Jennifer Tzivia MacLeod is the author of the new children's picture book Baila the Klopper. Her many other books include Yossi and the Monkeys. She lives in Israel.
Q: What inspired you to write Baila the Klopper?
A: I love stories about spunky little girls! And I already had this fictitious shtetl (old-world European) setting in my head from my previous book, Yossi and the Monkeys, which was also illustrated by my friend Shirley Waisman.
That fictitious town isn't quite Chelm and it isn't quite Anatevka (from Fiddler on the Roof). Like Tevye, religion is important to them. But so is family, and so is community, and that's what Baila is all about.
As a Canadian, I think I was also deeply inspired by Phoebe Gilman's gorgeous Something from Nothing, which is set in a similar shtetl. I've always loved how free the little boy seems in that story; he can run around the entire town but he knows he always has warm, loving people to come back to.
Q: What do you think Shirley Waisman's illustrations add to the story?
A: Wow, so much! When people tell me they love my books, I always credit the illustrations, not the words, and I'm not just being modest. They bring the whole book to life.
Shirley and I are friends in real life now and worked more closely together on the illustrations than I usually do. We started out just by reading the book together, with her asking me what I meant and how I envisioned certain spreads.
That's a fascinating cultural difference; in Israel, illustrators and authors work closely together all the time, whereas in the US, they're usually kept apart and mediated by the editor or art director. For me, it felt uncomfortably intimate at first, but I absolutely love the results.
Q: What do you hope kids take away from the story?
A: You know, I was talking to Fran Greenman-Schmitz, the new publisher at Kar-Ben who took over from Joni Sussman, who acquired the book. And I told her the story didn't exactly share most feminist messages: at the end of the story, Baila ends up baking and holding a baby, both traditionally female activities.
But then I think everybody in that meeting realized that it actually kind of is a feminist message: girls can do whatever they want. If what they want and what they're good at is taking care of babies and baking delicious bagels for their entire community... well, that's awesome. (My own kids, boys and girls, are all both great bakers and great baby-snugglers.)
Anyway, the bigger message is maybe that without food, without babies, society doesn't have much of a future. And without problem-solvers like Baila, who cut through the complexities to find simple solutions, our communities flounder. So let's celebrate her!
Q: What first interested you in writing children's picture books?
A: Years ago, as a Jewish homeschooler I kept stumbling across all these Christian materials and wondering why nobody had created Jewish resources that fit our needs better. So, in the greatest parenting tradition, I set out to create some. I wrote and self-published some educational things.
I also started to feel that a lot of Jewish picture books waste a ton of time explaining the basics: on Rosh Hashanah, you dip an apple in honey, you blow a shofar; on Shabbat, you make kiddush, you pray and rest and do things you love with people you love.
Spelling it out is wonderful for kids who are less Jewishly involved, but my kids knew that stuff by the time they were two. So I wanted picture book stories that put those basics in the background; they're assumed but never explicitly stated.
Here's an example: I wrote a book called Penguin Rosh Hashanah (https://tinyurl.com/penguinrosh), basically trying to create a Rosh Hashanah book that mentions none of the usual things.
And my favourite review - they gave it only one star, which is a terrible review! - says, "I thought this book was going to be about different ways to celebrate Rosh Hashana." Even though it's a lousy review, I take it as a compliment.
There are a million of that book out there already, and some of the choices are wonderful. But there's only one with a penguin. Also, who buys a book with a penguin on the cover if they're looking to find out about "different ways to celebrate Rosh Hashana"?! The review still makes me smile every time I see it.
Even though it's not exactly my most commercial book, I want to keep creating books like that. For kids like mine were, and now my grandkids. Kids who by the time they turn 2 have already celebrated 108 Shabbatot, so they don't need to be told what challah is, what kiddush is, what havdalah is. They just want stories - like all kids do - that reflect them and their world.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Middle grade! I still love doing picture books, but I'm dreaming of being published for middle grade.
I'm writing a World War II story set in Toronto. Donny is a 13-year-old Boy Scout who's preparing for his bar mitzvah against the background of what's going on in Europe (which all the grownups are talking about in whispers) along with some local antisemitism from the rival neighbourhood Boy Scout troop.
And then, on top of everything, his family takes in a British boy who turns out to be absolutely insufferable. There are the inevitable boyish clashes but ultimately (spoiler alert!) they wind up being friends.
Everybody knows about British kids being evacuated to the countryside because of the Narnia stories, but many of them were shipped overseas. Canada hosted about 3,000 kids as part of their "War Guest" program. The program was halted in 1940 after the Germans actually torpedoed a ship carrying children to Canada.
Like my chapter book The Peacock, which came out this year (Orca), Donny's War is based very loosely on my own family's history. My grandparents really did take in a War Guest child, but I haven't been able to find out anything about him. And my uncles were the wrong ages to be in this story, while my mother wasn't born yet.
So I changed my uncles' birthdates and other information, and invented a new girl for the family to fill my mother's place.
As with The Peacock, I love having the opportunity to tell a story about the war through the eyes of a child who is actually living very far away, in relative safety and privilege.
Here, too, the adults are trying to shelter Donny from what's going on over there. But he's a smart kid and understands a lot more than they give him credit for.
I hope this distance will make the story relatable for today's kids, who are also very distant, chronologically, from that war. And encourage them to think about bigger questions rather than just the specifics of that particular war.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Wow. Just how incredibly humbling it is to be part of the community of children's-book authors. There are so many wonderful stories out there, and so many talented authors and illustrators, that my books feel very small, like a drop in the bucket.
But it's my drop in the bucket. Well, in this case, mine and Shirley's. I hope this will become some kid's favourite story. Maybe even more than one kid's.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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