The Sydney Taylor Shmooze

The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs by Chana Siefel, illustrated by Susan Gal Scholastic Press, 2022 Category: Picture Books Reviewer: Jeannette Brod Buy at Bookshop.org In The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs , Chana Stiefel and Susan Gal have created a fitting tribute to the creator of the Tower of Life (or Tower of Faces) at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Professor Yaffa Eliach spent much of her professional life gathering photos, diaries, and stories from the village of Eishyshok that her family fled as the Nazis invaded. When charged with creating a Holocaust memorial for the Museum, she traveled across continents and into the homes of Holocaust survivors to gather nearly 6,000 photographs from inhabitants of her town. She hoped to create a memorial that would capture the dignity and humanity of the townspeople who lived ordinary lives in unsuspecting innocence ...

Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale with a Tail by Lesléa Newman, illustrated by Susan Gal Category: Picture Book Reviewer: Anna Caplan In Lesléa Newman’s gentle picture book Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale with a Tail, the Passover seder is rich with sensory experience. It’s also a little bit magical. Using simple, lyrical prose, Newman takes readers on a journey through two separate worlds: a boy experiences the seder indoors while a stray kitten wanders outside. Although the boy and the kitten occupy different spaces, their experiences echo one another: Inside, the boy dipped parsley into salt water. Outside, the kitten chewed A wet blade of grass. Inside, the boy broke the middle matzo in half. outside, the kitten split a twig in two. This soothing pattern of phrases beginning with “inside” and “outside” continues throughout the book. The repetition propels readers forward towards the inevitable meeting between boy and kitten. When they eventually meet...