Debbie Levy's Blog

This is what happens when a children’s book author (me) spends the pandemic with a bookseller (my son). We enjoyed distracting ourselves from the news by talking about RBG, biography-writing, and related matters, and hope this brief video is an enjoyable break for you and any kids in your lives!

Before all that’s happened in the past month happened, at the top of my mind was something far removed from social distancing and sheltering in place and to-mask-or-not-to-mask, and the devastation that now shadows our days.

Five weeks ago, Women’s History Month was on the horizon. So I sat down and started to write something. And then, well, you know.

By now Women’s History Month–the month of March–is in the rear-view mirror. But as I struggle, like everyone, with isolation and anxiety, I’ve been thinking back on the past year, which was my own personal Women’s History Year. Four nonfiction books published over eleven months about four women, each notable in her distinct ways, yet each expressing a common trait that, for me, is a hallmark of what we honor when we honor women’s history or women who are unknown to history, or, heck, people of any gender who set examples for the rest of us:

There’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Even if she had never become a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, she would belong on the Mount Rushmore of great women for the work she did as a lawyer in the 1970s creating the field of gender discrimination law. Before her efforts, the Supreme Court had never encountered an instance of sex discrimination that it didn’t think was just fine. She changed that. She paved the way for girls and women who want to claim their place in the world outside of the home.

There’s Jo Ann Allen Boyce, who joined with 11 other African American high school students in Clinton, Tennessee, to desegregate the first high school in the South in 1956. Talk about paving the way: Look at that date. It’s a year before Little Rock.

There’s Flory Jagoda. A post-WWII immigrant from Bosnia, Flory preserved and popularized the Sephardic music and Ladino language of her childhood. By leading audiences and students worldwide back to her ancestors’ rich culture, she paved the way for a new generation of musicians and music-lovers to discover it and carry it forward.

And there’s my mother: Jutta Salzberg Levy, my own personal waypaver. When 12-year-old Jutta arrived in this country in 1938, a refugee from Nazi Germany, she carried her poesiealbum—her “poetry album,” akin to an autograph album—filled with her friends’ drawings, wishes, proverbs, and poems. This little artifact paved the way for her friends who didn’t survive the Holocaust—fully half of the tweens and teens who wrote in her album—to be seen and have a voice these 80 years later.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has repeatedly used this word that I just used—“waypavers”—to described those on whose shoulders she and others in the women’s movement stood. She kind of made it up; that is, it’s a translation of vägmärken, a Swedish word that she likes and that expresses her meaning. (Of course, like most of us, she became fluent in Swedish in her 20s!)

“Waypaver” is not in any English dictionary that I’ve consulted. But I love this word, dictionary or no dictionary. It’s a lens through which we can see that the possibilities of creating change and goodness, connection and support, are close at hand. Waypavers walk among us. They are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sure, but they are also my mother. They make history, large and small, in ways that I think of as particularly female, laying down markers and reaching out hands. And, if they’re not history-makers, they enhance life in the same way: Remembering, always remembering, who came before—and ever mindful of those who come next. And at this particular moment in our shared history, I think we can all be waypavers by acting with mindfulness of our communities.

If you Google vägmärken, you’ll see it translated—more prosaically than RBG’s take on it—as “road signs.” You might click on links to the Swedish transport agency, to colorful pages with pictures of the vägmärken used in Sweden. How perfect, for those of us who care about children’s books, as the images put me in mind of children’s book covers. During this locked-down time, publishers continue to publish excellent books. Their authors can’t go out into the world as they normally would to do the exciting and fulfilling work of meeting new readers. But *we* can reach out to them by learning about and buying their books.

Here is a tiny sampling of books for young people released in March by my colleagues and friends:

Black Brother, Black Brother, by Jewell Parker Rhodes.

DidiDodo, Future Spy, by Tom Angleberger.

Dragon Hoops, by Gene Luen Yang.

Egg or Eyeball? by Cece Bell.

Girls Rule! 5-Minute Stories, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Green on Green, by Dianne White.

Jane Goodall, by Sarah Albee.

Mañanaland, by Pam Muñoz Ryan.

Most Wanted, by Sarah Jane Marsh.

My Best Friend, by Julie Fogliano.

Prairie Lotus, by Linda Sue Park.

Rover Throws a Party, by Kristin L. Gray.

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi.

The Great Upending, by Beth Kephart.

The Next President, by Kate Messner.

We Are Water Protectors, by Carole Lindstrom.

When You Need Wings, by Lita Judge.

I hope you’ll check these books out, and be inspired to buy one or more of them—or others! browse!—from your favorite independent bookstore which, I am sure, is either fulfilling online orders or (still in some states) offering curbside pickup. May I suggest some that I like: Greenlight Bookstore, Politics & Prose, One More Page Books, Bards Alley, Scrawl Books, Hooray for Books. Or go to the new online bookstore whose mission is to facilitate selling for local independent bookstores: Bookshop.org.

My own 2019 books, the ones that occasioned my Year of Women’s History are: Becoming RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Journey to Justice, Simon & Schuster; This Promise of Change: One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School Equality (with Jo Ann Allen Boyce), Bloomsbury; The Key from Spain: Flory Jagoda and Her Music, Kar-Ben; and The Year of Goodbyes, Disney-Hyperion Books.

Today, Veterans Day, I’m thinking of my dad, Harold Levy, who served on the destroyer-escort USS Menges in WWII.

Dad’s rank was that of pharmacist’s mate, a perfect slot for him as he always dreamed of being a doctor. The night the Menges was practically torn in half by a torpedo launched from a German submarine, the ship’s doctor was away, on loan to another vessel in the convoy. So my father was in charge of tending to the many wounded and dying. From his journal:

“Had GQ [General Quarters] at one, surface target astern of the convoy. We went back to investigate—a game of cat and mouse. We were the mouse. We were trapped—hit by an acoustic torpedo aft. Dreadful. . . . Now I know what war is.”

My father received the Legion of Merit for his tireless work that night. He never did make it to medical school. He worked for the federal government. He moonlit in the shoe department at Sears, and as a floorwalker at the late Raleigh’s clothing store. But after that night, his shipmates called him “Doc,” and years later, at reunions of the Menges personnel that he and my mom used to attend, they still called him that.

The photos show him as a new enlistee; the ship underway; and inoculating sailors on board.

Today is publication day for my graphic novel-style biography, Becoming RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Journey to Justice. Yes, my second book about RBG!

Becoming RBG tells the story of how Ruth Bader Ginsburg evolved to become the pathbreaker that she is. Step by step, a quiet little girl–“Kiki” Bader–became a child who questioned unfairness, who became a student who persisted despite obstacles, who became an advocate who resisted injustice, who became a jurist who reveres the rule of law, who became . . . RBG.

I’m so excited to share this remarkable woman’s story with more readers. Maybe some of them will be graduates of my picture book, I Dissent. Maybe some will be new to RBG, drawn to her story by Whitney Gardner‘s crisp and snazzy art. Maybe some will never have heard of a “graphic novel” (these would be adult readers; the kids all know)–and will be surprised to encounter a 208-page *comic book*!

I’d love to flip through all those pages with you now, but my talent as a videographer is limited. So, instead, I hope you’ll enjoy these excerpted pages. And please check my “Happenings” page to see where I’ll be going with Becoming RBG in the coming months. I do love talking about my RBG books!

Next Tuesday is publication day for my graphic novel-style biography, Becoming RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Journey to Justice. I’ve written two books about Justice Ginsburg in four years, which means I’ve read, watched, listened to, discussed, and thought about her — a lot. But I never get tired of it, and felt lucky to be able to attend a stimulating event at Georgetown University Law Center last night, where Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Rodham Clinton chatted for an hour about all manner of things. Among the subjects covered was President Clinton’s 1993 nomination to the Supreme Court of then-Judge Ginsburg.

The former president said he knew within ten minutes of interviewing RBG for the job that he would choose her. Secretary Clinton, too, talked warmly about her impressions back then of RBG. President Clinton talked about some of RBG’s decisions that he admired. All this went on for a while. RBG was fairly quiet. My friend, Georgetown law professor and RBG biographer Mary Hartnett, who was one of the moderators for last night’s event, was bringing this part of the conversation to a close when Justice Ginsburg piped up. “One thing I hope would please the president,” she said, and you could hear, yes, hear, the twinkle in her eye:

“I was age 60 when I was nominated, and some people thought I was too old for the job. and now I’m . . . starting my twenty-seventh year on the Court, so I’m one of the longest tenured justices.

“So if you worried about my age, it was unnecessary.”

She brought the house down.

And here’s an excerpt from the book about that time in RBG’s life:

It’s been more years than I care to admit since I received my breast cancer diagnosis. I’ll also admit that I don’t much like to think about things like Breast Cancer Awareness Month, or read articles about breast cancer science, or even think about this subject. I’ve done my time there.

And yet, as October–which is awareness month–closes out, my thoughts are on my own experience. I’d had an annual physical, with the doctor’s routine breast exam. Nothing detected. I had a mammogram. Nothing detected. And then, a month later: self-detection. There was a little lump, barely palpable, but real. I caught it very early, and here I am. No one knows your body like you do.

Ladies, feel yourselves!

And now, on to the second part of this Public Service Announcement. After my diagnosis and treatment, I took up fishing. And then I wrote an article about that for Discovery.com. I don’t think it lives online anymore, but I have my manuscript of the piece, and I’d like to share it here.

A few years ago, around my thirty-ninth birthday, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  It wasn’t a terrible case, as these things go, but it undeniably introduced a new dimension of stress into my life.  Judging from the notices for support groups and yoga and meditation classes posted in the waiting room where I went for treatments, I was not alone in my newfound disquietude.

I didn’t enroll in any groups or classes.  I did, however, take up fishing.

I’d never fished before, but it suddenly seemed a very good idea.  I craved a river,  a rod, pretty lures to dangle from the end of my line—and the time to cast and retrieve, cast and retrieve.

As I’ve since learned, my compulsion to fish in the face of adversity was not as strange as it might first appear. 

“The definition of fishing,” says Richie Gaines, who leads guided trips on the  Chesapeake Bay, “is a perpetual series of opportunities for hope.”  Which would be exactly what a freshly minted cancer patient—as well as pretty much anybody—is after on any given day of the week. 

 If you think Gaines’ definition sounds awfully high-minded for a blood sport, you are correct, I suppose.  But something about this ancient activity moves people to wax philosophical, and to embrace it to satisfy a deep, unnamable yearning. 

Many have described fishing as a way to reach for a world beyond our own.  As Michael Checchio put it in A Clean, Well-Lighted Stream (Soho $23), having a fish hit your line feels “like taking the pulse of the planet.”  Scores of writers have explained that fishing touches, calms, and even heals the human soul.  “When the going gets rough,” Ted Kerasote advised in his 1997 book, Heart of Home (Villard $23), “you can take Prozac or buy a fly rod.”

 You may think this is all just so much hooey.  As a former non-fisherman, I counsel you:  Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

“There’s something about fishing,” muses Louisiana-bayou-bred Gary Marx, now of Chevy Chase, Maryland, “that has inspired so many books comparing it to great art.  So when [NBA basketball coach] Phil Jackson talks about Zen and basketball, people laugh at him, and maybe there’s a reason for that, but with fishing—there really is a Zen to it.  You’re not meditating, because you’re doing something, but to me there is a rhythm to it that connects you to nature in a very special way.”

Perhaps not all 47 million Americans who fish have a Zen experience when they throw a line in the water, but many come close.  According to the American Sportfishing Association, the most common reason people fish is to relax.  Thirty-five percent of anglers cite this explanation, compared to only three percent who say they fish “to catch many fish.”

Dr. Peggy Stock, president of Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, goes fishing to relax, spend time with her husband, and have fun.  But there is something more. 

“Fishing is like life,” Stock suggests.  “You never know what you’re going to catch.  I think it teaches you lessons in persistence and tenaciousness.  You’re not always going to get what you want when you want it, in fishing or in life.”

Wise words—but if, like me, you’re after the fishing as much as the fish, you’ll triumph nearly every time.  When I go fishing on my home waters—the Wye River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—I am likely to see blue crabs swimming by in their comical, side-stepping way; spy a great blue heron patiently stalking its underwater prey; or bask in the sun alongside mallards, the male ducks gorgeous with their iridescent green heads, the females beautiful in their practical brown way. 

I’ve also seen sea turtles locked in a vise-like mating grasp, female carp lying exhausted in the mud from the effort of expelling eggs, snowy egrets snatching snacks of tiny fish—perhaps the carp’s babies?  The cycle of life and death captivates me every time, reminding me how small and insignificant I am in the greater scheme of this Earth.  The feeling is oddly comforting.  It renders my own mortality much more natural and necessary, and less scary, than I ever could have imagined. 

And the fish?  Oh, yes, them.  Sometimes I’ll keep a fish, bring it home and clean it, and my family will enjoy an incomparable meal.  More often, I’ll carefully remove the hook from the critter’s mouth and set it free.  “You’re okay now,” I’ll whisper, not putting too fine a point on whether I’m talking to the fish, or to myself.

Today is publication day! The Year of Goodbyes is about my mother’s experience in 1938 Nazi Germany. It’s about what that year was like for my mom, then a tween with the usual concerns about friends, gymnastics, and the latest American movies–but also a girl who saw her friends and their families inexplicably disappear; who heard whispers about mysterious places called “concentration camps”; who saw her father’s increasingly desperate efforts to navigate the less-than-welcoming U.S. immigration and visa system. (Click here for more information about the book.)

This is a re-issue of The Year of Goodbyes, which originally came out in 2010. It has a new cover, which I love; newly designed interior pages, which I love; and a spot-on foreword by kids’ author extraordinaire Tom Angleberger, which I love. I’m grateful to my publisher, Disney-Hyperion, for giving this book a new lease on life. I’ll be talking about The Year of Goodbyes at events this fall, starting tomorrow at a forum focused on the impact of immigration on children coming into the United States, convened by the Tikkun Olam Women’s Foundation of Greater Washington, DC.

With four books released between August and November–this will never happen again in my writing life!–I don’t have a  launch event planned specifically for The Year of Goodbyes. So this post is my book party, complete with a couple of photos from our very celebratory 2010 launch. The Year of Goodbyes is a Parents’ Choice Award winner, a Sydney Taylor Notable Book, a Kirkus Reviews Best Children’s Book, a VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) Nonfiction Honor book–and it’s so close to my heart. Please help me spread the word, and put my mother’s story, as relevant today as it was a decade ago, in the hands of readers everywhere.

(The book’s cover photo, by the way, is Mom on the deck of the RMS Queen Mary in November 1938, on her way to New York City. Coincidentally, a few days ago The Washington Post ran an article about the ship’s role in bringing Jews to the United States. Some great photos and a video there, too.)

Today is publication day for my two newest picture books! I’ll let a couple of the reviews introduce these stories to you:

The Key from Spain, from Kar-Ben Publishing.  “Levy’s captivating picture book biography tells the story of Flory Jagoda, known today as the ‘Keeper of the Flame’ of Sephardic culture and music. . . . Levy’s writing and Wimmer’s mixed-media illustrations strike the perfect synergy, working together to celebrate music, heritage, and family histories. The writing is poetic and lyrical, effortlessly weaving centuries of history into the story while maintaining a strikingly intimate tone. Wimmer’s illustrations are nuanced, and readers will enjoy discovering new details upon each rereading of the book.” (School Library Journal, starred review.)

Yiddish Saves the Day! from Apples & Honey Press. “Levy’s story is built on the specific and delightful premise that Yiddish is a language with superpowers. . . The Yiddish once spoken broadly among Ashkenazic Jews, from secular to observant, and the cornerstone of an incredible body of literature, has faded from daily life. Readers can kvell that Yiddish Saves the Day brings this world back to life for readers too young to have known it was gone.” (Jewish Book Council review.)

Did I set out to have two books of Jewish interest published on the same day by different publishers? I did not. We authors don’t have that kind of control! But I’m delighted on this August 1st to bring stories of two different Jewish cultures–Sephardic and Ashkenazic–to young readers and their families.

Nine-and-a-half years ago, Disney-Hyperion published my book about my mother’s—Jutta’s—last year living in Nazi Germany before Europe exploded and she and her family made their way to the United States. The Year of Goodbyes reached people across the country—people familiar with stories of refugees from Hitler’s terror, and people who were learning about what life was like for Jews in that era for the very first time. Mom and I went to schools, conferences, luncheons, and other events where we talked about her story.

We talked to many people, my mother and I did, and the book had quite a few readers—but to an author there can never be enough readers. And at this particular moment in time there can never be enough readers of a story that puts them in the shoes of a young person on the receiving end of anti-Semitism, injustice, and hate. The Year of Goodbyes is also about the small treasures my mother’s friends gave her before they all scattered. Those treasures were the poems and proverbs Jutta’s friends wrote in her poesiealbum—a type of poetry album or friendship book. The pages these young people created provide the architecture of, and serve as springboards for, this true story.

Now, I’m really pleased and grateful to share news of a re-issue of The Year of Goodbyes, coming from Disney-Hyperion in September. It will have a new cover that will resemble a poesiealbum. The poesies that begin each chapter will be rendered more beautifully.

And there’s this: Tom Angleberger, beloved author of outstanding, creative, funny, full-of-heart books for kids, has written a foreword for the book. In it, this creator of the Origami Yoda series frames my mother’s story in a way that only someone who reaches kids where they live could. His essay at the beginning of this fresh edition is perfect.

For me, the impetus for a re-issue of this book began a couple of years ago. I got my undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia; during my senior year I lived on the Lawn, desecrated in August of 2017 by the neo-Nazi march and violence in Charlottesville. My mother never graduated from college but oh, how she loved UVa, which she knew as a young woman when she drove down to spend party weekends there with friends. The bold resurgence of white nationalism and anti-Semitism, including its presence in middle and high schools, reinforced my feeling that there could never be enough readers of my mother’s story. What’s happening feels personal.

It’s no slight to the other strong, accomplished, admirable, and lovely women of my more recent books—Jo Ann Allen Boyce of This Promise of Change, Ruth Bader Ginsburg of I Dissent—to say that Jutta Salzberg Levy of The Year of Goodbyes has an unrivalled place in my heart. It’s my book about my mother, and that puts it in a category of its own. So I know that Jo Ann and Justice Ginsburg will completely understand if I close by remembering that, when I used to talk with Mom on the telephone (she died in 2013), and we were wrapping up the call, I’d say “I love you” as part of my goodbyes. We all do, right?

“Love you more!” she’d sing out and then, BAM! hang up lickety-split. She wanted the last word. Love you more.

This evening marks the beginning of Holocaust Remembrance Day/Yom HaShoah, which itself marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.

By then, my mom, her sister, and parents had fled to the United States, barely escaping their home in Hamburg, Germany, in advance of a Nazi sweep of Ostjuden–that is, of Jews from the East, meaning Polish Jews like my mother’s parents. Shortly after arriving in the States in late 1938, my grandfather, whom I never met, spoke before an audience in Detroit, Michigan. Mom kept a newspaper clipping reporting on his speech:

“Admonishing Jews not to fall into the error committed by German Jews 10 years before Hitler’s acquisition of power in 1933 by keeping silent in the face of the rising tide of anti-Semitism,” the article began, “Isaac Salzberg, who arrived from Hamburg, Germany, a few days ago, told a large gathering at the Shaarey Zedek last Sunday morning that an unrelenting fight must be conducted everywhere against the spread of bigotry engendered by Nazism.”

The article quoted extensively from my grandfather’s speech.

German Jews now realize the mistake they made when they kept silent during the first days of the rise of Hitlerism. Our mistake was that we did not take Hitler seriously. . . . They chose to laugh at Hitler rather than to fight him.

By 1938, of course, the time had passed when German Jews would be heard by the German government.

This experience ought to be a lesson for American Jews. Here you have a chance to protest against anti-Semitism, to voice your indignation against atrocities. Do it: This is a great democratic country and there is a way of getting to the government. Why keep silent? Don’t commit the mistake that was made in Germany!

He commended The Detroit Jewish Chronicle for condemning the anti-Semitic radio broadcasts of the now-infamous Father Coughlin. But he added:

The only criticism I have of The Chronicle’s action is that its answer was too mild. We can not be sharp enough in answering anti-Semites.

I am not suggesting that the white nationalism and anti-Semitism we see today mirrors what my grandfather experienced in Nazi Germany. I am saying that mild opposition to bigotry isn’t worth much, and that lukewarm “tolerance” is barely helpful. These truths are as relevant today as they were in 1938, and in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King wrote, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail,

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

If we light a candle for six million dead without shining light on bigotry of every stripe today, if we are “mild” in our indignation, as my grandfather put it, that candle is sputtering.

The newspaper article about my grandfather noted that he “permits the use of his name because he was able to take his wife and children with him and has no other relatives left in the Reich.” That was true when written, but a year later Germany conquered Poland, and it became part of the Third Reich. Most of the Salzberg family lived in Poland, and nearly all were murdered in the Holocaust. On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, then, I’m sharing a photo from earlier days of my mother, Jutta Salzberg, as a young girl (r), visiting a favorite cousin of hers, Manja Stahl (l), in Pabianice, Poland, one of those relatives “left in the Reich.”