Karol Ruth Silverstein: Cursed

 Cursed is a difficult book, as it deals with a fourteen year old girl, Ricky, who has just been diagnosed with a serious chronic illness. Having been in a similar position, although slightly older when my illness struck, I can unequivocally state that this book honestly reflects the physical and emotional struggles of such a diagnosis. It does it in a high school setting and with a broken family, reflecting the realities of too many kids and of high schools today. 

During the book Ricky learns to live with her disability. She also learns from her disability. Rooting for her, watching her learn how to stand up for herself and voice her needs, how to function in spite of pain, and how to depend on others makes this book hard to put down.

Great Characterization

The cast of characters is varied and vividly drawn, from mean girls to a teacher who at first is disdainful but comes to be one of her greatest supporters by making her stretch intellectually in spite of her pain.

Weakly Jewish

This is one of the books that almost made it to the Sydney Taylor Prize for a Young Adult book portraying the American Jewish experience. Unfortunately, almost the only Jewish reference was mention of Ricky’s Bubbie, who makes a joke with “a super-heavy East Coast Jewish accent that makes the joke even more hilarious.” 

The lack of meaningful Jewish ideas saddened me, but this is the truth of the  experience of vast numbers of American Jewish kids today. It will show non-Jewish readers that Jews are just like them. To those of us who find meaning in our differences and in our tradition, this is sad.

Well Worth Reading

In spite of these drawbacks, this is a book I would strongly recommend to teens. Sensitizing kids to the troubles of others can only help make them kinder and more thoughtful, and watching someone whose troubles are worse helps many young people navigate their own difficulties. And finally, this is a gripping page-turner worth reading just for enjoyment.

Leila Sales: If You Don't Have Anything to Say

 Leila Sales’ book, If You Don’t Have Anything to Say (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), was seriously considered for the Sydney Taylor Book Award, according to Book Award Committee Chairwoman Rebecca Levitan, although it was not a winner. I think the book is outstanding and important. Its portrayal of an innocent, albeit foolish, mistake, how it destroyed lives, and how the perpetrator learned from the mistake, is timely and, I fear, accurate. 

Politics and Religion

The book review journal Kirkus Reviews is critical of the book because it reflects the experience of a young adult in an ordinary high school, and the main character “never demonstrates a true shift toward understanding microaggressions, systemic racism, and white privilege.” Those seeking a reasonable approach to online shaming and cancel culture in a Young Adult novel, instead of a polemic, should take the Kirkus review as the highest praise.

However, its Jewish content was in my eyes not only limited but misleading.

Jewish Prayer

We read several times that Winter Halperin, the protagonist, attended a Jewish elementary school. Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are mentioned in passing, as is the low percentage of Americans who are Jewish. But the only passage I found that includes anything about what Judaism means is the following (p. 142 of 259 in the Nook ebook), which occurs at a residential rehabilitation program for people who have made foolish mistakes like Winter’s:

…praying was not optional, and that was weird; weirder still was the fact that they really did not seem to care what kind of prayer we were doing, to what kind of god, if any. There was a wide selection of prayer books from various faiths, and we could each take whichever one we wanted and pray silently to ourselves—or, in the case of Zeke, just sit still and meditate.

This was so far off not only from my religious practices but even from how Judaism was supposed to work that I could not for the life of me understand it. (emphasis mine)

Prayer, including silent (actually very softly whispered) daily prayer, is extremely important in traditional Judaism—the only kind of Jewish practice that is expanding in numbers in the United States, according to a 2015 Pew Research report. 

Unhappily, I believe that this book gives an accurate portrayal of a common Jewish experience in America. But I think it is unfortunate that the author did not qualify her statement about prayer by limiting it to her branch of Judaism since it clearly is not true of traditional Judaism. 

Where are Jewish Ethics?

The larger problem for me is that this book will be read by many Jews with little Jewish background and by many non-Jews who will come away with the mistaken idea that prayer and ethics have no place in Judaism. Nowhere are mentioned lessons on ethics that one hopes a child at a Jewish day school will learn, or that will be heard in a synagogue or temple sermon. This book is about ethics as much as it is about internet shaming, but the Jewish voice is silent.

I strongly recommend this book to teens. It is a book worth reading and worth discussing with others. But that an excellent, thought-provoking book about a Jewish character who is struggling with an ethical issue should provide no information about Jewish beliefs and ethics saddens me. If all the Jewish references were changed to reflect a Roman Catholic or atheistic experience, nothing else in the book would have to be changed. And I find that sad.

An Author's Responsibilities to Other Authors

Much has been written about the responsibility of journalists toward their readers, of children’s authors to write to the age group, etc. But unless I have been using totally incorrect search terms, little has been written about what responsibilities an author has to other authors.

Not to Plagiarize 

I believe that authors have responsibilities to other authors in at least two circumstances. First, authors have the responsibility not to steal another author’s work. We have a name for this theft: plagiarism. Whether material is fresh or very old, an author has a moral obligation not to copy it without permission or attribution. In Judaism, this is clearly articulated in Pirke Avot, the Sayings of the Fathers: 

    

     …Go forth and see which is the evil way that a man should shun. … Simeon said, One who borrows and does not repay. Pirke Avot 2:14. 

    R. Jose said, Let the property of thy fellow-man be as dear to thee as thine own… PA 2:17. 

    He who learns from his fellow a single chapter, a single rule, a single verse, a single expression, or even a single letter, ought to pay him honor. PA 6:3 

    …Whosoever reports a thing in the name of him that said it brings deliverance into the world; as it is said, ‘And Esther told the king in the name of Mordechai.’ PA 6:6 

Readers and writers alike understand cheating, so we cheer when an author whose work was stolen sues and wins, or when a prize is withdrawn when the winning article turns out to have been written by someone else. 

Reporting Plagiarism 

But what of the cases of plagiarism that are not reported, and whose resolution results simply in a monetary settlement and perhaps the quiet withdrawal of the offending work? Is this moral? This is the second situation where I believe authors have a moral responsibility to other writers. 

New voices have a limited chance of success when one author dominates, particularly in a small niche market. If the author is honest and is the better writer, then the free market is doing its job, weeding out the second-string so that the best can flourish. (Whether reviewers have a responsibility to promote excellent new writers is a question for another day.)

Consider a dishonest accountant who is fired from a job for embezzlement and never prosecuted. He will be hired by another company, and will likely embezzle again. By choosing not to prosecute, the first employer is setting the stage for other companies to be robbed. 

This is exactly what happens when an author settles quietly with a plagiarist. The plagiarist’s reputation continues unimpeded. Publishers, librarians and parents with limited budgets buy familiar names, names that they trust. Not knowing their trust in this case is misplaced, they continue to publish, buy, and give awards to the plagiarist.

Accessory to Theft? 

By agreeing to a secret settlement, the original author denies a generation of potential authors the opportunity for success. An out-of-court settlement with a gag order guarantees that the plagiarist will able to continue to increase both his reputation and bank account. And the careers of other writers of similar talent are stunted. 

Two wrongs do not make a right. Authors need to remember that they have a responsibility to others, not just to themselves. Receiving financial compensation for the misuse of one’s work is nice, but if a whole market is damaged because the thief’s reputation continues unharmed, then the author whose work was stolen is an accessory to the theft of sales, prizes, and reputation from a generation of writers.

Honey on the Page - A Great Book Launch

 October 6, 2020  was launch date for the first-ever anthology of Yiddish stories for children, Honey on the Page,* translated and edited by Miriam Udel with illustrations by Paula Cohen. In honor of the launch for the book, which was published by NYU Press, PJ Library sponsored a Zoom program.

Professor Udel, an Associate Professor at Emory University, must be a phenomenal teacher; she was certainly a dynamic yet approachable speaker, even with the limitations of Zoom. She did not grow up in a Yiddish-speaking  home, but around 2013 she attended a Yiddish language program at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. She discovered that the center had a list of approximately one thousand Yiddish children’s books and stories. After thinking, “Someone should do someone with all this material,” she decided to be that someone.

At 352 pages, this book is much more than a collection of stories: it is a window onto Jewish life and thought on four continents from the 1920’s to the 1950’s. Many European authors wrote during the vibrant years of the 1920s and 1930s, but perished in the Holocaust; others lived in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and other countries in addition to the USA. The age range for readers is from preschool through young adult.  The stories reflect the many nations in which they were written as well as their shared Jewish culture. 

Artist Paula Cohen illustrated the stories and drew the cover illustration. Because NYU Press, a university press, does not usually work with illustrators and never with color illustrations, the pictures are black and white. But unlike today’s spare cartoony illustrations, these are filled with strong details including uniquely Jewish ones like mezuzahs on doorposts or kiddush cups on a shelf in a story that does not mention Shabbat or kiddush.

This is a book for parents to read with their children, more than for children to read alone—it is too big, has stories for too many age groups, and has too few illustrations for young children to manage by themselves. But it sounds like a real winner for families. 

Thanks, PJ Library, for making this Zoom meeting possible, and thanks to Miriam Udel and Paula Cohen for sharing their joy, energy, and thoughts on this great book.

* “When a three-year-old child starts learning Torah in cheder (school) for the first time, it is customary to place a little honey on the letters of the alef-bet, which the child then licks happily, so the child learns to associate Torah with delight and good taste.”—https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2697265/jewish/Honey-in-Jewish-Law-Lore-Tradition-and-More.htm