A New Year...After A Long Hiatus

 It's January 2022--last post was December 2020. That says everything there was to say about 2021: not much. 

In 2021 I sold a couple of inspirational essays to www.chabad.org. One came out this week tied to the commandment to honor our parents. I'll continue to write inspirational essays from time to time.

I worked as a writer for months for a local alternative medical practitioner who tried to turn me into a copywriter. I discovered I dislike that kind of writing. 

After that I spent several months thinking about and researching going back into the freelance/contract nonfiction work that I did for a long time when I was younger. Today that falls mostly into the category of "content writing." Discovered I've been out of the business world too long. Everything has changed, most importantly for a writer the style of writing and even the language used. My writing is stodgy by today's standards, and if I am going to put hours into ramping up my writing skills, those hours are not going into B2B or B2C. 

I did work on improving my writing, though. Many of my skills are sharper than they were a year ago. Perhaps most importantly, as a member of Katie Davis's mentoring group, The Writers' Block, I learned that many of my themes are middle-grade, but what I really love, as far as the craft of writing itself, is the playing with words that is necessary in picture book writing. This means writing for a younger age group. 

This year I am completing Storystorm and finding it inspirational. I also joined 12x12 Picture Book Challenge and will do my very best to at least draft 12 picture book manuscripts in the coming year. (I've already rough-drafted two since January 1.)

You might think from the name of this blog that I am only writing Jewish-themed stories. Some of my stories are overtly Jewish, some are not. Turns out I write what the muse sends me, though everything is based on Jewish values. We'll see if and what I can publish.

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