Marcella White Campbell is the author of the new children's picture book Maya's Journey. She is the executive director emeritus of the organization Be'chol Lashon.
Q: How much was Maya’s Journey based on your own family history?
A: Maya’s Journey was inspired by the stories I told my children when they were young. I was trying to help them understand that both sides of their history were really the same story.
My children are Black and Jewish, and the story we tell small American children about the Jewish story is very simple. Jews lived in a place where they were unhappy, they sailed to America, and that was their happy ending!
It’s the barest outline of three thousand years of deeply complex history, and it doesn’t include many, many other Jewish stories, but it is very easy to tell to children as their first experience with their Jewish heritage.
A storybook framing can’t hold the outlines of the African-American story because that story takes place exclusively on American soil and can’t be distilled down to a story of progress. There are triumphs and setbacks, some large, some small. It is difficult to point to an “end” to the story since we’re still fighting for rights today.
But the African-American history in America is also a history of migration, one that is really important to my own family’s history. My grandparents, like millions of others, left the South in a movement of people that we now call The Great Migration. They left behind centuries of history to escape segregation and look for new kinds of freedoms. They also left to escape a very real threat of violence.
I wanted my children to understand that, first of all, neither story is actually simple. I also wanted them to know that the stories have much in common.
I told them that all sides of their family—their Ashkenazi-Jewish-African-American family—are made up of people who were intelligent and brave and resourceful, and some of them had to leave home even though they didn’t want to.
But no matter what their journeys were, their ancestors would have thought my children were both part of an ongoing story, and a happy ending. They left their homes and everything they knew to find opportunities and freedoms that make my children who they are.
In short: it’s inspired by our family history, but it also represents the history of many other families.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: The first inklings of the book actually began with my grandmother’s story. The real-life Martha lost her mother, Mary, when she was only a toddler; her great sorrow was that she knew almost nothing about her mother—she didn’t even remember her face.
When I had my own daughter, and had that connection with her, I really felt the call to find out as much as I could about that lost history. I reconnected the story over 20 years of research. I now know the names of Mary’s parents and siblings, the town where she came from, and so much more about who she might have been.
I wish I could tell my grandmother these things. But the next best thing, I thought, would be to choose my grandmother’s story to represent our family.
Essie is my husband’s great-grandmother, who emigrated from Dorohoi, Romania. And for Essie and me, it all started with a photo of a firecracker of a young woman. She’s posed in a turn of the century photographer’s studio, with a painted Atlantic City behind her.
This phrase is so overused but I think it applies here: she really does have a twinkle in her eye. She seems like a funny, outgoing person who’s ready for an American adventure.
When I talked to my mother-in-law about Essie, it was a really emotional moment for both of us. Her memories of Essie lined up with what I’d felt from the photo. She was an energetic woman with a great sense of humor. She came to the United States when she was only 15; she only spoke Yiddish, and had yet to learn to read or write.
Essie had to leave her younger siblings behind in Romania, but she never forgot them. She did as much as she could to help them, even when they were under Nazi occupation. Sometimes, the few dollars she could send from the United States made all the difference.
My master’s thesis centered around Jewish American women like Essie, who immigrated to the United States at around the time Essie did. I drew from that history to build Essie’s world.
It doesn’t just represent her story, but is an example of one kind of Jewish American woman’s immigrant story at that time, where working, learning, and helping the people around her through social work is central to her identity.
I already knew about African American history too, especially the story of the Great Migration, the movement of people from the South to the North, East, and West that brought my grandparents to San Francisco.
What I did *not* know was the history of the Jim Crow train cars. I knew that the trains were segregated—but I didn’t know how poorly the Black cars and waiting rooms were maintained. It hadn’t occurred to me that my grandmother’s very last experience of the indignities of segregation followed her all the way across the Mississippi and possibly as far West as California.
Q: What do you think Olivia Smith’s illustrations add to the book?
A: It was surprisingly hard to write my grandmother’s side of the story. I grew up in my grandmother’s house; I knew her, and it sometimes felt intimidating to try to tell a story about someone who had already told me her story on her own terms. I got a little lost in trying to tell the *right* story in the *right* way.
The first image Olivia sent us depicted Martha playing the piano in her grandmother’s parlor. I burst into tears. A sense memory of playing piano in my own grandmother’s house came over me; I could hear her voice behind me, telling me the stories behind the sheet music.
I had written so many words, but Olivia’s illustration captured the *feeling* of being there. She helped me to understand that I didn’t need to write a careful, line-by-line retelling of my grandmother’s biographical details. I needed to communicate what she felt like as a person, what it felt like to be near her.
Olivia brings such softness and kindness to each page. It feels warm inside her illustrations. She treated my family’s people with such empathy and care. I felt that I could trust her with our story.
Q: What do you hope kids take away from the story?
A: Maya’s big problem, in this story, is that she doesn’t understand *why* she should learn about her family history. In the end, she realizes that she’s really just finding out more parts of her own story, more about what makes her who she is.
When you learn more about your identity, it opens up more possibility for you. You are still unique, but, at the same time, you’re never alone. I hope that kids are able to access the strength that comes from that.
I hope the story makes them curious about their own family stories. For all the family research, I wouldn’t have been able to write this book if I hadn’t listened to my family’s stories.
I loved learning about them as children—my grandmother skipping to the corner store, my grandfather paying for a new bike by charging other kids for rides…Those stories made me feel closer to them.
I hope that children learn that there are many ways to be Jewish. Essie is Jewish, and so is Maya. Martha isn’t. Children might wonder how and why that is. I hope it leads them to further questions and conversations, and helps them to expand their understanding of their friends and classmates.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: When I’m not writing, I facilitate workshops for adults around creativity, memory, and identity. Some people don’t think they’re creative; but one way every person can be creative is to tell their own unique story, in their own words.
Connecting to that story—a story no one has heard before, a story only you could ever write—is empowering. And we need more of them! The more complicated our human story is, the better.
I’ll also be spending time visiting schools and bookstores to talk about Maya’s Journey, and talking about how family stories like ours can open conversations across generations. I’m looking forward to hearing and seeing how children like mine respond to the book! I hope every child can find themselves in the story.
And, of course, I’m always writing! I write about my own identity, about my family, and about people and places that never existed before, on my Substack and in a variety of other places.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Making joyful art when the world is heavy can feel frivolous. But through all of human history, even when violence was right outside the door, our ancestors still had and shared moments of joy, bursts of laughter.
And through it all, while they thrived or merely survived, they created songs and stories that still inspire us today—that get us through our own difficult times.
I wanted to make sure that Essie and Martha showed resilience in weathering real challenges and even dangers, but also had loving moments with their friends and loved ones. Joy is part of resilience, and children need to know that.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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