Review: The Moving Box Sukkah
The Moving Box Sukkah by Leah Rachel Berkowitz, illustrated by Sharon Vargo Apples & Honey Press (imprint of Behrman House Publishing), 2023 Category: Picture Books Reviewer: Jeff Gottesfeld Buy at Bookshop.org A few years ago on the campus of my synagogue, Adat Ari El in North Hollywood CA, Rabbi Jessica Yarkin taught a super cool religious school autumn lesson by using her car as the foundation for a sukkah. Two open doors plus the main car body plus some pine fronds, and there's room for a chair underneath. Et voilà! In The Moving Box Sukkah , author Berkowitz and illustrator Vargo do the same, in a poignant mother-son story of moving, displacement, adaptation, improvisation, and reconnection to both the distant and immediate past. The narrator is a boy whose mom has just moved him to the city from a place where sukkah-building was not hard. No dad in the picture, literally or figuratively. Here in the city, the boy longs for his transitional object from the past, a blue bla