Category Archives: Bookshelf

Books I’m reading, enjoying and want to recommend. And once a year,
reports from Jewish Book Fair.

Button Day, a children’s story

This story was published many moons ago in a teacher’s resource magazine. Never made it to book format, but I’m beginning to think some children’s book editor out there should take note. Last week (July 26, 2012) this story got over 1000 hits. Enjoy. And if anyone bumps into a children’s book editor with fond memories of her gran’s button box, send her my way!

Saturday is button day. I call it that because every Saturday I visit my Grandma and Poppy. When I get there the table is always set for tea; there are two round metal cookie boxes next to my plate. One has cookies in it. The other holds Grandma’s buttons.

Poppy loves guessing games and each Saturday he has me guess which tin holds the buttons and which holds the cookies. If I guess the tin with the cookieswe have tea first. If I guess the other way, I play with all the wonderful buttons.

Today it’s buttons first. I take the lid off the box and dig in ‘til I’m up to my wrists in buttons. I run them through my fingers the way I do with sand at the beach. Then I spill them onto the table.

Sometimes I sort the buttons into piles of blue, gold, silver and red. Other days I make long lines, like armies of ants — the big black coat buttons first, then medium grey ones, then white shirt buttons small as my fingernails.

Then, I pick out three buttons and while we have tea, Grandma tells me stories about the people who had the buttons on their clothes. When the tea kettle whistles I make my choices. I scoop the rest of the buttons into one big pile and then slide them over the edge of the table, rattle-crackle-shush-shush, back into the tin.

“Grandma,” I say, “your buttons are so beautiful.”

“Lily,” she replies, “You are my most beautiful button. So who do we hear about today?” Grandma reaches out her hand.

One at a time I give her the buttons — a shiny round one black as Poppy’s moustache; a small white square stamped with a teddy bear in the middle; and a tiny pearl, shaped like a teardrop.

“Ah,” she says as she looks them over. Smiling at Poppy she takes up the teardrop. “This was one of 36 buttons that fastened the back of my wedding dress. Your great-grandmother Molly, my mother, sewed every stitch of the dress by hand.”

My grandmother is very tall and I can just picture those 36 buttons falling down the back of her wedding dress in a pearly trickle. Poppy’s moustache twitches as he smiles back at her.

“This button,” she says, cupping the shiny black disk in her palm, “went on the suit I made for your mother to wear the day she graduated college. She was the first in the family to earn a diploma, you know.”

Laughing, Grandma takes the last button. “I made your uncles matching red flannel pajamas and used these buttons on the tops.” I laugh with Grandma trying to imagine my great big uncles in such silly pajamas.

Grandma drops a sugar cube into my tea and, as I put the three buttons back in the box, I see my favorite one of all. The button is big as a vanilla wafer and on it is a peacock, his tail feathers spread wide in an arc. The feathers are outlined in gold and inside the gold each feather is painted shades of blue and green.

The button went on a suit that was part of a trousseau. Grandma told me that’s a special word for the fancy clothes a bride wears on her honeymoon. But the night before the wedding the bride ran away with the groom’s best friend and no one ever heard from them again. I can’t imagine anyone running away and leaving behind a suit with such beautiful buttons.

One Saturday after tea Grandma says, “Lily, let’s pick out some buttons and make you something special to wear.” I open the tin and poke through until I find the peacock.

“This one,” I say to Grandma.

“But this is the only one,” she says. “We can’t make anything with just one button.”

“Oh,” I say, putting the button back. Then I have an idea.

“What about a cape? The princesses in my fairy tale books wear capes and the pictures show them with just a button at the neck.”

Grandma thinks for a minute. “What a wonderful idea. A cape it is. Come after school on Monday and we’ll shop for fabric.”

School finally ends on Monday and I run the three blocks to Grandma’s and Poppy’s. Her coat is already on. We walk up the street to Mr. Benno’s fabric store. Mr. Benno’s father used to own it. Great-grandma Molly would take her best customers there to pick out their fabrics. A little bell tinkles when we enter.

“What can I do for you today, Mrs. Fine?” Mr. Benno asks with a smile.

“We need a very special fabric,” she tells him. “I’d like to make my granddaughter a cape.”

“A cape?” he says. “Don’t see many of those nowadays.”

“I know,” she agrees. “That’s why it has to be extra special.”

Mr. Benno takes down bolts of fabric that are almost as big as he is. His muscles ripple like little mice scampering through his arms.
“How about this?” he asks holding out some navy cloth. “Good serviceable gabardine. It will wear like iron.”

My heart falls into my stomach. It’s awful. Grandma rubs it between her fingers and looks at me. Her eyes tell me that she thinks it’s awful, too.

“Maybe,” she says. “What else do you have?”

Mr. Benno sets the gabardine aside and pulls down a brown and yellow plaid. Grandma and I don’t even have to look at each other. “It won’t go with the peacock,” we say at the same time.

“Peacock?” I hear him say to Grandma as he reaches for something else.

I walk to the back of the store while Mr. Benno takes down more bolts. On a shelf next to the button counter is a cardboard box. I lift the dusty lid and see leftover fabrics folded inside.

I thumb through and at the very bottom there it is — bluish green velvet as soft as a feather. Taking it from the box I stroke it and watch the colors dance from dark to bright. It is the most beautiful fabric in the world. I hurry over to where Mr. Benno and Grandma are talking.

“What about this?” I am so excited I can hardly keep from jumping up and down. I’ve already unfolded it and have gathered it around me like a cape.

“Sonia,” Mr. Benno says softly. He has a funny faraway look in his eyes. “My first wife picked that for her trousseau. ” I knew what a trousseau was. Was Mr. Benno’s Sonia the peacock bride?

“Lily,” she says shaking her head ever so slightly, “come look at what Mr. Benno found for you.” Her face is pale as the muslin Mr. Benno sells for
patterns.

“No,” he interrupts. “If that fabric would make Lily happy, that’s what she’ll have. My gift.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr. Benno,” I say giving him my hardest hug. He hugs me back and then takes a handkerchief from his pocket and blows his nose real hard. Grandma is quiet as we walk back home.

“Well,” she says unlocking the apartment door. “We have work to do.” She measures me up and down and then lays the velvet over my shoulders.

“Who could remember so long ago?” she mumbles around the pins fanned between her lips. “I was young as you.”

“Thursday,” she says when all the pins are tucked into the folds of the velvet. “Come for it on Thursday.”

“Sam!” she calls to Poppy. “Would you please set up my machine?”

The cape is hanging in the hallway next to Grandma’s purse when I arrive after school on Thursday. I can’t believe my eyes. It is better than anything in my books. The peacock gleams like never before. I can almost see him wink his diamond eye at me.

“Thank you, thank you to pieces,” I tell Grandma.

She laughs. “Come let’s see how it fits.”

“Perfect, just perfect,” says Poppy when I swirl into the room.

“Let’s show Mr. Benno,” I shout.

“I don’t know Lily…” she says.

“Please?” I say and run for her purse.

The little bell tinkles as we enter.

“Just a minute,” Mr. Benno calls from the back. As he walks towards us I spin three turns in a row. I feel like a peacock myself spreading out my feathers.

“Well, well, well,” says Mr. Benno smiling at me. He blinks his eyes a time or two like there is dust in them. “What a beautiful button.”

I don’t know if he means me or the peacock but I say thank you just the same. If Mr. Benno’s Sonia was the peacock bride, I hope she’s sorry for leaving such a sweet man.
The bell rings again and two women walk in.

“Come Lily,” Grandma says. “Mr. Benno has customers.” She takes my hand to leave. But first she hugs Mr. Benno and whispers, “Sonia was a foolish girl.” He smiles at her, ruffles my hair, and we leave.

Poppy has already set the table for tea. There are cookies on our plates. Carefully I unbutton my beautiful new cape and hang it on the coat rack. Grandma was right. Sonia was a foolish girl. I wink back at the peacock and follow Grandma into the kitchen. The tea kettle has just begun to whistle.

“Look. Listen. Learn. Live. Love.”

My very good friend and editor, David Crumm, is on an amazing journey. He and his son Benjamin are taking a 9000 mile driving trip around the country over the next 40 days. Well, now they’re down to about 34 days as the trip started last week. He is reporting, a la Charles Kuralt, from his journeys. Or perhaps more in the spirit of William Least Heat Moon whose 1982 Blue Highways is a masterful meandering along the American’s back roads.

Crumm is retracing a journey taken thirty years or so ago when he was a senior at the University of Michigan. And his son, now a college senior, is with him. That right there is worth the price of admission. I am green with envy at the thought of having that much car, travel, talk time with an adult child. He is endeavoring to give his readers the small snapshots of America as he traces not only paths to out-of-the-way places but the paths of people’s hearts, their values and what makes them proud to be Americans.

David, former religion editor for the Detroit Free Press, and I crossed paths back in 2003 when he came to the house to meet me and review my first book, This Jewish Life. I have written for his site — Read the Spirit— in the past and he has chosen me as one of Read the Spirit’s Jewish voices. David will be bringing out a new edition of This Jewish Life (now out of print) through DCMedia, the publishing house he runs in connection with the site, a vast and varied online community of all things religious and spiritual. We also have in the works a collection of my parenting essays, tentatively titled Walking by the Way: Universal Wisdom from a Real Jewish Mother. OK, enough self-promo.

David is a great guy, a fabulous journalist and good friend. His journey across America provides a moving slice of life of where we are today and what we value. So, bookmark the site and check it out each day with your morning latte. Or read it at night before you head to sleep. Dream of the open road and make your way with David and Benjamin as they crisscross this great country of ours.

With Thanks to Barbara Cooney

I cannot see a lupine flower without thinking of children’s book author and illustrator Barbara Cooney. In Miss Rumphius, Cooney tells the tale of a woman who returns to the coast of Maine after leading an adventurous life and sets out to fulfill her father’s admonition to “do something that makes the world more beautiful.”

For Miss Rumphius, beauty and lupine flowers are synonymous and so she spends her remaining years harvesting their seeds and scattering them on walks along her beloved Maine coast. Cooney’s paintings, strewn with the periwinkles, blues and violets of Ms. Rumphius’ lupines, made my heart ache with their beauty. One day I wrote her a note of thanks for all the joy her books had given my children and me.

When a card arrived with the postmark — Damariscotta, ME, I tore it open, stunned that Ms. Cooney had taken the time to reply. “My drawing board is lying fallow at the moment,”, she wrote, “but I expect to be back at work momentarily. Still waiting for inspiration to fall from the sky!”

Her confession of a drawing board, metaphorically and literally fallow, touched me deeply. Her? A Caldecott winner twice over? But I understood that fallowness did not mean barrenness. It only meant the creative spark was regenerating. I took comfort in her confidence that she would soon be painting again, her canvass coming to life from heaven-sent inspiration.

For that is how it so often happens. A chance overheard conversation inspires the plot of a novel; the seemingly incongruous melding of maps and dictionaries comes together in searing artwork; a father’s admonition to make the world more beautiful comes alive in the pages of a children’s book.

I planted lupine in my garden with Barbara Cooney in mind. For all of Miss Rumphius’ success, my experience with this luscious flower has been spotty.    I have finally found a place in my garden where it is happy but have been warned by experienced gardeners not to try and transplant the seedlings that sprout nearby in potentially inhospitable  patches.

Gardening entices me for a myriad of reasons — the pure joy of digging in the dirt while the sun beats warm upon my back; the joy of watching seedlings take root and blossom; the fire of righteous anger I direct at the rabbits who dine on my carefully tended plants; the infinite metaphors to child rearing. There are marvelous names that I husband into the loam of vocabulary — scabiosa; heliotrope; scaevola; bee balm; dicentra; holly hock; delphinium; cleome. Who wouldn’t want a plant called “party girl” in her garden?  One seedling planted years ago has morphed into a girl gone wild showing up in back yard and front, confronting the astilbe and sidling up against the asters.

And then there is the lupine.  This year one plant has sent up five, count them five, plumes of violet and white! I admit to indulging in the sin of pride. But it is so much more that that.  The lupines take me back to the days of rocking chairs and bed time stories, back to the years when I tended the slender shoots that were my children, weeding out sass, striving to cultivate kindness and character. The lupines remind me of the marvelously talented author and illustrator who took a moment from her drawing board to write a fan, unwittingly imparting her faith to a fellow writer that inspiration, like rain, can be counted on to fall from the sky.

The Women of WISDOM

At the publishing party for Friendship & Faith, I marveled at all the players in the one room: Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Baha’i, Buddhist, Baptist pastor, Catholic educator, Japanese-American Presbyterian. They were dressed in pants, skirts, and saris, hair covered by the hijab, in high heels and barefoot. We ate ruggelach, baklava and a delicious mango pudding I still want the recipe for.
   
The Women of WISDOM (Women’s Interfaith Solutions for Dialogue and Outreach in MetroDetroit) is a network of women from many religious and cultural backgrounds committed to creating peace, friendship by friendship. They  have come together to learn from one another and build bridges at a time when it seems all that is being built are barriers.

Friendship & Faith is a collection of their stories, accounts of  discovery and transformation, courage and enlightenment, struggles to understand the other and grow past personal prejudices. I had the honor of interviewing two of the women in the book and writing their stories for the project.

At the party we stood in a circle as each woman was introduced and a short preface to her story was read. One woman, small and dark-haired smiled at me from across the circle. Semitic looking yet dressed thoroughly modern she looked familiar. I had been in synagogue youth group with girls who could have grown up to look like her. The smile from across the room was a touchstone in an unfamiliar setting.

The short accounts that were read were powerful. “You’re an American Caucasian woman — so how can you be a Buddhist?” one woman related in her story. Another expressed my sentiments precisely. “I don’t like the word ‘tolerate’ ” she wrote. “We need more than that in our relationships.”

When it came time to introduce my smile-friend across the room, I learned that Mona Farroukh, Muslim from birth, is called “Tiny Mighty” for all the empowerment work she does in her community. Ending her sixteen-year marriage to an abusive husband, Farroukh completed her bachelor’s degree and is now pursuing a master’s degree, determined to help the women in her community find, and keep, their voices. The moments we spent talking afterward were pure WIDSOM. One Jew, one Muslim. Or simply two women talking about their lives, sharing stories of work and child rearing

The book, edited by David Crumm, founder of ReadtheSpirit.com, and published by Read the Spirit Books, profiles the stories of twenty-eight extraordinary women. The Women of WISDOM are committed to building a peaceful world. And they are doing it — one friendship at a time.

Read the first story in the book.

Jewish Book Fair Seeking Local Authors

The Detroit Jewish Book Fair is seeking submissions by local authors. Who qualifies? A published author (Jewish or not) who is originally from Michigan or is currently living in Michigan and who has written a work of fiction or non-fiction with Jewish content. How’s that for leeway?

Book Fair’s local author event is an opportunity for authors to publicize their book, meet the public and be a part of an organization that celebrates books, their authors and the written word. (Where else to you get that today?)

During November (Jewish Book Month) Jewish Book Fairs are held across the country. Detroit’s is the oldest and with 20,000 + attendees, the largest. You don’t have to be Jewish to love or attend Book Fair. You just have to love books and love to read. Check out your community’s Jewish Book Fair come November. And if you’re an author with a Michigan connection and a book with Jewish content to promote send it tout de suite to Dalia Keene, Book Fair Director, 6600 West Maple Road. West Bloomfield, MI 48322.  

Reading I Love Jewish Faces at Book Fair.

A Quartet of Books

So many books I’ve wanted to share with you. These will not be full reviews but just a few sentences of rave.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo –Many of you may have already read this wonder but if not, put it on your list. Murder; mayhem; money; family intrigue; Lisbeth Salander, the kinky funky, irresistible and much-tattooed heroine; and a journalist whose career is temporarily in the loo. Larsson, signed a three-novel contract for what was to be a ten-book series called the Millennium Trilogy in late 2003.

In the saddest irony of all, the author died of a sudden heart attack in late 2004 before the publication of Dragon Tattoo. The next two are now out — reading The Girl Who Played With Fire or The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. Haven’t read them and so have no opinion other than I can’t think of anything sadder for an author than to die before knowing his work entranced millions.

Traveling with Pomegranates: a mother-daughter story — Oh what a lovely book! Sweet, insightful, rich. Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter set out for Greece. Monk Kidd is fifty and taking stock as she is “about to emigrate to a new universe.” Her daughter, Ann, has just graduated college and has her own issues of self to deal with. Both of them are trying to figure out how to relate to one another — as mother and daughter, as adult women, as creative talents.

The daughter’s chapters –those of a young woman just emerging from adolescence — don’t have the resonance of her mothers’ which have the depth of decades of life and reflection. Still, it is satisfying cadence to read back and forth between the two and whether mother or daughter there is deep recognition in each of their experiences.

My son loaned me The Emperor of Scent. I’ve always wanted to be as “nose” one of those people who plays with scents all day long and comes up with perfumes. So when Elliot handed me the book I dove right in. It’s mesmerizing.

Luca Turin, a scientist and Renaissance Man from toddlerhood, is consumed with uncovering the mechanics of our sense of smell. Scientists have long said that smell is shape, in other words molecules of scent embedding themselves in similarly shaped receptors. Along comes Luca who posits, and as far as I’m concerned, proves that scent is vibration. (Have I lost you yet?) Our noses are vibration receptors. The science industry got very angry at this upstart.

It’s way beyond me to explain this meshing of physics, biology and chemistry but taking it slowly it all did make sense. The book reads like a novel. Turin is quite a character and though I’m not done yet it is possible to have a grasp of the science behind it, even if that grasp is evanescent — much like a lovely perfume whose memory stays with you even as its essence fades.

Last one, another science book that read like wildfire — Thomas Hager’s The Alchemy of Air. Had you ever heard of the nitrogen wars? Neither had I. But fought they were, over vast stores of nitrogen-rich guano so necessary for fertilizer. Whoever cornered the market on fertilizer, cornered the market on food production.

Until two scientists (Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch) discovered how to “make bread out of air” by extracting and stabilizing nitrogen from the air. The downside of their discoveries is that the same process that turned air into bread also turned air into the explosives that fueled both world wars. Without Haber and Bosch food production would be stagnant. Without them, Hitler might also have withered on the vine. Is there a more tragic dichotomy?

Update for book lovers — two catalogs you must know about: Bas Bleu — offbeat books for adults and some for children, readers reviews, bookish gifts that I think are a bit pricy but charming.
Chinaberry Books — hands down the best children’s book catalog. Anne Reuthling, the woman who founded the company, is wise and wonderful. The books are enchanting. CD’s are great. Adult books in the back are ones you might not have heard of otherwise. Gifty items, too that nourish body and soul. Companion catalog — Isabella.

Anne Frank, the Art of a Young Diarist

A funny thing happened to Francine Prose on the way to writing a novel about a thirteen-year-old girl. Taking her own advice from Reading Like a Writer — if you’re going to write about a particular kind of person then first read something by that kind of person — Prose reread Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl. This quest for authenticity set the author on a completely new path that culminated in the writing of Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife.

Upon rereading Anne Frank’s diary, Prose realized this was not simply the daily journal of a thirteen-year-old girl but “…a work of art as a historical record. When the last survivor has died,” she commented, “we will know these eight names, preserved forever in the words of a little girl.” Through her research, Prose understood that while Anne Frank might have been a little girl, during those last two years of her life, hidden away in the attic as the world went mad beyond her confines, she matured into a writer of prodigious talent, “She used a novelist’s techniques — character, setting, dialog — deliberately crafting a work of literature that she hoped would one day be read by the public.”

During the last months in the attic, Anne heard a broadcast from Holland’s exiled culture minister calling on Dutch citizens to write journals so the world would one day know the truth. She took the minister’s words to heart and during what turned out to be the last four months of her life, Frank edited the diary. “She cut, changed, clarified,” said Prose. “The device of Dear Kitty came into being in this four-month period.” Prose read aloud comparative versions of entries and it was astonishing to realize how correct she was.

The diary electrified the world not simply because it was the first of its kind, and not just because Anne Frank was so young and died at the hands of Nazis. Her diary is a superlative work of literature, the second most widely read and taught book in the world. Prose is right. Because Anne Frank understood the craft of writing and understood that if she didn’t survive then her words must, the names of Otto Frank, Edith Frank, Margot Frank Anne Frank, Herman and August Van Pels and their son Peter and Fritz Pfeffer will forever be remembered as long as there are books and as long as there are readers.