage fell apart, I started looking for ways to explore writing as a woman — not as a persona, like Anna, but as someone living as a woman. For a long time — from the end of  Impersonation through most of Transmigration, the book I wrote during the roughest part of transition and the first one published under my true name — the closest I could come to writing as a woman was poems in the second person, made out of language scavenged from women’s magazines. To me, these poems constituted prophetic voices, voices from my future self dragging and cheering me on toward a kind of embodiment, feeling, personhood, that I had never experienced and, despite all my persona poems, didn’t know how to imagine for myself.

My ability to say “I” and mean myself emerged after that book. You can see it growing in Coming to Life, the book after Transmigration, though that has plenty of second-person writing, too, and it is fully developed in The Definition of Joy, the book I published last year. But the key to my transition to writing in the first person was the book I published in between them, Psalms. I wrote psalms over a couple of terrible summer months, when I thought a mysterious illness (I was initially diagnosed with MS) was rapidly destroying my cognitive abilities so I had to write whatever poems I was going to write. It was miraculously published a few months after I finished it, by a small publisher, Wipf & Stock. In Psalms, I didn’t have time for personae or future selves or indirection; I needed to talk directly to God about the collision of coming to life and, so it seemed, simultaneous descent into disability and death that I was experiencing. The book is intended as a sequence, the story of a relationship between the speaker, an “I” who really did represent me, and “you,” God, that progresses from the speaker’s rage and disgust to … tenderness, forgiveness, a kind of largeness and acceptance that I didn’t know I was capable of, and toward which, in my life and writing, I still strive.

TWM: You’ve said in an Ilanot Review interview that you suspect that American poets’ obsession with first-person writing is also a response to loss of authority. Please tell us more about that.
JL: Till the end of the nineteenth century, and in some respects for some years afterward, Americans looked to poetry for moral guidance, spiritual uplift, family entertainment, national history, political proclamation, as well as for aesthetic experience. Poetry was a major expression and aspect of our emerging national culture, and was taught in schools as a model of not only eloquence but of thought, philosophy, values, and so on. That gave poetry a kind of authority that it lost in the twentieth century for a variety of reasons, including the segregation of the study of literature into English departments, which increasingly presented poetry as a specialized literary activity rather than a broadly relevant mode of cultural expression.

American poets responded to this shift in poetry’s cultural status — its loss of broad cultural authority and enshrinement as a hyperspecialized form of literature — in a variety of ways in the early twentieth century, introducing non-literary language (think Frost’s North of Boston and The Spoon River Anthology, both seen as cutting-edge when they were published), developing modernist techniques that among other things enabled poetry to sound like it was espousing great truths that most readers would be too stupid to grasp (what I call, somewhat unfairly, the TS Eliot effect), etc. But by the mid-twentieth century, more and more American poets were turning to the one mode of writing in which they could unarguably speak with authority: first-person writing, poems that present truths about one person, one voice, one situation, one life. These poems stake very modest claims in themselves, but they can gain great cultural authority and resonance when readers see themselves reflected in the “I” of the poem.

TWM: What advice would you give emerging Jewish poets?
JL: Jewish poets are inheritors of three thousand years of extraordinary writing spanning innumerable cultures and countries. Because both American culture and American Jewish culture tend not to be interested in poetry, I think many young Jewish poets think of poetry as a non-Jewish endeavor, and overlook the riches of their own tradition. Those riches include ground-breaking Americans like Allen Ginsberg and Charles Reznikoff, the excruciating intimacy of Biblical psalms, the glittering cross-cultural brilliance of medieval Andalusian poets such as Yehuda Ha-Levi who were inspired by their Muslim peers, Russians such as Osip Mandelstam — the list goes on and on. We can learn so much from this Jewish poetic legacy, and grow enormously by seeing ourselves and our own small lives as extensions of this millennia-spanning heritage.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What prompted you to write The Tattered Prayer Book?
Ellen Bari (EB): When my daughter was picture book age, there were almost no books about the Holocaust for young children. I felt there needed to be what I’m calling a “gentle introduction” to the Holocaust, an accessible story that children can relate to and that could be used as a tool by parents and educators to begin a conversation on this insanely difficult topic.

TWM: We hear all the time that no one wants Holocaust stories. Did that hold you back at all, at least initially?
EB: I actually wrote the book without any hesitation,  as it is a story that is somewhat autobiographical, and I guess I felt it needed to be told. However, I rarely sent it out to editors, because as you said, no one was interested in “Holocaust stories.” I imagine many writers  have a number of manuscripts tucked away in the proverbial drawer, waiting for the right moment to share the stories that “nobody wants”…yet.

TWM: What were the challenges in writing this book? 
EB: I was hoping to create a universal story that would resonate with Jews and non-Jews alike, while centering the story around an object of faith that has special significance to Jews. I  wanted that story to reflect one family’s Holocaust experience, without  depictions of violence that would be  too graphic and off-putting for younger readers. I also wanted my father to be comfortable with the story. To this day he has never gone back to Germany, and generally does not revisit that part of his life. It was important to me that he like the book.

TWM: What were the satisfactions?
EB: There are many. The illustrations are based on family photographs and artifacts. The grandfather clock in the book was in my grandparents’ house in Germany, then in their New York apartment, and now in mine. The illustrator Avi Katz, took my family images and lovingly recreated them, memorializing family members in a very unique way. Reading the completed book with my father and 90-year-old uncle has been satisfying beyond words. When my uncle responded to an illustration of my grandmother by saying, ”That’s my mother. She used to wear her hair that way,” I knew I had done something right. I also know that as the generation of survivors ages and passes on, it is incumbent upon the second and third generations to tell the stories. By creating this type of narrative, it makes it easy for me share the important messages of Holocaust education. I can talk about it with children and families from my perspective, which I think can make it less scary, and more personal.

TWM: Did you read Holocaust books as a young reader?
EB: I guess Anne Frank stands out above all others, along with a Hebrew book with a red cover about the Warsaw Ghetto. I remember hearing lots of stories, but not reading a lot of actual books until I was a bit older, and was able to read books like Eli Wiesel’s Night.

TWM: You promote the book as a gentle introduction to the Holocaust for children ages 6-10. Why is that important?
EB: I have heard from many parents that they don’t know how to broach the subject. Picture books can offer a meaningful way in, in this case, allowing parents to discuss Holocaust-related  issues of prejudice, hate and displacement without having to talk about the murder of millions of Jewish men, women and children. Bringing the experience down to a child’s level can facilitate invaluable discussions about the larger implications of stereotyping, bullying, racism, and the importance of  individual responsibility and tolerance. My hope is that the story will lay a foundation for exploring the more difficult aspects of the Holocaust later, when a child is older and able to integrate the information.

TWM: How did you decide on a publishing strategy? What brought you to Gihon River Press?
EB: I met the publisher, Steve Feuer, at Book Expo in 2012. He was promoting an adult book, and I asked if he might be interested in a children’s title. The rest is history as they say. This is his first children’s book.

TWM: We’re going to turn to Steve Feuer for a moment. What attracted you to The Tattered Prayer Book?
Steve Feuer (SF): I’ve not taken a survey, however, I believe that Gihon River Press is one of a very few independent publishers that specializes in Holocaust education and I’m always on the lookout for potential books.  I was doing a book signing at the Book Expo America for another title, when Ellen approached me with the idea of a children’s book about the Holocaust.  The idea intrigued me.  I was up front with Ellen and said that I had not done a children’s book before, that I was a very small publisher and might not be able to do it justice.  As Ellen and I discussed it, the potential became clear and with Ellen’s help and expertise I felt it would be possible.  Again my experience with children’s books, especially about the Holocaust, was a leap of faith.  Ellen’s experience and positive ideas are what attracted me to The Tattered Prayer Book.

TWM: How did you (or Avi Katz) decide to use different typography and framed pages for the flashback?
SF: This was all Avi Katz’s idea.

Ellen, what has the reaction been to this book? It’s quite a departure from Jumping Jenny  (published by Kar-Ben).
EB: The response has been great.  I guess in some ways, both books are good jumping-off points for discussions about how each of us can make a difference in the world. I was recently invited to bring The Tattered Prayer Book  to an inner city school for a day of celebrating literature. I visited with two 8^th grade classes whose teachers had done units on the Holocaust. The librarian thought my background in developing museum exhibits and the Learning Center for the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. would be of interest to the older students. They were rapt, even as I read them a picture book! They asked great questions, though I could see that a number of the students were struggling with understanding  how I, or my father, could have had anything to do with the Holocaust.  I always bring archival pictures of my family from before the war in Germany,  which the kids find fascinating. But in this case,  I felt like the photos brought an authentic “light bulb” moment of the reality of the Holocaust into this Brooklyn classroom.

At the other end of the spectrum, the book is a great resource for Jewish schools and synagogues and I’ve gotten very positive feedback from rabbis and teachers. I presented the book  at a Yom Hashoah program for a much younger group, and the questions there were quite powerful. As I have been back to Germany to visit the home my father grew up in and the Jewish day school he attended as a boy,  I share those experiences with the kids as well.  Though I obviously cannot talk about the Holocaust first hand, I think my experience adds a perspective that audiences can relate to.  While the programming that I do for Jumping Jenny is more “fun” and activity oriented, I find children and adults welcome an opportunity to talk about this book and its themes as well as learning more about the “real” people behind the book characters.

You can reach Ellen Bari at her website.

When I first thought about writing Leonard Bernstein and American Music, I had just finished work on a young adult biography of Ernest Hemingway, whose story was a sad one. Here was a charismatic young man full of promise who became an important and influential literary figure, but who fell victim to alcoholism and mental illness. Finally he could no longer resist the urge to take his own life. I had seen Hemingway through to that lonely, terrible end, and as I’m sure you can imagine, I needed a lift. I found it in Bernstein, a person who embraced life and brought joy to millions through his music. Bernstein had his low moments, as do we all, but his unwavering message was hope.

To write a biography is to face a challenge: how do I help readers experience my subject as a human being—not just as an outstanding man or woman who made a lasting contribution, but as someone with a family and friends, a person with likes and dislikes, someone who made mistakes, faced obstacles, and overcame them? Did my subject have a quick wit or a quick temper? Was he or she an optimist at heart or prone to depression? What were the subject’s quirks? When writing a biography I am doing so much more than presenting facts. I am creating a work of literature, a portrait in words.

I have often remarked on the similarities between fiction and nonfiction. Of course, novelists are free to make things up, whereas biographers must stick to the facts, but both novelists and biographers want to tell a good story. Both groups are concerned with setting, with sketching in the places where their stories take place, and with giving the reader some understanding of the larger society and what was happening in the world. Novelists and biographers also people their stories—with characters on the one hand, and with subjects on the other.

Before I begin writing, I listen to my subjects, because often they simply tell me what makes them tick. “There was no question in my mind that my life was to be about music,” Bernstein said when he was approaching age seventy and recalling his ten-year-old self. It’s a strong statement, one that reveals how profoundly music mattered to him. He and music were inseparable; without music, there would have been no Leonard Bernstein.

Direct quotations such as this one go a long way toward bringing a subject to life. I could write, for example, that Bernstein felt compelled to reach others through music. But we get a better sense of that need, and of his warm, high-powered, exuberant personality, if we hear him say, “The original energizing motor that makes me compose is the urge to communicate, and to communicate with as many people as possible, because what I love about life and the world is people.”

Quotes from individuals who knew the subject help round out the portrait. Consider, for example, two observations of Bernstein the conductor at work. “Lenny conducts with a look of angelic peace on his face,” remarked Bernstein’s longtime friend Adolph Green. Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, said that while watching Bernstein conduct a composer’s music, “I frequently had the sense that he was the composer for those moments.” These two quotations allow readers to see in their minds Bernstein at the podium and to understand how intimately he identified with the music he was interpreting.

Anecdotes—those brief, often amusing stories recounted by families, colleagues, and friends—offer a candid look at a subject at home or at work. Stories told about Bernstein reveal that although he worked long and hard, his joy was contagious; it was fun to be with him. There’s the one about Bernstein and Jerome Robbins, two young artists and pals, sharing a hospital room when they each underwent minor surgery. So many friends dropped in to chat and play cards that all the talk and laughter caused the nurses to complain. And then there’s the one about an older Bernstein, now a husband and father, writing his Kaddish Symphony at his home in Connecticut. When he announced to his family that he had finished, his wife, Felicia, expressed her happiness by leaping fully clothed into the swimming pool.

Let’s not forget those telling details, the habits and preferences that mark us as unique human beings. Bernstein, for example, owned a pair of cufflinks that had belonged to his late mentor, the great conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Bernstein wore these cufflinks when he performed and kissed them for luck before stepping onstage. I also enjoyed learning that when he and his siblings got together as adults, they chattered to one another in Rybernian, a language Bernstein and his friend Eddie Ryack had invented as children.

So: can biography be reduced to a basic recipe? Describe the significant events in a subject’s life, put them against a background of place and time, add quotations from the subject and people who knew him or her, throw in a few anecdotes and details, mix everything up, and serve it in a book? If only writing a biography were that simple! In truth, a biographer faces the biggest challenge when all the facts have been gathered and organized, and all the quotations have been selected. The time has then come to create, to use language to build a compelling narrative and breathe life into the person whose story is being told. Writing biography will forever be an art.

Learn more about Catherine Reef>>>

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What prompted you to write a book for young readers about the capture of Adolf Eichmann?
Neal Bascomb (NB): Cheryl Klein, a wonderful editor at Scholastic, called me out of the blue one day and said that she had read Hunting Eichmann and thought that my narrative on the hunt for Eichmann would make a perfect book for young adult readers. She liked that it was important history mixed with spies, Nazis on the run, derring-do, secret flights, and all the rest of a classic thriller. Of the many editors I’ve had, Cheryl is definitely one of the best. Smart, passionate, tireless on her edits, and with great vision.

TWM: In what ways is your adult treatment different?
NB: The adult treatment is roughly three times as long as the younger version. That leaves a lot more room for complicated historical and personal backgrounds, much more detail on Eichmann’s activities during the war, and further activiities on the secret operations (some that didn’t pay off). That said, the heart of the story is the same: ordinary people doing extraordinary things to bring this monster Eichmann to justice.

TWM: From your author’s note, it sounded like you spent two decades conducting research for this story, including original work. Please comment on your research strategy and process. (Do you have a day job that allows you to do this kind of work?) Did you record your interviews? Have them transcribed? Donate them to an archive?
NB: In college, I met a survivor while living in Luxembourg who said that she never spoke about what happened to her in the Holocaust until the Eichmann trial. That stuck with me, and I’ve always therefore been interested in the story. But I only spent about 2 years researching this story, much of it in Israel and Argentina, tracking down archives and meeting those involved. Typically on my research, I spend a lot of time first just reading everything I can get my hands on related to the story, then I check out the sources those authors used, and then hunt them down, and go deeper and deeper until I’m often hitting all original archival, interview sources. It’s a full time job, and I’m fortunate that my publishers support me handsomely (though not too handsomely…) so that I can devote all my energies to the stories I follow. For my interviews, which I find next to diaries, the best sources of information, I transcribe them while the interview is underway.

TWM: How were you able to weave in so many perspectives to create a full-bodied narrative? Had you ever considered telling the story from a single character’s perspective?
NB: Weaving in a lot of perspectives is often the most difficult part of the process. It takes a great deal of planning, almost like a jigsaw puzzle, to see what goes where, when. I try to maintain a chronological throughline, but sometimes you have to throw that to the wind when introducing characters and various side stories. I wish there was some kind of formula, but this is part of the magic of writing, I suppose, and truth be told, I love it!

For the chase of Eichmann, there was simply no way to tell it from one person’s perspective. There were too many different characters who had important roles at different times. And that’s great, because I find readers like to learn about new people, their backgrounds, throughout the book.

TWM: Did you seek vetting to ensure accuracy?
NB: I vet my own books. I have thousands of pages of research, probably more than anybody on this subject, and the key to accuracy…I’ve found…is organization, the ability to look up a specific date, person, fact, straightaway, rather than a “promise” you make to yourself, which is very easy while writing, to confirm something later. That said, each page of my books probably has 10-20 facts. Over a 400-page book, that’s a lot of facts, and I undoubtedly get a few things wrong (a misspelled name, location, minor time sequence wrong), but I’m only human. Fortunately, I also have great copy editors who do some double-checking as well.

TWM: What foreign languages do you speak? How does knowing another language help the research? (Conversely, how does not knowing another language hinder the research?)
NB: I speak English extremely well :)…and my German and French are serviceable, at least in terms of research, combing through archives and spotting papers that are helpful. It would be wonderful to be fluent in every subject I write about, especially since it allows you such a tremendous breadth of research material. But since I’ve covered stories in Russian, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, Ukrainian, this simply isn’t possible. I hire researchers and translators to help me, both in the archival and interview process.

TWM: What are your plans for other books for young readers?
NB: At the moment, I am researching a book called Sabotage, which focuses on the operations to stop the Nazi atomic bomb program during World War II. It’s a tale of science, secrets, and spies on skis, and I’m super excited about it. As with my Eichmann book, I will write one version for adults, another for children.

TWM: What advice would you offer aspiring writers about writing nonfiction?
NB: The classic advice: read, read, read. As well, take a job as a journalist, learn what it is to track down a story, interview, research in libraries, archives. This will help you not only understand how to prepare for a much longer process, but it will also introduce you to the type of stories that you find most appealing—and that you’re best at writing. For a while, I worked as a book editor in New York and that experience was also tremendously helpful, as it taught me how to organize such a huge project, how to revise, and to be frank, what not to do. Further, and this may seem like a odd thing to say, it demystified the writing process for me. While in high school, college, I had this grand vision of every author living in some garret in Paris, burning the candle all night to finish their great masterpiece. That may still happen, now and again, but most writers I know, aren’t wild-eyed madmen and madwoman. They’re workers, who love what they do. They sit at a desk or in a library, day after day, and they hammer out their words…Hope that’s helpful…

About Neal Bascomb

Neal Bascomb has published a number of international and national bestsellers including Higher, The Perfect Mile, Red Mutiny, and Hunting Eichmann. His books have been optioned for film, featured in several documentaries, and translated into over 15 languages. Nazi Hunters is his first book for a young adult audience. He has also written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. He and his wife and their two daughters make their home in Philadelphia. Click here to learn more about Neal Bascomb.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What was your process for writing Believe? Where did you get the inspiration for the story?
Sarah Aronson (SA): Every book I write teaches me at least one thing: how to write that book. With Believe, I also learned a lot about myself. I learned that I have a lot of tenacity, that I am able to overcome many obstacles, and that I am more sensitive than I sometimes like to admit.

I was first inspired to write this book in a hair salon in 2006. I had received a letter from Tim Wynne-Jones re: my fourth packet of my last semester at VCFA telling me that my creative thesis was done! He gave me some sage advice: For my last packet, take some risks and try something daring! As I sat under the dryer, waiting for my hair color to process, I picked up some copies of People. Back then the covers were dominated by Jon and Kate, people famous for being famous. But in one issue there was a story about the woman I knew as Baby Jessica—the baby who fell in the well. It made me think about how people deal spiritually with second chances—especially after near death experiences. (I’m not just a former religious school director: I’m also a rabbi’s granddaughter! It is a struggle not to be didactic!)

I left the salon thinking about how fame and the media have changed our world. The truth is: I have tons to say about that topic. That day, I found out that one of the men who had saved Jessica killed himself after his fifteen minutes of fame were over. It’s so tragic. He left behind a wife and family. I also found myself judging Jessica for not leading a more purposeful life—and that wasn’t fair. She hadn’t asked for fame.

When I got home, I began my journey. It took me many tries and many complete deletions (as in the whole thing) before I found Janine’s voice. Then I spent a few drafts finding her story. And a few more developing the secondary characters and subplots. Each step was a challenge—each discovery led to more re-imagination and moral questions. The whole time, I grappled a lot with Janine’s likeability. I think it’s funny that the first line is, “You never really knew me,” because it took me a long time to figure her out. But from Day One, one thing was clear: There was a story to tell. And it was a story that I wanted to write. Faith and fame were themes I needed to explore. I had some strong opinions and once I knew what all my characters wanted, I didn’t hold back.

Published 2013 by CarolRhoda Labs

TWM: What beliefs in yourself did it challenge?
SA: Like most people, there have been times when my faith has been challenged—when I wondered what kind of God would let terrible things happen to good people. It wasn’t easy reliving those feelings in Janine—in fact, there were times when I felt pretty cynical. That’s one of the reasons why I loved writing characters like Dave Armstrong, the man who rescued Janine, and Emma, a girl who put her complete trust in God. Because she is so trusting, I also wanted her to feel completely reliable and true. I didn’t want her or Dave to seem silly or disrespected. I respect people whose faith is solid. I wanted Emma especially to speak out and offer optimism. Those believers moved me. I felt their pain, too. I know from my own struggles, when we are faced with challenges, it helps to be hopeful. Her ending was really hard to write.

TWM: How did you grow as a writer as a result of this book?
SA: With each book I write, I feel more willing to take chances. In Believe, I didn’t shy away from Janine’s faults. I embraced her unlikeability and let her be interesting first. (In truth: That’s the kind of character I prefer!) I let her make mistakes; I made her pay for them. Of course, that meant I also had to deal with some readers’ disappointment that Janine was not more heroic. The funny thing was: They felt exactly the way I did when I read about Baby Jessica. The bottom line is: As much as I want to be liked, I had to accept that Janine wasn’t always going to do the right thing. After being in the spotlight for so long, she had become jaded. Maybe even a bit paranoid. At the end of the book, I think she takes huge steps toward maturity, but she still has a long way to go.

TWM: Finally, did it affect your ideas about Judaism in any way?
SA: Every book I finish gives me a great sense of satisfaction. There is something spiritual about the process of telling a story, of finding a character, a voice, and the people who matter to her. I feel blessed when I find connections to write about. Every time I sit down to write, I consciously trust the reader, my abilities, and the opportunity I was given to write again. More than anything, I love having the opportunity to collaborate with an editor. It is a very solemn experience for me; I appreciate the work Andrew Karre put into this book.

Specifically, I sought to write about a family whose conflicts begin with one interfaith marriage. This issue, and the way the Jewish community welcomes interfaith families, is important to me. Although the Reform movement has made great strides since 1978 when Alex Schindler said, “We must remove the not wanted signs from our hearts,” I also know too many people who still feel abandoned, rejected, or estranged because they fell in love with someone who was not born Jewish—and that saddens me. It’s terrible. When I meet a person who embraces synagogue life—who helps raise his or her child in a Jewish home—who allows our faith to flourish—I call that person a hero. No matter what they believe in.

As I wrote Janine’s story, I thought a lot about how her families’ actions set up a lot of the problems. I couldn’t help wondering if her story might have been different if her grandparents had not disapproved of her mother’s marriage. What if Lo had found a community that would have welcomed her and Sharon as a family, if Janine had grown up understanding Judaism, knowing a rabbi, having a foundation to help her make sense of her tragedy? I am sure it would have been a different book.

Bottom line: Writing Janine’s story made me realize how important community is to me. I feel supported and welcomed—and that makes every hardship easier to face. (The truth is: When I first found out I was moving to the Midwest, the first call I made was to the synagogue!) I am so proud of the work my synagogue, Beth Emet, does every day, especially when it comes to welcoming every family and working in our larger interfaith community. And I’ve always been impressed with the work of Interfaithfamily.com. Check them out! They offer a lot of great resources! It’s something I really like talking about, too.

About Sarah Aronson

Before starting her writing life, Sarah Aronson had worked as a physical therapist, a religious school director, and salesman at Jewish Lights. She began writing in 2000, when a friend dared her to give it a try. What a wonderful journey it has been! After writing many stories that now spend time in a drawer, Sarah went to Vermont College of Fine Arts and earned an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Since then, she has published three novels for kids and teens: Head Case, Beyond Lucky, and her newest novel about faith and fame, Believe. When Sarah is not writing, she loves working with aspiring writers of all ages, in person and online at www.writers.com. She also organizes the Novel Writing Retreat at Vermont College, now in its 11th year. Sarah lives in Evanston, Illinois with her family. You can find out way too much about Sarah, her books, and her classes on her website: www.saraharonson.com.

The Whole Megillah is pleased to post this entry by Erika Dreifus, who joins the Fiction Panel at the May 18, 2014 Conference on Jewish Story in New York City. For more about the conference, click here>>>

It’s a perennial question: What makes a given literary work “Jewish”?

Some of my ruminations on this subject stem from my own writing, notably my short-story collection, Quiet Americans, which is inspired largely by the experiences of my paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. But I’ve also considered the subject more broadly, particularly as I continue to read and write about other people’s “Jewish stories.”

Helping me shape my thoughts is a website I discovered thanks to one of the innumerable Jewishly-focused newsletters I subscribe to. At The 5 Legged Table, educator Avraham Infeld’s teachings frame a discussion of the question: What is being Jewish all about? The underlying principles impress me as applicable to a related question: What is a Jewish book or story all about?

Briefly, the 5-Legged Table comprises the following elements:

• Memory: “While history is about what happened in the past, memory is about how that past drives our present and our future.”
• Family
• Covenant: Grounded in the idea that, at Sinai, Jews committed “to recognize one God; to make the world a better place for all people; and to use certain rituals to define and shape Jewish time and space. So, for Jews who observe any or all of the mitzvot, and those who are committed to tikkun olam (repairing the world), and those who serve the Jewish community, or move to Israel, the covenant established at Mount Sinai is still a tie that binds.”
• Hebrew
• Israel

My hypothesis: To the extent that these are the “legs” on which a particular book stands, that book is a Jewish book; its story is a Jewish story. Note that the work need not necessarily include all five legs. After all, tables normally stand on four. But I take pride in realizing that, to varying degrees, all five are woven into Quiet Americans,

Memory: The book itself stems from the transmitted histories of my grandparents and their families, and how all of that accumulated history is remembered and continues to influence me. Which leads to family: Family relationships are at the core of virtually every story in my book.

What about Covenant? Here, I think especially of one story in my collection, “Lebensraum,” and the role that Jewish ritual plays there. Moreover, in a small gesture of tikkun olam, I have been making quarterly donations—based on sales of Quiet Americans—to The Blue Card, a nonprofit organization that aids U.S.-based Holocaust survivors.

Hebrew words—albeit transliterated—are sprinkled throughout Quiet Americans. And Israel is very much on the minds of many of my Jewish-American characters, whether they are watching Golda Meir speak on television after the massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972, or anguishing over the Second Lebanon War (and international condemnation of Israel for it) nearly 35 years later.

So that’s my take. How do you define a “Jewish story”?

About Erika Dreifus

Erika Dreifus lives and writes in New York City. Her prose and poetry have appeared in The Forward, Moment magazine, The Washington Post, and many others. Visit Erika online at erikadreifus.com and follow her on Twitter @ErikaDreifus.

You’ve now come to the final stop along the 2014 Sydney Taylor Book Award blog tour, the culmination of a full week of insightful and inspiring award-winning author and illustrator interviews.

Read about the blog tour and all 2014 Sydney Taylor Book Award blog posts.

The wrap-up and virtual roundtable

Imagine, if you will, available award winners seated at a dais table with mics, poised to answer questions from the press. We have nine participants:

Sydney Taylor Book Awards

• For Younger Readers — Author Laurel Snyder and illustrator Catia Chien, The Longest Night: A Passover Story 
• For Older Readers — Patricia Polacco for The Blessing Cup
• For Teen Readers — Neal Bascomb for The Nazi Hunters
  

Sydney Taylor Honor Books

• For Younger Readers
  • Author Renee Londner and illustrator Martha Aviles for Stones for Grandpa
  • Author Betty Rosenberg Perlov and illustrator Cosei Kawa for Rifka Takes a Bow

• For Older Readers
  • The late Leon Leyson (represented by Leon’s widow, Elisabeth Leyson, and Dr. Marilyn Harran, founding director of the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education at Chapman University) for The Boy on the Wooden Box
  • Carol Matas for Dear Canada: Pieces of the Past: The Holocaust Diary of Rose Rabinowitz, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1948

• For Teen Readers
  • Robyn Bavati for Dancing in the Dark
  • Author Aline Sax, illustrator Caryl Strzelecki, and translator Laura Watkinson for The War Within These Walls

The seating’s a little crowded, but we’ve saved room just for you. The energy’s high, although we know this will be a somewhat long discussion — there’s so much to talk about!

We begin…

The Whole Megillah (TWM): Thank you all for joining us today and congratulations on your great achievement. Let’s just dive right in. What are your recommendations for great Jewish kids lit?

Laurel Snyder: I’m a huge fan of Erica Perl’s middle grade novels, When Life Gives You OJ and Aces Wild.  I love that we’re seeing more contemporary middle grade books with authentic Jewish characters, books that capture family life, and the kid experience, without being heavy handed.  I love the humor in her work. I’m also a huge fan of The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming. I know it isn’t a book for everyone, but honestly, I find my favorite books tend not to be books for everyone.  I like distinct voices, books that surprise and make their mark.

Neal Bascomb: There are some excellent novels that feature young Jewish heroes and heroines or themes. In particular, I would recommend Dancing on the Bridge of Avignon by Ida Vos (a former Sydney Taylor Award winner), which I read years ago and stays with me still.  That said, I always take every opportunity to recommend nonfiction to readers, young and old alike. Of course, The Diary of Anne Frank is perhaps the most enduring nonfiction contribution to Jewish kids lit, and remains one of the most powerful works we have detailing Jewish life during WWII.

Caryl Strzelecki: It’s a very difficult question for me personally to answer. I hope that especially young people will remember their own, often tortured, history. I like to think that by reading books children will better be able to understand their own background.Maybe teachers in the schools or parents or friends can give a good guidance for reading books. But I would never force anyone or in particular any child to read anything they don’t like, it’s all about personal taste and you need time to develop your own personal taste.

Laura Watkinson: Well, I’ve recently translated a children’s book for Arthur A. Levine that I’d really like to recommend. The book, written by Marcel Prins and Peter Henk Steenhuis, is called Hidden Like Anne Frank, and it tells the stories of a number of Jewish children who, like Anne Frank, went into hiding in the Netherlands during World War II, but who survived to talk about their experiences.

The authors realized the importance of recording these stories and they’ve built up a wonderful online archive, in addition to the books that they’ve published on the subject. There’s a website with animated films accompanying the stories at www.hiddenlikeannefrank.com.

Hidden Like Anne Frank, which is coming out in March, is a specially-adapted version of the survivors’ stories for younger readers, and it’s full of interesting notes, maps, and photographs of the children who went into hiding.

I feel a bit awkward about recommending a book that I worked on myself, but I really believe in this book and these stories. I’d love Hidden Like Anne Frank to reach more young readers and I’m so pleased that I was able to play a small part in bringing these important stories to a new audience.

Robyn Bavati: Since discovering the Sydney Taylor Book Awards, I get my recommendations from them.

TWM: What trends do you see coming our way?

Snyder: I think it’s interesting to see more Jewish fantasy appearing — books like Path of Names and Inquisitor’s Apprentice. I wouldn’t be surprised if that continued.   

Bascomb: This is an interesting question, as I don’t necessarily set out to write specifically about Jewish themes, but rather stories that feature the human spirit. The Nazi Hunters took me on a journey that led me to explore a fundamental Jewish struggle in the wake of the Holocaust: Can justice ever truly be delivered for such a horrific set of events? And what does survival mean to the Jewish community, both then, and even today? With this in mind, trends I could imagine might focus on contemporary themes for kids as time increasingly separates them from those struggles: What does it mean to be Jewish today, particularly in the United States and the West where assimilation is the norm? What does it mean to be Jewish in parts of the world where assimilation is not the norm?

Renee Londner: I believe there will be a continued need for multi-cultural books. But I don’t believe it’s necessary to be a part of the culture you write about. What is necessary is the passion you bring to your work, and the authenticity of your story which comes from extensive research for both fiction and non-fiction.

Cosei Kawa: Bright, colourful, gorgeous, energetic, decorative, and vivid images will be the trends from now on. I feel the world has a thirst for festas and feasts. This comes from the need to escape from an unconscious fear that we might repeat the history which erupted a century ago. Blank spaces, resonance, and suggestiveness which are not written/illustrated will become more important in such a tempest.

Strzelecki: I have to say honestly, I’m not very good in making any predictions. I’m working on my drawings in my little studio in Lommel (Belgium)and that’s it. But I hope, without sarcasm, the future world could be a better world for everybody. I would love to see a more peaceful world that would be a real good trend. It sounds very simple but wouldn’t it be wonderful, after facing the endless futility of wars, violence and conflict for centuries.

I like this quote: ”Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.” — Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

TWM: What are your next steps in your literary career?

Snyder: I’ve just published a novel, Seven Stories Up. It’s a time-travel story, about a girl who falls back in time, from 1987 to 1937, and becomes friends with her own grandmother, as they explore the streets of Baltimore.  And in December I’m putting  out my first picture book biography, SWAN: the life and dance of Anna Pavlova. She was a childhood obsession!

Bascomb: I’m currently at work on my next nonfiction book called Sabotage. It features another wonderful story from World War II about the Allies’ ultimately successful efforts to stop the Nazis from creating a nuclear bomb. I’m working on the book for adults now, but will also write a version for young adults.

Londner: I will continue writing picture books and haiku poetry, hopefully combining the two genres. I also have plans for a non-fiction book for children.

Marilyn Harran (standing in the late Leon Leyson): It was a great privilege to play a part in Leon telling his story.  I’ve had the good fortunate over the last years to come to know many witnesses to the Holocaust.  There are so many extraordinary stories that remain to be told — and, of course, time is pressing. Right now I am working with another Holocaust survivor who has a remarkable and inspiring story to tell.  Most likely, it will be a young adult book, but it’s a little too soon to say for sure. Beyond that, I am in the early stages on a couple of other projects which I can’t as yet publicly discuss, but which I am very excited about.

Carol Matas: In the spring, I will have a new book out called Tucson Jo, inspired by the first Jewish mayor of Tucson and his family. It is set in 1882, and the main character is his independent 14-year-old daughter, Josephine. For this book, I chose Fictive Press, a small, digital publisher. Unlike traditional publishers who now seem overly concerned if a book is “too Jewish” for a general audience, Fictive Press was willing to let me write this book exactly as I saw it and explore issues freely, which was very liberating. In my earlier writing days, this was less of an issue: my publishers were happy to print my Jewish-themed books like Sworn Enemies (just re-released by Starburst Publishing) and The War Within (Simon and Schuster).

Fictive Press has recently published my first non-fiction title, When I Die, a picture book about death and dying for young children and their families. When I Die is a book I hope will help young children who are coping with loss or who are just upset at the idea of death. I still remember my grandson freaking out when he was told that dinosaurs are extinct. He immediately realized that meant people could die, that he could die, and he cried his heart out. He was four years old!

Strzelecki: For my latest book, an autobiographical graphic novel, I’ve worked closely with war correspondent for Belgian TV (VRT) Rudi Vranckx. The book is called The Vulture Club, about the ”Arab revolt.” It came out in autumn 2013. I’m also working with Rudi Vranckx on my next graphic novel. This time it’s about illegal immigrants from Africa and how it’s affecting Europe. It has increased massively in recent years. Many people from poor African countries embark on the dangerous journey for Europe, in hopes of a better life.

Watkinson: I’m currently working on a translation of a classic Dutch children’s adventure story, The Secrets of the Wild Wood, by Tonke Dragt, for Pushkin Press in the UK, which is the sequel to her book The Letter for the King, once voted the best Dutch children’s book ever. It’s about a young knight who goes on a dangerous mission to save a kingdom that’s in peril, and it really is gripping stuff. The Letter for the King was written in 1963, so it’s great to see these two books finally appearing in English.

Kawa: Narratives will attract my interest throughout all of my life. From great narratives to individual stories, I’d like to illustrate themes such as time and fate. Nonsense is also tempting as disassembled narratives. I’d like to imagine the drama on the line between ordinary life and extraordinary experience. Foods/clothes/everyday life/festivals/shows/magic/mysteries.

Bavati: I’m currently working on another YA novel. This one is unrelated to dance and features dual protagonists — one male, one female, so hopefully it will appeal to both boys and girls.

TWM: What insights did you get into Jewish life as you wrote/illustrated your book?

Snyder: Well, I spent a lot of time thinking about children in the Bible.  Thinking about how kids have a very different experience of the world.  I could probably spend a lifetime trying to unpack those ideas.  What the world was like for the children born immediately after the flood.  Or during the years in the desert.  It was a lot of fun, talking to my kids about all of that.

Bascomb: Although I did a tremendous amount of research on a wide variety of topics for The Nazi Hunters, there are two parts of the Jewish experience in particular related to my story that stand out for me.

One, the effects of the brutality of the Nazis on the human spirit. In his execution of the Final Solution, Eichmann did specific things to attempt to strip the humanity from the Jews: removing them from their homes, separating them from their families, treating them like cattle in the transports, the denial of any free will at all. Although I was certainly familiar with this before researching the book, I read many personal testimonials which added unforgettable and heartbreaking color to my understanding of this.

Two, the question of justice, how to exact it. David Ben-Gurion understood that by bringing Eichmann to trial he would remind the world what the Germans did to the Jews during the war, as well as remind Jewish youth why the state of Israel needed to exist. It would have been much simpler to kill him, but mere revenge would not have served a larger purpose. I remember interviewing the Mossad agents about how difficult it was to have one of the men chiefly responsible for the death of their loved ones, not to mention many, many other unspeakable acts, within easy strangling distance. To hold Eichmann in the safe house in Argentina while they waited for an opportunity to take him back to Israel and put him on trial was excruciating. The strength of these men (and women) to follow through on their mission and their ability to respond so nobly in the face of such barbarism is an enduring testament to Jewish humanity—and humanity over all.

Aline Sax: The story of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto is rather unknown in Belgium. We all know about the round-ups, the camps, the gas chambers, the death marches. Young people think of the Jews as lambs being led to the slaughter, passively packing up their stuff and boarding the trains. When I studied history in Berlin, I took up a course on the relationship between Poles, Jews and Germans during the Second World War, where the subject of the ghetto uprising came up. I was immediately interested, since this was such a different story of what I already knew about Jewish life during the war. It showed Jews were not all that passive. They did resist, they did raise their voice, hoping to be heard, they did not accept what was happening but protested against the injustice being inflicted upon them. I think it’s important to tell this part of history as well.

Matas: I needed to think a lot about the nature of yetzer ha-rah, the evil side, and yetzer tov, the good side. A character who is an orphan, who has experienced the worst of human nature, must look at the world in a particular way and I had to try to understand that and to inhabit it. A character like that must try to reconcile a good universe vs. a bad universe. She must try to come to terms with the world and she must try to discover if there is any love or beauty even as she knows from the inside the horror and the hate.

Strzelecki: It’s very difficult to imagine what life must have been on those days in Warsaw. The entire war period was just madness for Jewish life. It’s still today difficult to understand how this all could happen. For me, the key moment is absolutely when the ghetto inhabitants learned that the deportations were part of an extermination process. It changed everything! But fighting with almost nothing (only some handguns, grenades, and Molotov cocktails), that’s heroism: A battle they could not win against the more powerful Nazis. So they decided not to go quietly to certain death. That’s for me, personally, pure heroism.

Watkinson: I was, of course, aware of the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto and the uprising, but translating Aline’s take on the story and really getting inside those events, seeing things from the point of view of someone who suffered the horror and the indignity of incarceration and starvation, really inspired a visceral reaction within me. The scene with the flamethrowers was particularly vivid and harrowing, and Caryl’s illustrations underline the sheer despair of the people within the Ghetto.

I think Aline’s story, supported by Caryl’s dramatic illustrations, provides an important way in to this essential historical material for younger readers. It also introduces them to a very strong man, Mordechai Anielewicz. I was certainly inspired to find out more about him and about his life and death.

Bavati: Dancing in the Dark was very much a product of my Orthodox upbringing and the inner conflicts I experienced both in adolescence and well into adulthood as a result of it. Writing it actually helped me to resolve these issues and clarify my own beliefs. I’m not sure I got any additional insights into Jewish life; instead, I gained further insight into my own psyche.

TWM: Let’s talk about the award itself. What does the Sydney Taylor award/honor mean to you?

Bascomb: It means a tremendous amount to be recognized for my efforts in this way, in particular since, as most people know, I am not Jewish. It is always important to me as a writer to honor the people and the amazing things they accomplished by telling their stories in the best way I know how. To be recognized for The Nazi Hunters by those who safeguard Jewish children’s literature means I might have achieved that here, and I’m very proud of that.

Londner: Having my book recognized by the AJL is an honor beyond description. The fact that Stones for Grandpa is such a personal story makes this recognition even more meaningful. I remember, many years ago, when a friend in a critique group announced her book had won the Sydney Taylor Award. I was filled with such wonder at her achievement. Now I am thrilled that my book has also been recognized with a Sydney Taylor Honor.

Elisabeth Leyson: I am absolutely overjoyed by the Sydney Taylor Honor Award to my husband’s memoir The Boy on the Wooden Box.  Leon would have been so proud that his work is being recognized by such an influential and esteemed group.  Thank you.

Harran: Well, it means a lot, but it would mean so very much more if Leon were here to receive it.  I think of him every day.  I am  proud to have played a role with Lis in helping him tell his story.  I think about how much courage it took for Leon to relive that history and then to find the words to capture what is in many ways an indescribable set of experiences.  Every time I read a page or two from the book, I hear Leon’s voice.  He had a truly extraordinary ability to reach audiences of all ages.  It’s very nice to read comments on Amazon from readers who echo that very thought — that although the book is written for readers 11 and up, people of all ages are reading it and finding it meaningful.  And it’s thrilling to read comments where people say that once they start the book, they can’t put it down.  Leon would be stunned at the reception the book has received and its being named a Sydney Taylor Honor Book.  I know he would see it as a tribute to all his family and perhaps most especially to his beloved older brother Tsalig, whose memory, I think, was what most inspired Leon.

Matas: I take it as a confirmation that there are Jewish readers who are as interested in Jewish issues as I am and that I am  not speaking into the void!

Strzelecki: We all want to get recognized and noticed for the work you do. We all enjoy receiving compliments, but that’s not the reason you do it. The purpose is always to tell a good story maybe an important story. That’ my goal. And, therefore, it’s a lot easier when you win prizes; it gives you the freedom to work in the future on the things you like to do. So for me personally the Sydney Taylor Book Award is of course very welcome. It also makes me very proud that it came from the Jewish society. In fact that makes it extra special!

Watkinson: I’m very thankful for the committee’s recognition of the team that created The War within These Walls and brought the book to the United States. It’s a great honor for everyone involved that The War within These Walls has been recognized with such an important award, and it’s particularly gratifying as the book opens up such a very important chapter of history.

I hope that this award will encourage librarians to read The War within These Walls and to recommend the book to a new group of readers, and to help convey the book’s message to a younger generation.

Kawa: Receiving praise is a genuine pleasure.  Thank you so much for this honour! I hope children will know Rifka Takes a Bow by this award and enjoy reading it. It gives me confidence that there are people who empathize with my drawings. Also, I’m excited about what kind of changes will occur around me. 

Sax: I am very happy that our book has been chosen as a Sydney Taylor Honor Book for various reasons. It was already nice to hear that Eerdmans wanted to translate and publish our story in the United States, but when I heard we also won the silver medal of the Sydney Taylor Award, I was really thrilled. It’s so nice to get recognition abroad because it shows that our story also touches people in other countries. I think it’s important that good books are translated into different languages. Literature is a great way for people around the world to learn about each other, it’s a marvelous way of communication between cultures.

Moreover, I’m very honored because this is a Jewish award. I think it’s very important to tell the story of the Holocaust to as many people as possible and I’m glad that the Jewish community supports this idea – and our story, by granting us this silver medal. I hope this award will make the story known to an even broader audience.

Bavati: I feel extremely honoured. Given the high quality of Jewish writing today and the wonderful books that abound, it’s a great privilege to be named alongside some truly outstanding writers.

Though I didn’t write Dancing in the Dark for a specifically Jewish audience, I did feel it would be of particular interest to Jewish teens and their parents, and I hoped it would find its way to the Jewish libraries and schools. But there was some controversy over it in Australia when the principal of a Modern Orthodox Jewish school refused to allow the book on the library shelves because he felt it portrayed Orthodoxy in a negative light (see Book Censorship at Mount Scopus College). He claimed that the book had “a clear agenda to disengage young Jews from Judaism” (certainly not the case) and that it was, moreover, “a bad book.”

Finding out that it had won a medal and been named a Sydney Taylor Honor Book for teens was, therefore, especially gratifying.

TWM: And now for the final question for today’s discussion: Will anything be different now that your work has been recognized by the Sydney Taylor Book Award?

Bascomb: Well, I’ve never been to Las Vegas before, so I’m really looking forward to that! More seriously, I don’t think anything fundamentally changes for me in my day-to-day work: The research and writing remain as difficult as they’ve always been. But what the Sydney Taylor Award does change for me is my perspective on the purpose of my work. All writers share the purpose to add to our understanding of the human experience, our history, present, and future. This award is a reminder that, when done as well as I’m able, people, and in particular, kids will read my work and it can inform their view of the world.

Londner: Since there are so many wonderful books being published it is almost impossible to read them all. However whenever I, personally, see that a book has been singled out for an award or an honor, I pay closer attention. It often introduces me to an author I may not have known and I then tend to follow his/her work. I hope this is true of other readers, as well.

Matas: I hope Pieces of the Past will reach a wider audience, and  hopefully the award will encourage more readers, young and old, to read and learn about the Holocaust, a subject that people often find frightening or daunting to explore.

Bavati: My writing process and lifestyle won’t be any different. Hopefully the award will help increase sales.

The Whole Megillah thanks each of you for participating in this roundtable discussion. Readers, please check out the preceding blog tour and get to know these winners and their works even better — their techniques, their approaches, their inspirations. And thanks to all the wonderful bloggers who volunteered their time and space to interview these Sydney Taylor Book Award winners.

Next week I will be speaking at the Seminar on the Jewish Story about how being the editor of the online literary journal Jewish Fiction .net affects me as a writer, and vice versa. I look forward to discussing this at the seminar, but in the meantime, here’s a forshpeiz with a few of my thoughts.

Overall I find it fascinating, fun, exciting, and challenging to be living simultaneously as a writer and as the editor of this wonderful literary journal. (For those of you not yet familiar with Jewish Fiction .net, please visit us online — it’s free.) In a couple of obvious ways, being a writer and an editor are compatible roles. They both exist in the same world, that of literature (and here specifically, that of contemporary Jewish fiction), and they both involve a love and respect for this literature. In other ways, though, these two roles are not all that compatible, and they are even at odds with each other.

First of all, there’s the issue of time. Before starting Jewish Fiction .net, I was a full-time writer. My new novel, Fields of Exile, the first novel about anti-Israelism on campus, was published one week ago in Canada, and will be coming out in two weeks in the USA. Luckily, most of Fields of Exile was already written before I created Jewish Fiction .net. I didn’t foresee, when beginning this journal, that running it would be a full-time job; I thought of my full-time job as writing fiction, and imagined I would work on Jewish Fiction .net in my spare time. I laugh at that now. Like many people, I had no idea how time-consuming it is, or how much work is required, to produce a first-rate literary journal. I won’t bore you with all the details, but suffice to say that editing Jewish Fiction .net is a full-time job.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Jewish Fiction .net, and couldn’t be more delighted with its success. It is currently the only English-language journal either in print or online devoted exclusively to publishing Jewish fiction, and in less than four years we’ve published 186 first-rate works of fiction (stories or novel excerpts) that had never previously been published in English, and were originally written in eleven languages. All of us on the Jewish Fiction .net team are immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished so far. But there’s no denying that producing three issues a year of this journal has cut into my writing time.

The other major incompatibility between the roles of writer and editor is an existential one. Writing fiction and editing a fiction journal involve two different ways of being in the world. Writing fiction is ultimately a solitary endeavour. When I write, I — like other writers — am stripped down emotionally and psychologically to my most basic self, and sometimes to my unconscious self. When I was writing Fields of Exile, for instance, there were times I was so deeply immersed in it that I could barely talk to anyone else.

In contrast, working as an editor occurs in collective, social space. This, of course, is part of what makes editing Jewish Fiction .net so rewarding: the joy of community, the feeling one is part of something larger than oneself. If Nora the writer works in intense solitude, Dr. Nora Gold the editor is social, collegial, and 100%  professional. I have been a social worker and a professor in two of my past professional roles, and I relate to being the editor of Jewish Fiction .net as engaging in a professional role in precisely the same way.

Overall, I’m very grateful to be both a writer and an editor now. Despite the time demands and the constant juggling, I feel extremely fortunate as a writer to be involved with Jewish Fiction .net. It’s an honour to be able to help support other fine Jewish writers (including writers who are just starting out, but not only them) by providing a special place specifically for Jewish-themed fiction. I feel like I’m helping members of my own tribe. But I don’t mean “tribe” just as in the Jewish people tribe. The incomparable Adele Wiseman (one of my favourite writers) and her close friend Margaret Laurence (another of my favourite writers) both referred to their writing community as their “tribe”. What I have discovered — to my surprise — is that, through giving Jewish Fiction .net to the international Jewish literary community, I got something back: a literary community, maybe even a literary home. And what greater gift could there be to any writer, struggling alone in her/his solitariness, than to know that none of us is really alone, and that in our solitary writing lives, we are all in this together?

Nora Gold will be speaking on the fiction panel (along with Erika Dreifus and Yona Zeldis McDonough) at the May 18 Seminar on Jewish Story, Temple Emanu-El, New York City. Seats are still available. Contact barbarakrasner(at)att(dot)net for details.

From May 13 through May 27, the MS St. Louis, a Hamburg-Amerika luxury liner, carried nearly 1,000 German-Jewish refugees to alleged safety in Havana in 1939. The refugees, save 22 first-class passengers, were not allowed to disembark. Martin Goldsmith is the grandson of one of those passengers and tells the story of retracing the steps in Alex’s Wake: A Voyage of Betrayal and a Journey of Remembrance, published by DaCapo Press in this 75th anniversary year of the voyage.

TWM: What was different for you in writing Alex’s Wake vs. The Inextinguishable Symphony?
Martin Goldsmith (MG): The Inextinguishable Symphony was my first book, written in 1999.  Though I couldn’t help commenting occasionally, for the most part I remained firmly off stage as I told the story of my parents and their experiences performing with the Judische Kulturbund (the all-Jewish arts organization supported by the Nazis) between 1935 and 1941.  In Alex’s Wake, though again I tell a story rooted in the history of the Holocaust, I’m very much a participant, as the book is not only about my grandfather and uncle, it’s also about my wife’s and my journey three years ago in which we traveled for six weeks and 5,700 miles from Alex’s birthplace in Lower Saxony to the Polish city of Oswiecim, or Auschwitz in German.  Along the way I come to terms (or do my best, at any rate) with the family legacy of guilt and shame that for so long I believed to be my emotional inheritance.  So all in all, AW is a good deal more personal than TIS was.

TWM: Do you think you could have written the former without the latter?
MG: Probably not.  Though I’d been thinking about writing another book about my family, I was spurred into action by the deaths of my father and my brother, my only sibling, which occurred exactly eleven months apart in 2009 and 2010.  I decided that part of my grieving process would be the start of another journey into the story of the family, since I was now the Last Goldsmith Standing.  The first book provided me with a template and a jumping-off point.

TWM: How long did it take you to produce the Alex’s Wake manuscript? Did most of your research come before your trip or during the writing process?
MG: During the six-week trip through Germany, France, and Poland, I kept a travel diary and some phrases from that diary made their way into the finished manuscript.  So in that sense, the writing process lasted from May 2011, until February 2013, when I wrote the last word of the last chapter.  But in another sense, I actually sat down to write Chapter One in late August of 2011, so that would mean the writing took me about a year and a half.  (I held down a full-time job during that time, so the majority of my writing occurred at night and on weekends.) Most of the historical research occurred before the trip and of course so much of the research and life experiences of the journey occurred while we were on the road.

TWM: It seems like “it took a village” to make your journey happen. Please comment on that.
MG: I received so much valuable assistance from the archivists at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.  When I began thinking about telling the story of Alex and Helmut, I knew that they’d landed in France in June of 1939 after the voyage of the St. Louis and that they’d entered the Rivesaltes concentration camp in January of ’41, but their whereabouts during those intervening 18 months were a mystery.  It was thanks to the Holocaust Museum (and an unwitting French functionary filling in a form in 1941) that I learned many details of their itinerary.  It was also thanks to the fact that Montauban, one of the cities where Alex and Helmut were held, is a sister city with Pawhuska, Oklahoma, that I came to know Jean-Claude Drouilhet, one of the very kind and helpful people we met on our journey, who assisted me in learning even more details of their captivity.  It really did take something of a global village of wonderful people who made possible both the journey and so many invaluable discoveries along the way.

TWM: What do you think your book will add to the canon of Holocaust-related literature? What do you want it to add?
MG: I like to think that Alex’s Wake will add what I want it to add and those items include the following, in no particular order.  I think the book includes a thorough history of the unhappy voyage of the St. Louis, explaining how political considerations and an undeniable strain of anti-Semitism in the America of the late 1930s led to a decision that should still haunt this country 75 years later and remind us that our dearly-held ideals are always subject to compromise.  I think that the book will inform readers of the existence of the thousands of French camps that were built to house those whom the right-wing Vichy government deemed “undesirables,” most of them Jews.  It is my hope that the book will begin to make the names Gurs, Rivesaltes, Agde, Les Milles, and Drancy as familiar as the names Dachau, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz in the horrific annals of the Holocaust.  And I think that Alex’s Wake will speak to the sorrows of my generation, the Second Generation: children of Holocaust survivors who grew up in homes where the violent destruction of their families was kept veiled in silence and shame, leading to long-held unresolved issues of trust and fear and unhappiness.  It is my deepest hope that readers of the book will discover that it is possible to steer their way out of the churning turbulence of the wake of their family torments and into the peaceful waters of their current families and friends.

TWM: What advice would you give aspiring memoirists?
MG: My best advice is to get started, to write down everything that moves you, that galvanizes you, and to tell stories that you realize on some deep level need to be told.  No one else knows your stories as well as you do.  Share them with us.

Capstone develops nonfiction titles for the school and library market. Here The Whole Megillah presents a dialogue with the editors and authors of two titles, A World War II Timeline and Hitler in Paris, which carry Jewish themes.

Title: A World War II Timeline (Smithsonian, War Timelines series)

The Whole Megillah (TWM):  How do you choose the writer? What qualifications do you look for?
Kristen Mohn, Capstone Senior Editor (KM): Elizabeth Raum is one of my go-to writers for history topics. She delves into the research, makes sure she gets every detail right, and presents it to the reader in a gripping way.

TWM: What advice would you have for writers interested in nonfiction history writing?
KM: Read widely. Having a good core knowledge of history topics is important, and reading on various topics is bound to reveal new book ideas. You may find yourself asking—why haven’t I heard more about this topic? If it interests you, it will be interesting to a young reader, too, if you find the “hook” that will reel them in.

TWM: What draws you to editing children’s books?
KM: It’s all I ever wanted to do. Reading a great book during your developmental years is a transformative experience. When I was young, I remember being in a daze after finishing certain books, knowing that I’d never look at the world in the same way again. To help deliver that experience as an editor is incredibly rewarding.

TWM: What did you like to read as a kid?
KM: Real-life stories. Stories about kids “like me,” or conversely, kids or people whose lives were nothing like mine. It was fascinating to me how many ways there were to live a life. If it really happened to someone, I wanted to read about it.

TWM: Thanks, Kristen. Let’s turn now to author Elizabeth Raum. Elizabeth,  what was your greatest challenge in writing this book?
Elizabeth Raum (ER): World War II encompassed the entire world and took place over the course of six years. The greatest challenge was deciding which dates and events to include in the timeline given the 32-page limit and the reading level. I was also aware that many readers were approaching it without prior knowledge. So I wanted to include major battles, pivotal moments, and the most powerful world leaders, as well as explanatory notes. My job was to make difficult choices. Happily, historians at the Smithsonian concurred with my choices.

TWM: What was your greatest satisfaction? Did anything in your research or writing process surprise you?
ER: A timeline book is like a puzzle. It’s always rewarding to find that the pieces fit together! Although I was aware of the suffering of the Polish and Russian people, I was reminded again of how long those sieges lasted and of the untiring efforts of the Polish Resistance.

TWM: What advice would you have for writers interested in nonfiction history writing?
ER: Visit historical sites, read history, watch documentaries, and frequent museums. That’s where you’ll find the fascinating details and sidelights that make history come alive for young readers.

TWM: What draws you to writing children’s books?
ER: When I was a child, books carried me to times and places I could never have visited in person. I want to do the same for my readers. History is exciting. It’s up to children’s writers to interpret complex events and ideas in ways that children can understand and in a manner that inspires them to read more.

TWM: What did you like to read as a kid?
ER: Like many children, I went through phases. When I was in 4th grade, I read nothing but biographies. By 5th grade, I moved on to historical fiction. I was fortunate that the librarian at my small public library let me browse the adult section, as well as the children’s shelves. I read whatever caught and held my attention. It was a fantastic education!

Title: Hitler in Paris (Captured World History)

TWM: How did you come up with the concept of the importance of photography to history?
Catherine Neitge, Capstone Senior Editor (CN): Here’s a post from our Capstone Connect blog, written by Amber Ross, Capstone’s Product Planner, who came up with the idea for the Captured History series:

“There really is no magical formula to coming up with great books for kids. Sometimes it’s the converging of various thoughts and trends that sprouts a seed of an idea. Like the day I was trudging through state curriculum standards and came upon one that called for students to analyze primary sources, including photographs. I’ve always had an interest in photography, so this piqued my curiosity. I started thinking: What if we asked readers to analyze famous photographs? A book could look at a famous photo and discuss what was happening in the world at the time, the events that led to the photo being shot, the impact the photo had, etc. And just like that, our series was born. (OK, I might have glossed over the actual hours spent toiling over defining the vision for the series and the months editors, designers, and photo researchers spent producing the books, but you get the picture.)”

In an email, Amber goes on to say: “The photo I instantly thought of was Migrant Mother and how cool it would be to do a book on it. Such an iconic image of the Great Depression and a great way to jumpstart a discussion on the topic. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, and it’s so true—there’s more to most photos than meets the eye, and why not do a series of books to explain all of that?”

TWM: How did you choose the titles? Are there more titles forthcoming in the series?
CN: We started by choosing iconic photos with a U.S. focus: Migrant Mother from the Great Depression, Little Rock Girl and Birmingham 1963 from the civil rights movement, Mathew Brady’s Civil War photos, Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office after President Kennedy’s assassination, among them. Our most recent books took a worldwide view for an even wider audience: Hitler in Paris, Tank Man, Summiting Everest, and The Blue Marble.

Our two newest books, which will be published in spring 2015, are focused on the West and will feature the brilliant photos of American Indians by Edward S. Curtis and the iconic East and West photo by Andrew Russell of the completion of the transcontinental railroad.

TWM: How do you choose the writer? What qualifications do you look for?
CN: We have a group of excellent writers who have worked on Compass Point Books titles for many years. The Captured History writers have proven themselves to be excellent writers and researchers with a love of history. Don Nardo, who wrote Hitler in Paris, is a historian as well as an author. He is perfect for the Captured History titles and has written many of them, including the award-winning Migrant Mother from the first season.

TWM: With the focus on photography, does this series present any challenges?
CN: Since we are telling the story of the photographer as well as the featured photo, we always include photos of the photographer. Sometimes they are hard to find.

TWM: What advice would you have for writers interested in nonfiction history writing?
CN: The best nonfiction history writers have a passion for history and keep up-to-date on new research. It’s amazing how much new information surfaces.

TWM: What draws you to editing children’s books?
CN: Children’s books should be as interesting, factual, and error-free as books for adults. I draw on my background as a longtime journalist to provide children with just such books. Plus I love history and enjoy working on our books with historical topics.

TWM: What did you like to read as a kid?
CN: I come from a family of avid readers and spent a lot of time at the library as a child. I was a huge fan of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books. I also loved Nancy Drew, books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, all sorts of historical fiction, biographies of famous women, mysteries, and on and on.

TWM: Thanks, Catherine. So now we come to Don Nardo, author of more than 400 books for young readers. Don, what was your greatest challenge in writing Hitler in Paris?
Don Nardo (DN): I’m not sure that “challenge” would be the right word to use here, in large part because Nazi Germany and World War II are two of my areas of special interest as a historian.

However, as I do in all my nonfiction books, I had a distinct aim in mind when approaching the project. This was to tell the story on two levels—the first one being a general overview of the events and personalities involved, structured fairly simply in order to acquaint our young readers with information that it is assumed they are not yet familiar with. The second level is an undercurrent of sporadic details that are little known or unknown to all but a few scholars and World War II buffs. The details are fascinating, striking, ironic, disturbing, and/or compelling in some other way. This undercurrent of little-known, intriguing material is what makes such a book interesting and absorbing on the one hand, and unique from all other books on that topic in the market on the other hand.

TWM: What was your greatest satisfaction? Did anything in your research or writing process surprise you?
DN: My greatest satisfaction in writing this and my other history books for young people has been the knowledge that I am providing a large series of history texts that exist in libraries across the country and that can be referenced by both young people and adults who are looking for accurate, up-to-date, and entertaining examinations of various areas of human history. I can’t say that anything surprised me during the research, but that is likely because I was already conversant with this material. Still, when writing books in historical areas that I know less well, I frequently find facts that do surprise me.

TWM: What advice would you have for writers interested in nonfiction history writing?
DN: The person should have either of two things (or both, hopefully). First, he or she should have at least one subject area—whether it be a historical one, a scientific one, a literary one, or whatever—in which he or she is very conversant. Editors often look for writers who are knowledgeable in the subject areas of books that they are planning to do. Second, the person should become as proficient as possible in doing research. Many people have little notion of how important that is. There are dozens of skills and tricks that one can learn that will make him or her a more skilled researcher. One major reason that I have been able to make a full-time living as a nonfiction writer for a quarter of a century is that I write books fast; and in large part that is because I’m highly skilled in doing research. In a related vein, the person needs to be well-organized too.  (Often, that’s half the battle!)

TWM: What draws you to writing children’s books?
DN: In my case, I did not set out to write young adult and children’s books. Back in the 1980s I was writing screenplays and teleplays, including work for Warner Bros. and ABC TV. (I already had a degree in history, but at the time I only rarely accepted history-writing assignments.) One day I got a call from a packager/publisher in Boston (about 60 miles from where I live) who said they saw my name on a list of good writers in the region. They explained that they were in the midst of turning out a new American history text for junior-high level and they were in desperate need of a writer with a background in history to write four of the book’s chapters. It took me about three days to do each chapter and the pay was good, so I had no regrets. To my surprise, however, a mere month later, I got a call from a publisher of young adult books in California, who offered me a book. The publisher liked the manuscript so much, they asked me to write two or three more, and before I knew what hit me, I was getting calls from other publishers in the young adult and children’s nonfiction markets. Soon I was turning out 15 to 20 books a year for those markets and always booked ahead with projects. In a sense, I became hooked, partly because there was plenty of work, but more so because I saw an opportunity. I decided to make a mission of providing reliable, accurate, up-to-date history texts for young people.

TWM: Thank you—Kristen, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Don—for a great interview! 

Submitting to Capstone

We are always looking for new history writers! Writers can submit the following: a resume, cover letter, up to 3 writing samples. Mail them to: Editorial Director, Capstone Nonfiction, 1710 Roe Crest Drive, North Mankato, MN 56003.

We also have this info outlined on our submissions page here:www.capstonepub.com/content/CONTACTUS_SUBMISSIONS

Book Giveaway in return for your comments

Be one of the two first responders to this post and receive a free copy of the A World War II Timeline or Hitler in Paris. One of each title will be awarded.