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Sholom's Treasure: How Sholom Aleichem Became a Writer
by Erica Silverman; illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein
There’s a Yiddish word, tsuris, meaning sorrows, and young Sholom Rabinowitz had plenty. His family lurched between tragedies: grinding poverty and displacement, death, and a stepmother’s abuse. The boy’s reaction: clown around and ridicule everything.
Except that he develops a talent for caricature and mockery, which grows in proportion to his miseries until his genius becomes apparent even to those who dismissed him as a rascal and good-for-nothing.
Rabinowitz of course grew up to become Yiddish author Sholom Aleichem, of “Fiddler on the Roof” fame, who lovingly speared 19th-century Jewish life in the claustrophobic and oppressive Russian shtetls, or ghetto villages.
Silverstein tells his story matter-of-factly and somewhat artlessly, as if trying to jam-pack details into 36 pages the way the Rabinowitz family crow-barred 12 kids onto sleeping mats in a hallway. Her prose is terse, yet still manages to thematically tie it all together with Sholom’s boyhood quest to find a trove of gold to end his family’s penury.
Gerstein’s inky squiggles evoke a vanished world where Jews found reasons to laugh and banish the gloom, and Sholom’s impish facial contortions are nothing short of brilliant.
Reviewed by Anne Levy
Rating: *\*\*\
by Jason Alexander; illustrated by Ron Spears
I don’t know of many adults who sob to their psychiatrists about the childhood trauma of discovering the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real. But in case you’re worried your kids will harbor lingering hostility about this particular revelation, this is the book for you.
Alexander writes without a hint of the razor-sharp comic instincts he brings to his acting, and the result is a maudlin discourse on what constitutes Truth with a capital “T.” Pardon me for thinking kids face greater hazards and let-downs than Dad’s fib about the fate of missing teeth.
The plot’s predictable enough: Gaby loses teeth, gains a few coins, loves his personal Tooth Fairy. Come to find out through the rotten neighborhood kids that it’s all a myth. Imagine! Confronting Dad gets him an earful about how magic creatures once roamed the earth, but us pushy grown-ups scared them off. Says Dad: It’s Gaby’s choice whether to keep believing. Snort.
In an end note, Alexander says events are largely as they occurred. The character names are also the same as his kids. The problem with hewing too closely to actual events in a fictional story is that you don’t leave yourself enough wiggle room for a more imaginative, amusing treatment.
Reviewed by Anne Levy
Rating: *\*\
Dad, Are You the Tooth Fairy?
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