When my debut picture book for children, Alone Together on Dan Street, was published one of the earliest reviewers commented on how brave it was for me to debut with a book about Israel. While I appreciated the accolades that came with the review, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps they confused me with someone else because I didn’t write a book about Israel. I wrote a book about Passover and the pandemic and loneliness and community. I wrote about a neighborhood coming together and finding good in difficult times and Jewish values.
I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t breaking barriers with the exception of writing about the pandemic while we were still in the throes of it. Brave? Not I. Bored, perhaps. We were in lockdown. Bereaved, definitely having just lost my mother to the pandemic. But not brave.
I was praised for using my book to “normalize” Israel. The phrase normalize makes me very uncomfortable. I don’t need to normalize Israel. It is normal. It's the rest of the world that needs to normalize its value system, moral compass, and understanding of historical fact. But anyway, I didn’t write a book about Israel so this entire defense is moot.
What I did is set a picture on a street called Dan Street which happens to be in Jerusalem which is, of course, in Israel. And it, of course, was based on events which unfolded across Israel that first pandemic Pesach. And for this I am brave?
I have a picture book on submission currently that is lighthearted and mostly true about a little girl (my daughter) who finds a turtle on a hike and sneaks it into the family’s rental car. I tell a version of this story on school visits because it’s about making mistakes and then making things right. It’s about Shabbat and family and learning to respect nature. It happens to take place in Israel. I suppose then that should my turtle story find a home (I won’t give away the plot, but not to worry Nachum, the turtle eventually does find a home), that story will be read as an attempt to normalize Israel too. But now I’m told that stories that normalize Israel can’t be lighthearted because we are in dark times and they can’t address the conflict either because then there goes all attempts at normalization.
So I suppose I could rename Nachum, the turtle (who was actually a tortoise), Bob, and the family could find him in Arizona and it could just take place on a Friday afternoon. And instead of the family not being able to drive Nachum, I mean Bob, back home because of Shabbat, they could just have a flat tire. Because, after all, I’m not in the business of normalizing something that is normal.
But if I was, I would want you to know that in Israel, like everywhere else, children are children and families are families and turtles and tortoises alike belong in nature. And every child should have a chance to see themselves in a story.
