It’s an all-too-common family scenario, especially in the Bay Area — a child who’s the product of an Asian-Jewish marriage becomes the focus of attention from two grandmothers who maybe aren’t as different as they think.
In this case, in a new children’s book called “Chicken Soup, Chicken Soup,” the family is fictitious but the storyline emerged from a real-life situation that got the author thinking. In the book, young Sophie teaches her Jewish bubbe and her Chinese grandma that they’re cooking up pretty much the same soup with different names.
The book, written by Pamela Mayer and illustrated by Deborah Melmon, both of whom live in the Bay Area, follows Sophie as she goes to Grandma Ellie’s house for chicken soup with kreplach and then visits Grandma Nancy for chicken soup with wontons.
But she praises her Jewish grandmother for the delicious wontons and her Chinese grandma for the kreplach, sending the two progenitors into a tizzy.
“How could a little piece of dough, stuffed with meat and floating in a bowl of chicken soup, cause a problem?” Sophie wonders.
So she has each grandmother make a new batch of soup, then mixes them together to show their similarities — leading Grandmother Ellie to acknowledge she uses wonton wrappers to make her kreplach and Grandma Nai Nai to admit she gets the chicken for her soup at a kosher market.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that a lot of foods have similar things in different cultures,” Mayer said in an interview. “Call them blintzes or crepes or tortillas. I think it’s just interesting how people take raw material and it becomes a cuisine.”
Mayer, 63, said she first got the specific idea for “Chicken Soup, Chicken Soup” after reading a March 2011 story in J. about the child-raising styles of Asian-Jewish families in the Bay Area.
She wrote “The Grandma Cure” in 2005, about two grandmothers disagreeing on how to cure a granddaughter’s cold until the youngster teaches them how to cooperate using lessons she learned in kindergarten.
Mayer, who grew up in San Francisco attending Congregation Beth Sholom and now lives in Foster City and is a member of Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo, said she grew up eating the Russian food of her grandmother but had lots of Chinese friends. She works part-time as a librarian in San Mateo.
The Menlo Park-based Melmon, who is not Jewish but was married to a Jewish man, found the theme fairly universal. “That’s what I loved about this story the most — the tension between the grandmothers, because every family can relate to that. There’s that competition about which is better,” Melmon said in an interview. “I think the little girl had a sense that the two grandmothers were doing it out of a love for the food and who they were cooking it for.”
Though Mayer and Melmon live only a few miles apart, they had never met or even talked to each other until after the book was published. After Mayer sends in a manuscript, the publisher (in this case, Kar-Ben), selects the artist and there normally is no interaction between author and illustrator during the creative process. Melmon previously illustrated Kar-Ben’s “Speak Up, Tommy!” and “Picnic at Camp Shalom.”
Mayer, who has two daughters and a 2-year-old granddaughter, said she likes “to write stories where the little girl outsmarts the grown-ups.” Her latest book, though, is about a mouse — which would be a perfect fit for Melmon, since most of the roughly 50 children’s books she’s illustrated have involved animals and not people.
“I always wanted to write a Jewish story with a cute little animal,” Mayer said. “It’s called ‘The Mouse Who Danced the Hora,’ and it was sent to the publisher, but I haven’t heard back yet.”
“Chicken Soup, Chicken Soup” by Pamela Mayer (32 pages, Kar-Ben Publishing) Ages 4-8