Hana's Suitcase

Having just reviewed Rutka's Notebook for School Library Journal, my mind turns to other Holocaust narratives I have read. One of the best was Hana's Suitcase by Karen Levine, the 2002 Sydney Taylor Book Award winner in the Older Readers Category.

"Hana's Suitcase" was a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio documentary before it was a book. Originally broadcast on January 21, 2001 on The Sunday Edition, it was produced by Karen Levine, who later became the book's author. It was recognized right away as remarkable storytelling, winning a gold medal at the 2001 New York Festival. The audio can still be heard at the CBC web site.

It's a multilayered story. One the one hand, we have an old suitcase in a Japanese Holocaust museum, with the name "Hana Brady" painted on it. On the other hand, we have the story of what happened to Hana and why her suitcase was left behind. Tying these two threads together is the story of museum director Fumiko Ishioka's globe-trotting detective work to learn about the suitcase's owner. The search led her to Europe and ultimately to Canada, where she found Hana's surviving brother, George.

Intriguing, touching, and ultimately hopeful, the story has attracted attention in all its formats. In 2002, the book version was published by Second Story Press. It won fourteen awards: Jewish awards, Canadian awards, reader-selected awards... and the list goes on.

The story has been produced as a play across Canada and the United States, and the complete script is available in the book Hana's Suitcase on Stage.

A beautiful web site has been produced by the Brady family, which includes additional background information about Hana and her life with brother George. You can even see a silent home movie of the family from 1938!

In a fascinating twist, it was later discovered that the suitcase in the Tokyo museum was actually a replica. Wikipedia explains:

In February 2004, Lara Brady, Hana's niece, discovered inconsistencies between the suitcase on display and the suitcase pictured with Hana's friend after the war in the 1960's. Not only did the physical suitcase appear newer than in the photographs, but the location of the handle was also reversed. In March, Fumiko and George Brady inquired about the suitcase with the director of the Auschwitz museum, who explained that a replica had been created based on the pictures after the original suitcase was destroyed in a fire in 1984. This fire was likely caused by arson (according to the director and police at the time) while on loan to an English exhibit in Birmingham. As the museum personnel omitted this fact when they loaned it to the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center, the fact that the suitcase was a replica had gone unnoticed for several years. The family and the Center assert that even as such, the replica's contribution to the cause of human rights and peace education is not lessened by its lack of authenticity.

So many Holocaust books are published each year that the subject can start to feel overdone. This book is one of the standouts: fresh, well-researched, emotionally engaging, and inspiring.

Two Gold Medalists Speak!

Barbara Bietz, a member of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee, has interviewed2007 STBA medalist Brenda Ferber (Julia's Kitchen) and 2008 STBA medalist Sid Fleischman (The Entertainer and the Dybbuk) for her blog! Both authors took the gold in the Older Readers Category. A highlight from each interview:

BRENDA FERBER

Barbara: Tell me a little bit about your latest book. Why you were drawn to write about a Jewish theme or character?

Brenda: JULIA’S KITCHEN is about an 11-year-old Jewish girl finding hope and resiliency after her mom and sister die in a house fire. My initial inspiration was to write about grief, about coping in life when the worst possible thing happens. I was interested in the relationship people have with God when tragedy strikes. So often, people thank God for all their blessings in life, but does that then mean God is to blame when something awful happens? That was the question I explored in JULIA’S KITCHEN. Because I’m Jewish, it was natural for me to write about a Jewish character and to have a Jewish perspective on God’s role in our lives.

Click here to read the entire interview with Brenda!

SID FLEISCHMAN

Barbara: The concept of a dybbuk might be unfamiliar to kids. How have readers responded to this aspect of the story?

Sid: Yes, even among Jews, I have found only spotty familiarity. But they respond immediately and with fascination when the dybbuk is explained. Kids, especially, to discover there is a well-defined Jewish ghost lurking about. From mail I have received so far, kids especially are enchanted with Avrom, the dybbuk in the novel, and particularly the ending when he tricks the villain into confessing.

Click here to read the entire interview with Sid!

STBA Winner Lauded in New Zealand

Creating Readers, a blog run by staff at the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, exists to help create motivated and engaged young readers. They cover children's and YA literature (especially from New Zealand), literacy research, and ways to get, and keep, kids reading.

They recently reviewed Real Time by Pnina Moed Kass, the 2004 Sydney Taylor Book Award gold medalist in the Older Readers Category. Here's what reviewer Janice Rodrigues said:

You probably hear about the complexities of the Israel-Palestinian situation almost every week on the news. Real Time by Pnina Moed Kass is a frighteningly real minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day depiction of how quickly lives can change by acts of terrorism.

The story is set in contemporary Israel. The book is strung together through narrations by Thomas, a German boy on a mission to find out more about his grandfather, Vera, a Jewish girl trying to escape her distressing past, Baruch, a Holocaust survivor working on a kibbutz, Sameh, a Palestinian boy on an assignment and his friend Omar, Dr Ibrahim Stitti, a Palestinian doctor working in a hospital in Israel and Clive Burleigh, a Middle East news correspondent.

The format of the book is brilliant as it sets the pace for the events that unfold. The author Pnina Moed Kass says in her interview that writing this book seemed to be her only act of release from feelings of overwhelming sadness, bitterness and incomprehension.

This book was the winner of the 2004 Sydney Taylor Award. Read this book and get a feel for the effects of terrorism from different points of view.

Amazon Listmania

If you're a regular browser or shopper at Amazon.com, you may have noticed many Listmania lists of Sydney Taylor Book Award winners. The chair of the awards committee usually puts up a list soon after the winners are announced... but some eager readers can't wait that long! "Unofficial" Sydney Taylor Listmania's include:

Sydney Taylor Lives On--In Book Awards, 1993-2004, a list by Sherry York, librarian, reviewer and author from Ruidoso, NM

Lists of Award Winners and Notables from 2006, 2007 and 2008 by Jennifer Wardrip, owner and operator of the site TeensReadToo.com

Sydney Taylor Book Awards 2008 a list by Anatidae Ling, a reader, parent and librarian in Pittsburgh, PA

There's also an All-of-a-Kind Family list by J. Nichols of Arvada, CO

Beyond Sydney Taylor-related items, there are a number of Listmania's for Jewish children's literature and even for music:

Jewish Children's CDs with (at least some) songs in English, a list by Rabbi Yonassan Gershom in Minnesota

My Favorite Jewish Children's Books, a list by Rabbi Fred Greene in Atlanta, GA

Great Jewish Children's Books, a list by Rabbi Phyllis Sommer in Highwood, IL

Jewish Children's Books, Grades 5-10, a list by parent Steven R. Eisen

Children's Books and My Jewish Heritage, a list by Mr. Dave K., a librarian in Boston, MA

Time to go shopping!

Reading Guide for "Confessions"

Confessions of a Closet Catholic by Sarah Darer Littman was the Sydney Taylor Book Award gold medalist for Older Readers in 2006. Despite the funky title, it is totally a Jewish book, featuring a girl who explores her spirituality in a way not often seen in kidlit.

I found a great reading guide for Confessions online. It's by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer, author of Reaching for the Sun (a Schneider Family Book Award winner), and writer of over 200 reading guides for other books.

The reading guide includes:

• author interview ("The book is hilarious! How did you develop your comedic writing?")


• comprehension questions ("Who is Bubbe? What happens over the course of the novel to Bubbe?")


• discussion questions (" “I decided if my family was going to make fun of me for trying to be Jewish, I might try something else.” (p. 6) What spurs this decision? Would you be tempted to do the same thing? Why or why not?")


• projects related to different curricular areas ("Music: Listen to at least one piece of music from the religion that you’re assigned. What does it celebrate? What types of instruments are used?")

This reading guide is great for teachers, book clubs, or for helping librarians come up with booktalking materials!

The View from Down Under

Bookawardsonline.com is project born out of Kevin Parker's passion for fine literature. It is his personal goal to publicize books that receive recognition from literary peers and that deserve to be widely read. Kevin lives in Australia, and his web site is international in scope, covering news, longlists, shortlists, winners, and reviews from around the English-speaking world.

Kevin wrote a beautiful article about the Sydney Taylor Book Awards in general and about the 2008 winners at www.bookawardsonline.com/sydneytaylor.html. He also included an extremely cool Amazon widget that displays all the books and allows you to click-and-buy.

The Sydney Taylor Book Award is included amidst such wonderful awards as the Kate Greenaway, the Golden Kite, the Cybils, the Americas, and of course those familiar ALA awards. Thanks so much to Kevin for including us!

Multimedia and the Dybbuk

The Entertainer and the Dybbuk, this year's Sydney Taylor gold medalist in the Older Readers' Category, is getting a lot of techno-attention. Have you noticed the widget at the bottom of our right-hand menu bar? HarperCollins offers a "browse inside" widget for this title!

I also found a very funky audio review of this title at Revish, the book review site. Along with the text of a very nice review by RJ McGill (blogger at 3Rs Reading Den), there's a flash player that reads the review aloud. The thing is, I think it's a robot doing the reading. The words have that unconnected, pre-recorded sound to them, and "dybbuk" is incorrectly pronounced as "DIE-bock." (For the correct pronunciation, click here and then click "Hear it.") Even funkier, the robot has an accent that sounds sort of Scottish to me. And when I clicked on the player, which is provided by ReadSpeaker, it took me to a foreign-language page of the service that, in my ignorance, I'm guessing is a Scandinavian language.

I took a look at ReadSpeaker, and found that it is an online service for speech-enabling website content. What an interesting idea!

The Mission of ReadSpeaker is to make the "miracle of the Internet" accessible for dyslexics, people with learning disabilities, low literacy level, people with English as a second language, elderly with impaired vision and others that like to listen as well as read.

I thought that was pretty cool. Almost as cool as possession by a spirit of the dead!