Image of the Week: Puppets from Prague
© D. Yael Bernhard
When I accepted the contract to design and illustrate The Dreidel That Wouldn't Spin: A Toyshop Tale of Hanukkah (Wisdom Tales Press, 2014), I was given an unusual decision to make: it was left up to me to determine the setting for the toyshop featured in the story. Immediately I thought of Prague – famous for its carved marionettes, curious clockworks, and innovative inventions. Here the Jewish com
munity had a long and rich history, making this Bohemian city a perfect place for a mysterious dreidel with intuitive powers to show up about a century ago, when the story takes place.
My own daughter had several puppets from Prague that her father brought back from his travels. One was a wizard with frazzled white hair and a prominent chiseled chin. Another was a gypsy dancer whose exaggerated features were rather frightening. Other puppets and toys came from my own childhood memories, but the great majority were found on the internet. Such variety! I found photos of every kind of marionette, nesting dolls, carved lions with who knows what kind of hair, and spotted ponies that would melt a child's heart. I tried to capture their proportions and bring their faces alive as subtle observers of the human behavior they witnessed throughout the story.
The dreidel in the story flat out refuses to spin for spoiled or demanding children. Much to the shopkeeper's dismay, it's twice returned by these rotten kids' parents before finding its way to a young boy who asks for nothing. The child of a poor father who I dressed up like a college student majoring in philosophy, this boy is well loved, unassuming, and courteous – rather like Charlie in Charlie & the Chocolate Factory.
I was like a kid in a candy shop painting all these toys. I put them on a separate sheet and dropped them into the book wherever I saw space. I tried to use a rainbow palette, with emphasis on the colors of raw wood, for back in those days there was no plastic, and all these toys would have been hand-carved or cut on lathes. Liberated from the need to make them mechanically sound or even 3-dimensional, I could focus on the fun part: making them cute and colorful. These toys are also in tune with the dreidel, expressing their disapproval when a rich girl in a fur-collared coat orders her father to buy her a whole pile of toys for Chanukah.
The poor shopkeeper! Because of this dreidel, his toyshop is in quite a kerfuffle. At the beginning of the story, all he cares about is earning a few korunas. The greedier the customer, the better, as far as he was concerned. But by the end of the story, he, too, learns the true spirit of Chanukah – and gives the dreidel, now transformed as well, to the boy in the ragged blue sweater.
The Dreidel That Wouldn't Spin was chosen as one of the eight best Chanukah books by this website and this one – neither of which I've heard of, but I'm honored by the company the book keeps, for some of the other titles are truly classics.
You can order a signed copy here, or find it on Amazon.
The Jewish community of Prague was decimated in WWII. It wasn't the first time – as memorialized in an extraordinary picture book of paper-cut illustrations, Golem, which won the Caldecott medal in 1996 for illustrator David Wisniewski. Set in Prague in 1580, the story tells of a Rabbi Judah Loew, who legend holds created a "golem" – a giant clay man who came to life to defend the Jewish people against their brutal attackers. These stories hit close to home, as my own maternal grandmother also bore the name Loew – which translates to mean "Levite" – and hailed from a little town just three hours from Prague, in what is now Slovakia. She, too, fled from vicious pogroms that killed tens of thousands of Jews in the decades preceding WWI.
Yet the stories and music, wisdom and memories of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe live on.
Chanukah Sameach – Happy Hanukkah! – to all my Jewish readers. And special thanks to the author of Dreidel, Martha Simpson, for creating this special story; and to our editor, Roger Gaetini, who was a pleasure to work with. We all teamed up again for a sequel, Esther's Gragger: A Toyshop Tale of Purim. I'll write about that book in the spring. I hope Martha and I will have an opportunity to collaborate again in the future!
