Chaya Burstein, 1923—2012
When I first starting teaching children in a Judaic setting, Chaya Burstein’s “Jewish Kid’s Catalog” was the book I used for ideas and simple explanations of holidays and customs. As a day school librarian, I often recommended her mystery books for 3rd and 4th graders who needed a mystery for a book report. I loved being able to give them a “Jewish” story for a secular assignment. Her “Jewish Holiday Cookbook” was a perennial favorite. Students who checked it out were “required” to bring the librarian a taste of whatever they cooked. Like Chaya’s books, “Delicious!” She was a true treasure and contributed so much to the juvenile Judaic lexicon.
— Susan Dubin, past president, Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL)
Meeting Chaya Burstein when we moved to Seattle was a treat in itself. Like my colleagues in the Jewish library world, I knew her work well, so sitting across from her at the Temple Beth Am BABL book group meetings or just chatting with her was a privilege. Then, in April 2011, TBA held an exhibition of her work. I not only was able to enjoy the exuberance and color of her original pictures, I could take home two that spoke to me. They frame my desk and give me delight as I write these words of appreciation.
— Rita Berman Frischer, past president, AJL Synagogue, Schools and Centers division
Chaya Burstein, mother, grandmother, talented artist and author, a woman of extraordinary valor, vigor and opinion, passed away on Saturday, September 15, surrounded by her family singing her on her way. When she died, the world of Jewish children’s books lost a wonderful asset, a person who, while living her life with passion and creativity, wrote and illustrated varied books which offered young readers accessible and appealing introductions to just about every aspect of Jewish life. She paid special attention to the world’s ecology and to Israel for, besides her family and her work, it was Israel that ignited in Chaya the adventurousness and devotion that was to shape so much of her life.
Born in Queens in 1923 to Russian immigrant parents, Chaya’s imagination was fed by her mother who, she said, “would steal time away from the family grocery store to tell me stories about the village in Russia where she grew up — about her goats and chickens and other friends. Then I would sit on the milk box and draw my own comic strips or make paper dolls and tell myself stories, using them as the characters.”
Chaya’s imagination was also engaged by her early involvement in the secular socialist Zionist organization Ha’shomer Ha’tzair. In this group, when she was 16, she met Mordy Burstein, her future husband, a “younger man” of 15 who was her match in daring and determination. While Mordy served in the Pacific during World War II, Chaya turned to practical drawing as a draftsman and a year after Mordy returned in 1945, they married. Then, in 1948, after first working with survivors in a displaced persons camp in France, the two smuggled themselves into Israel to join a group there and found a kibbutz that still exists today. They were home.
However, when Mordy was accepted into engineering school at the University of Missouri under the G.I. Bill, they made the tough decision to move back to the States until he got his degree. Circumstances intervened and they would not return to live in Israel for almost 35 years. Living on Long Island, Chaya raised three children and put her art and ambition on hold until they were in school, whereupon she studied at the School of Visual Arts in N.Y. She then took her portfolio to Harcourt Brace, where they told her she should write stories to go with her illustrations. The best stories she knew were told her by her mother, Rifka, who lived with the family; Chaya’s first book, “Rifka Bangs the Teakettle,” sprang from those tales of her mother’s childhood in a shtetl in Russia. Harcourt published the book in 1970.
Over the next 41 years, Chaya wrote and illustrated 15 books while getting her master’s degree in Middle East History and caring for her family. Two of those works, “Rifka Grows Up” (1976) and “The Jewish Kids Catalog” (1982) — a classic in every Jewish school and library — won the National Jewish Book Award. She wrote and her art enlivened an outstanding series of catalogs, one which focused on Israel, one on the natural world and ecology.
She wrote modern and ancient histories, Bible stories, and a Passover Haggadah. But despite winning awards and recognition, Chaya, like Mordy, yearned to return to Israel. At ages 63 and 62 they became founding members of a community in the Galilee where they lived and worked for 20 years. She continued to write while working to shape the emerging community and do literacy work with both Jews and Arabs.
In 2005, health concerns and the desire to be close to their immediate and extended family, most of whom had settled in Seattle, brought them back in spite of their strong desire to remain in Israel. They shared a studio behind their house in Northgate, where Chaya worked on the drawings and text for her final book, “The Amazing History of the Jews,” which she completed in the summer of 2011. In December 2011, at Temple Beth Am’s Jewish Book Month Shabbat, Chaya was named as the temple’s Author of the Year. But the rare nerve disease that would ultimately cost her life was already affecting the use of her hands, a tragedy for an artist. Unable to work, she read and when she could not, her children read to her. In her final days, she was never alone and she heard singing as she slipped away into the sunset.
Let her have the last word on her career. On the night she was honored, Chaya gave a speech in which she said, “I love my work. I loved doing it when I was able to. I had fun doing it. I looked forward to drawing and writing each day. I don’t know if that warrants an honor. I think all of us working people who enjoy work and work hard should be honored. However, most to be honored are those who go in to do jobs they do not enjoy or jobs that must be done in order to earn a living.”
Her grandson, Jacob, said it best: “True to who she was, at the end of her long and extraordinary life, Chaya was thankful, humble, wholly aware of the world around her, and contrary.”
Chaya is survived by her husband of 66 years, Mordy Burstein, her three children, Ranan, Dina and Beth, her five grandchildren and a host of extended family, all of them expressing gratitude for the legacy she has left.
— Rita Berman Frischer