If you are like me, a parent of young children, then you too are probably always looking for interesting, age-appropriate, educational reading material for them. If the books have a degree of Jewish content, all the better. To my delight, along come three books that are successful at providing this type of reading for children of all ages.
The first, “A Grandpa Like Yours/A Grandma Like Yours,” is a well-illustrated little book. It has a quirky setup that uses pictures of different animals to illustrate the many unique skills and loves of grandparents.
The book works in transliterated Yiddish and Hebrew words, and has the various animals participating in many Jewish activities like matzah-making, challah-baking and caring for the sick. The words and the illustrations work hand-in-hand for young children to reinforce the unique intergenerational aspect of many Jewish activities.
In contrast to the light-hearted spirit of “A Grandpa Like Yours,” “Miriam’s Journey: Discovering A New World” is a more serious selection from Gali Girls Jewish History Series, aimed at 7-year-olds and up. It tracks the immigration of the Bloom family from Grodek, Russia, to New York during the great migration of Eastern Europeans through Ellis Island. The book focuses on three sisters: Ida, Miriam and Sophie, who are 12, 10 and 5 respectively.
The plot follows the three Bloom sisters and their mother, Rose, as they move to the United States and attempt to find Samuel, the girls’ father, who had already immigrated to find a better life for his family. The family faces much travail on their journey, including harassment from Cossacks and a standing-room-only ship ride across the Atlantic, only to arrive in New York to find out that Samuel had died of a heart attack just prior to docking.
The Bloom family then faces the daunting possibility of being denied entry to the U.S., and only through the timely intervention of an entrepreneurial Jewish reporter for the Forward and a Jewish lawyer from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society are they allowed to remain.
This tale of a Jewish family working to build a better life for one another and facing many challenges, including anti-Semitism, to try and create a better future is inspirational and focuses on a part of Jewish history that is in many ways triumphant: the building of a large scale Jewish community in the United States.
However, the story, like much of Jewish history, forces children and their parents to confront serious issues: As a parent, how does one explain Cossacks attacking Jews throughout Russia to young children?
And on a more personal level, how does one explain to their children that parents die — and they may die when you need them the most, like when you arrive on the shores of a strange country?
“Miriam’s Journey” handles these issues in a matter-of-fact fashion and parents should prepare themselves for many difficult discussions about death and bigotry.
The most difficult subject matter in this troika of children’s books is “I Am A Star: Child of the Holocaust,” a first-person account from a survivor of the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Written for adolescents in a plainspoken fashion, this slim book describes the Holocaust in many of its most gruesome details, from expulsions to slave labor and mass extermination.
This book is a useful segue into addressing this part of Jewish history with their teenagers. The Holocaust is a subject beyond the mental grasp of even most adults, though as parents a time will inevitably come to address this issue with our children.
So how does one teach children to be optimistic and unafraid of the future, while revealing to them that human beings to do the most unspeakable things to one another? How can we place the genocides in Darfur, Rwanda and Bosnia into a relevant context? How do you raise children that are both aware of the dangers that have lurked in our past and may lurk in our future, but also of the Jewish people’s successes and triumphs?
If you decide to broach “I Am A Star: Child of the Holocaust” with your children, be ready to take on these questions.
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“A Grandpa Like Yours/A Grandma Like Yours” by Andria Warmflash Rosenbaum (32 pages, Kar-Ben Publishing, $6.95).
“Miriam’s Journey: Discovering a New World” by Robin K. Levinson (63 pages, Gali Girls Inc., $12).
“I Am A Star: Child of the Holocaust” by Inge Auerbacher (96 pages, Puffin, $5.99).