Books

A mix of cultures in children’s books

By Rita Berman Frischer, Special to The Jewish Sound

As the grandmother of cross-cultural Jewish children, I’m especially interested in how this phenomenon plays out in Jewish Seattle, with its seemingly open doors and open minds. So when I recently received three children’s books for review, all dealing with how young cross-culture Jews interact with their communities, schools and friends, I called the Jewish Federation for demographic information.

I found that the latest Seattle community study dates back to 2000, with an updated survey only now underway. Noting that the 2010 U.S. Census cites a 50 percent increase in multiracial children since 2000, I turned for background instead to a 2012 article in New York’s The Jewish Week. Julie Wiener’s article seems to describe our local changing landscape as well, with its headline “Multiracial Jews moving beyond isolation.”

The UJA-Federation of New York included questions about race in its 2012 survey — the first Jewish population study to do so. It found that approximately 12 percent — or 87,000 — of N.Y. Jewish households are “multiracial or nonwhite.” Of course this includes a broad range of respondents including couples, adult children of multiracial couples, Jews with non-white adopted children, and non-whites born Jewish or converted to Judaism. But what multiracial households shared, according to April Baskin, then-president of the Jewish Multiracial Network, is a desire to meet other Jews of color and share their stories. They also shared a relatively low rate of Jewish engagement.

San Francisco’s Be’chol Lashon states as one of its prime goals bridging the gap between Jews of color and the organized Jewish community by increasing awareness in mainstream groups about the multiracial Jews and “the global nature of the Jewish community.” As part of its policy, Be’chol Lashon partners with Jewish organizations when planning events so people are brought into Jewish spaces often and comfortably.

It will be interesting to see how our own community’s survey and resultant actions approach this part of our Jewish family. Now, to the books:

In 1970, Judy Blume was considered a maverick when her book “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” brought into the open the issues and confusions faced by a pre-teen girl in a Jewish-Christian mixed marriage. Now, over 40 years later, interreligious marriage is just one aspect of the broad diversity of intercultural and interracial families found in many of our Seattle public and private schools, our synagogues, and our playgrounds.

In February I reviewed “Elan, Son of Two Peoples,” in which Elan, son of a Jewish father and Native American mother, now Jewish, became a Bar Mitzvah but also went through a coming-of-age ceremony important to his mother’s people. Such fusion of cultures, reflected more and more often in our lives and in children’s books for all ages, sparked this column. Here are three books I hope you will introduce to some of the young people in your lives:

Carolivia Herron, a professor of Comparative Literature, is a Jew of African descent living in Washington, D.C. After learning surprising stories about her own family’s past, she wrote “Always an Olivia: A Remarkable Family History,”illustrated by Jeremy Tugeau (Kar-Ben).

From this fictionalized historical picture book, young readers will learn about roots and backgrounds not often made accessible to them. It opens as Carol Olivia’s great-grandma, another Olivia, tells the true tale of a Jewish family in the 1400s when Jews fled Spanish soldiers during the Inquisition. With five children, they sailed to Portugal for safety, taking a Portugese name and hiding their Judaism.

But to no avail.

Persecution soon began; again they were forced to leave. This time they sailed across the Mediterranean, landing in Venice, Italy, where they lived for many generations among other Jews who had escaped. Years later, one of their descendants, Sarah Shulamit, was kidnapped by pirates as she walked by the water. They planned to take her and their other captives to North Africa where they would get rich Jews to pay ransom for their release.

Instead, Sarah was rescued by a seaman she later married. The couple ended up in the Georgia Sea Islands among the Geechees, black people from West Africa. There Sarah changed her middle name from Shulamit to Olivia, because it made her think of the olive branch of peace.

Her children and her children’s children married the children of the African people among whom they lived safely and happily. But Sarah’s daughter, and all the daughters down through the years, light Shabbat candles on Friday nights and always name a daughter Olivia so they will never forget the people they came from.

“My Basmati Bat Mitzvah” by Paula J. Freedman (Amulet Books) is the story of “just your average Jewish-Indian-American girl,” a description lifted right off the saffron yellow book jacket festooned with Jewish stars. Tara Feinstein has been doing well so far balancing Hebrew school and Bollywood movies. However, the pressure builds when she agrees with her converted-to-Judaism Indian mother that she’ll consider becoming a Bat Mitzvah.

Remembering her deceased Indian grandparents with love, she worries this major step into Judaism will somehow alienate her from that side of her background. Luckily, her Jewish grandmother, while thrilled her granddaughter is going to be called to Torah, still respects Tara’s need to honor her whole identity. With her support, Tara overcomes all kinds of minor catastrophes en route to the bima. She picks the best boy, plans the best Indian appetizers, finds the most ethnically beautiful dress to wear, learns that nobody is perfect, and discovers her own capacity to understand others, accept and forgive. Perfect for middle graders (10-12).

In “The Whole Story of Half a Girl” by Veera Hiranandani (Random House), Sonia Nadhamuni’s mixed identity wasn’t a problem in the progressive private school she’d always attended. Her mother and her BFF are Jewish, her father is Indian, her education is creative and exciting. Life is good. Then her father loses his job, money becomes tight, and she and her little sister must move into public school. There the first thing she realizes is that the white kids and the black kids never sit together in the lunch room — and suddenly everyone wants to know exactly what is she anyway? Now she wonders, too: Does she want to make friends with Kate, the cheerleader, or with Alisha, who rides a bus to get to this good school and who loves to write? Is Sonia Indian? Is she Jewish? Is she Jewish enough? Can’t she be both? Is she destined to be broken in half? Her identity problem is just one challenge, since her family is also coping with her father’s unemployment and his resultant deep depression and disappearance.

Admirably, this work, while it deals compassionately with the stresses of Sonia’s life, maintains a positive voice and moves quickly. It hits the right balance between serious content and light reading, giving us another fine book for the circa Bat Mitzvah set. In receiving starred reviews from both the Kirkus Review and Publishers Weekly, the Kirkus review compared Sonia to Blume’s main character in Blume’s aforementioned classic, “Are You There, God?” That puts Hiranandani’s work in the big leagues, indeed.