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POSNER/ FIFTY YEARS OF JEWISH CHILDREN’S BOOKS
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the families, their attitudes, customs, and concerns were Jewish
— as in Miriam Chaikin’s
I Should Worry, I Should Care
(Harper,
1979), and Barbara Girion’s
A Tangle of Roots
(Scribner’s 1979).
PICTURE-STORYBOOKS
The publishing of beautiful full-color picture-storybooks that
had begun in the sixties, continued into the seventies. Not only
did Marilyn Hirsh produce another picture-storybook each
year, but her
Ben Goes Into Business
(Holiday, 1973) pioneered
the use of picture-storybook format for themes like “immigra
tion” and “acculturation” once used only in books for older chil
dren. Barbara Cohen entered the Jewish children’s market with
her
The Carp in the Bathtub
(Lothrop, 1972) and has been de
lighting readers ever since. Artists and authors continued to
mine traditional Jewish literature for inspiration as, for instance,
Uri Shulevitz (
The Magician,
Macmillan, 1972) and Carol Chap
man and Arnold Lobel (
The Tale of Meshka the Kvetch,
Dutton,
1980). With
The House on the Roof,
illus. by Marilyn Hirsh (He
brew Publishing, 1976), David Adler introduced the first holiday
story with literary merit that contained as many large illustra
tions as a picturebook.
Clearly, the seventies could also be known as the decade of
holiday craft and activity books and the beginning of Jewish
holiday non-fiction series, such as Joyce Becker’s
Jewish Holiday
Crafts
(Bonim/Hebrew Publishing, 1977). In 1978, Margery
Cuyler wrote
Jewish Holidays
(Holt), which had not only crafts
and activities, but also delved into the historic backgrounds of
nine holidays. A forerunner of many holiday series that would
follow, this book is unusual in that it was written by a non-Jew
and published by a trade publisher. Over the years, series of
distinguished holiday books were written by Malka Drucker
(Holiday), Miriam Chaikin (Clarion) and by various authors for
Kar-Ben, including its owners, Saypol Groner and Wikler.
The pre-immigration and immigration periods continued to
be sources of inspiration to authors, resulting in non-fiction
books such as: Milton Meltzer’s
World of Our Fathers
(Farrar,
1974); and novels like Chaya Burstein’s
Rivka
books (Hebrew
Publishing), Marietta Moskin’s
Waiting for Mama
(Coward,
McCann, 1975); and Anita Heyman’s
Exit from Home
(Crown,
1977). The period of acculturation, set in the 1930s and 1940s,