Women vampires, time travel win at Jewish children’s book awards
By day, sisters Molly and Clara appear to be modern-day New Yorkers, living in an indie cinema that once was home to a Yiddish theater. At night, they transform into estries — owl-like vampires who prey on men.
Molly and Clara — whose alter egos are based on figures from Jewish lore — are the heroines of “Night Owls,” AR Vishny’s time-travel debut novel, one of a trio of books that took top prizes at the Sydney Taylor Book Awards for Jewish children’s books.
The awards were announced Monday by the Association of Jewish Libraries at the American Library Association’s LibLearnX conference in Phoenix.
“Night Owls” won the gold medal for young adult fiction. “An Etrog from Across the Sea” by Deborah Bodin Cohen and Kerry Olitzky, illustrated by Stacey Dressen McQueen, took the gold medal in the picture book category, and “The Girl Who Sang: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope and Survival,” by Estelle Nadel (1934-2023) and Bethany Strought, with illustrations by Sammy Savos, won top prize in the middle-grade category.
Set in the early 18th century, the lavishly illustrated “An Etrog from Across the Sea” tells the story of a Sephardic Jewish family living in Colonial-era New York. A young girl named Rachel is worried when her father, a tradesman, doesn’t return home from Corsica in time for Sukkot. It’s based on the life of Luis Moises Gomez, a real-life British merchant who settled in New York. Co-author Olitzky is a former pulpit rabbi and former executive director of Big Tent Judaism, an outreach institution.
“The Girl Who Sang” is based on the life of the Polish-born Nadel, who survived the Holocaust as a child hiding from the Nazis. The novel’s protagonist’s passion for singing becomes her source of strength, through the tragic loss of her family, her arduous post-war escape, and a complicated life as a young refugee in the United States.
In other awards, Hanna R. Neier won the Sydney Taylor manuscript award for “When You Write Back,” a time-travel novel layered in mystery. The award honors unpublished manuscripts of Jewish fiction targeting 8- to 13-year-olds.
Writing about “Night Owls,” Vishny said that estries can be traced to Sefer Hasidism, a medieval text that describes estries as witch-like creatures who suck their victims’ blood. They, along with most other Jewish magical creatures, have been lost in obscurity because of the systematic destruction of European Jewish culture. “We’re a tiny people whose culture our enemies have long sought to destroy,” she wrote.
The gold medal for “Night Owls” was its second major award this month. Earlier it won a National Jewish Book Award in the young adult category. Other Jewish children’s books to win National Jewish Book Awards, a program of the Jewish Book Council, were “Sharing Shalom” by Danielle Sharkan, illustrated by Selina Alko, in the picture book category, and “Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop” by Joshua S. Levy for middle-grade readers.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
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