Not just any Phil and Lil

In the newly published book for young readers, “Just Try It: Someplace New,” dad Phil needs to convince his reluctant daughter, Lil, that it’s okay to sleep at grandma’s house.

Lil likes the comforts of home. Not only is she convinced that grandma will serve her broccoli, but that she’ll be forced to sleep in a bed hard as rocks in a room where there are monsters in the closet.

The authors of his tome (charmingly illustrated by Luke Flowers) are — wait for it — named Phil and Lil. Go figure. But not just any Phil and Lil.

They are Phil and Lily Rosenthal — the former a legend, the latter most likely a legend in the making. He is the co-creator of the seemingly ubiquitous sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond” and host of “Somebody Feed Phil,” and she is an actress and budding restauranteur.

At the moment, both Rosenthals are on Zoom to talk about the book, their upcoming appearance at Books and Greetings in Northvale, and their Jewish lives. But first, as part of my effort to ask the questions others fear to ask, to determine the relationship between fact and fiction, where one leaves off and the other begins, I put it bluntly to Lily: “Did your grandma make you sleep on a bed of rocks? Were there monsters in the room?”

It was almost as though she anticipated my tough question. “They did not have a rock bed,” she answered immediately. “I slept on a plush futon.

“My grandpa was always so funny and he had jokes for us. And my grandma, I remember she never wanted to be thought of as an old lady. My brother and I would wrestle in the living room, and she would say I can wrestle. And I was saying, ‘No, you can’t, grandma.’ And she was like, ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

“The only sadness I had growing up is that they lived across the country. It wasn’t like my friends in L.A., whose grandparents were also in L.A., and would, you know, have breakfast with them every Saturday and pick them up from school.”

Across the country, in this case, is New City, N.Y., where Helen and Max Rosenthal raised Phil and his brother, Richard.

“My parents were Holocaust survivors,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “My father got out of Germany after Kristallnacht, but my mom was in a concentration camp in France. Not only did she survive that, but after the war she discovered that her father had survived Auschwitz. They found each other after the war, but he didn’t want to come to New York with her.

“He said, ‘My work is here in Germany’ and he did great work. He started the restitution program, which, as you know, gives Jews checks from Germany if their business was stolen. She saw him once after that, so, on top of the other trauma, I guess she felt rejected by her own dad. So there was trauma on top of trauma.”

Phil believes he was impacted by that experience. “I’ll give you an example” he says. “For my 10th birthday, I said to my mom, ‘Can I get the five-speed Schwin Stingray everyone is getting?’

“She said, ‘You know what I got for my 10th birthday?’ When you’re a kid, you don’t care what your mom got for her 10th birthday. You just want the bike. You don’t want to hear a Holocaust story.”

That was counterbalanced by his dad, who had a great sense of humor. “If I have any talent at all I inherited that from my father, who was super funny,” Phil said.

Max was a tailor “who worked with his father in the garment center for many years while he saved up so he could open his own children’s clothing store in Orangeburg. It was called Young World.

Helen and Max “were not very religious. Their parents were religious, so they pretended to be kosher when they came over.

“Even though we were not religious, I still went to Hebrew school” — at the New City Jewish Center — “after school, which I saw as a punishment on top of the punishment of regular school. And then I had a bar mitzvah.

“I must say I love being Jewish, but I’m not a huge fan of organized religion.” However…

As Raymond fans likely know, the role of Amy MacDougall-Barone was played by Rosenthal’s wife, Monica Horan, who became a Jew by choice and was less impressed with her husband’s attitude toward organized religion.

“I wouldn’t say she was Orthodox,” Ms. Rosenthal said. “But I would say she loves [being Jewish], I think more than anyone in the family. She was the one who made sure we had Shabbat every Friday as we were growing up, and that we went to services. She’s the reason my brother and I went to a Jewish elementary school” — Temple Israel of Hollywood day school — “which was kind of liberal and I would say more fun.”

That prompted her father to say “I think if I had gone there I would be better.”

Not that he turned out so bad. As the recent ratings success of his show’s retrospective indicates, everybody still loves “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Both Mr. Romano and Mr. Rosenthal unilaterally decided to end the show’s 10-year run. Without regrets, Mr. Rosenthal said.

“That was all part of the plan. It’s like living a good life and then it comes to an end. No regrets. We did everything we wanted to do. We loved it so much. We appreciate it. Every second. Maybe the fact that we ended it when we did is why it’s still on the air after 30 years. It’s still, you know, the gift that keeps on giving.”

No chance of a revival, say as “Everybody Loves Grandpa Ray”? “It’s funny that you should say that,” Mr. Rosenthal tells me. “Because this morning Ray became a grandpa.”

Fortunately, even without the prospect of a revival, Mr. Rosenthal has managed to keep himself busy hosting a series of TV shows, most recently “Somebody Feed Phil,” in which he travels the world and samples exotic cuisine, unlike anything served by his parents

“They were not chefs,” he remembers. “They were great in every respect, but they were not chefs. For Passover my mother once made matzah lasagna. And we never let her forget it.”

Phil and Lily Rosenthal will appear at Books and Greetings, 271 Livingston St. in Northvale, on Monday, March 9, at 6 p.m.