[COLD OPEN] The name of the character, Muriel: That's my grandmother's name. So, every time anyone talks about Muriel in this scene and I'm like, oh my gosh, how do you know my grandmother? And then Sean did something special with what Muriel is wearing on her head.
The red beret? Yeah, that was actually from my great great aunt. The red hat sticks out in a lot of the more sort of dreary Depression scenes.
And so, to me it ends up being this great homage to these two important women in our lives.
[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. Today we're going to talk on The Book of Life with Susan Kusel and Sean Rubin about their picture book, The Passover Guest, an adaptation of a famous I.L. Peretz story. This book gives me life, not only because it's beautiful, not only because I love the holiday of Passover, but because I am thrilled to pieces for my friend Susan to introduce her debut book to the world. Meeting Sean, the creator of Bolivar, was also a true delight. If The Passover Guest gives you life too, please recommend this episode to your friends. Word of mouth is the best way to help us find new listeners.
By the way, The Passover Guest was one of three Pesach books on the Association of Jewish Libraries' first-ever Holiday Highlights list, which identifies the very best Jewish children's holiday books, each spring and fall. If you are stocking your Passover shelves, you should know that The Four Questions by Lynn Sharon Schwartz and Meet the Matzah by Alan Silberberg were also on the Holiday Highlights list. Also FYI, Welcoming Elijah, a Passover Tale with a Tail by Leslea Newman won this year's Sydney Taylor Book Award and National Jewish Book Award, and Miriam at the River by Jane Yolen was a Sydney Taylor Honor Book. Don't worry about writing all that down. I've got all the info for you at BookofLifepodcast.com. And now, Susan and Sean.
Susan Kusel, Sean Rubin, welcome to The Book of Life.
Thanks so much. I'm, I'm really happy to be back; it's always so much fun to be on your podcast, Heidi!
As regular listeners may remember, Susan has been on the show many times before, because we are good friends and we do many many many projects together.
Many many many many...
Too many to even start talking about because that would take over this entire episode.
We recently agreed we needed to make a spreadsheet just to list all the projects.
Because we can never remember what we're talking about. But Sean is here for the first time. Welcome Sean, glad to have you here.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
My pleasure. So, we are gathered here today to talk about The Passover Guest, your new picture book. Susan, start off by telling us about The Passover Guest What is it about and what was your inspiration for the story?
It's so exciting to be able to talk about it. It's about the first night of Passover, and a family that is really too poor to have a Seder. A stranger knocks on their door, and some magic ensues. The inspiration came from a story that my mom read me when I was a child, it's called The Magician and it's by I.L. Peretz, who was often called the father of Yiddish literature. The version my mom read me was a picture book version, illustrated by Uri Shulevitz, although it was originally written by Peretz early in the 1900s and published in a short story collection and it was written for adults. I loved it as a child and then I found it later in a Jewish library and I loved it again. And then I started thinking that there were things I wanted to change about this beloved story.
What did you feel needed to be different? And how does yours compare to the original?
Well, as I said it was originally written for adults, the main characters are adults, they are a husband and wife. I really envisioned this as a picture book. There have been two picture books written, one by Uri Shulevitz which I mentioned and the other by Barbara Diamond Goldin, and they're both wonderful, but I wanted to add a child to it. There were so many little things that I wanted to make different, for example, there's a part of which they need the rabbi's expertise, and they go and consult him and he's sitting in his study surrounded by books, studying the Torah, studying the Talmud. And that always drove me crazy because it was the first night of Passover and I didn't understand why he wasn't at a Seder. So in this version Sean has beautifully done this scene, drawing the rabbi at his own Seder. I also wanted to change the fact that usually the parents don't get a chance to talk to Elijah much because they run away and they consult the rabbi but in this version they actually visit with Elijah, while the daughter goes and consults the rabbi. This is one of my favorite scene, Sean does all of this amazingly in the same scene, and it's it's really quite something.
You were sort of taking directorial charge of this and moving characters around to your own satisfaction, I like that.
Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
So, Sean, did you look at the earlier picture book versions and did that have any impact on your interpretation of the story?
Yeah, that's a good question. The edition I did pay attention to was in Yiddish, which unfortunately I can't read yet. That one was actually illustrated by Marc Chagall in sort of a strange illustration style, and beautiful as everything that he did, but also very surreal and weird and only in black and white. That edition, I looked over in some detail. I wound up looking at a lot of Chagall paintings and actually got a great exhibition catalog from a show that I think was done in the 70s or 80s called Chagall it was like The Lost Jewish World, really about how Chagall was consummate painter of the Ashkenazi universe that existed in Eastern Europe. Chagall is a painter of a particular cosmos, so to speak. That really drove a lot of the thinking of how I put things together. Certain colors keep coming up; Neal, at one point, he called me up and was like, what's with all this blue, because he had done a book about blue, in fact that particular shade of blue, it's very idiosyncratic shade of blue it's almost an electric blue that pops up in a couple of places. I later realized it was from a swatch that I had in my studio from another job I was doing, it's just sort of gotten into my brain that pops up a lot but is this wonderful way of having our work that is very, very based in the real world, but at the same time, viewed as a sort of magic, and surreality and it was just kind of perfect. You'll see in the book, certain colors come up, you know, sort of as motifs where you'll have magic tap and you may see a gold you may see some blue, there's a blue cat. Things that Chagall referenced keep showing up and are involved in various things that happen in the story, and as the night goes on, and the sun goes down, Washington starts to look more and more like a Chagall painting. Actually, it's funny, at one point, Neal told me Hey, this is starting to look too much like a shtetl, I was like yeah you're right, so we had to scale that back a little bit, but it does, it does sort of do that like the book becomes more timeless, as the night goes on, where it's very obviously rooted historically in the 30s everything about it in the beginning, and then the style, while it still incorporates aspects of all that, it also becomes more sort of magical and surreal, more of an imaginary environment, towards the end.
Let's talk about the setting. Originally this story was set in the shtetl, in the small villages in Eastern Europe. Susan you live in the DC area and that is where you've set your retelling, so... coincidence? I think not.
No, it was not a coincidence. I live there, and grew up in this area, and love the area, but also there's this really great Jewish community in DC and I wanted to show that there are Jews in different parts of the world. And I am just obsessed with the cherry blossoms, which bloom every year in the spring. I really can't put into words what a big event they are in Washington DC. They're just the hugest thing. And since Passover is in the spring I love the idea of having these beautiful white stately buildings of DC to contrast with these beautiful blossoms and also to be able to show some historic Jewish DC landmarks, such as the synagogue Sixth and I, which was really important and special to me. But it was a bit of a question originally where it was set. I discussed it with our editor many many times and it wasn't until he happened to be in DC for another reason that our editor Neal Porter and I walked around Washington. He called it location scouting. We walked the whole path that the main character takes in the book. And that really convinced him to be in DC and then later, I was lucky enough to walk around that same path again with Sean and we also were lucky enough to go inside the Sixth and I synagogue.
But that's very unusual for author and illustrator to meet before the book is finished. How did that come about that you actually got to meet?
It's actually sort of the usual story of even how we met. There's this big book trade show every year, Book Expo. And I was at a party earlier in the day at our publishers, Holiday House. And at the party, Neal the editor said okay, Sean is definitely going to be the illustrator, everything's done, you know, you can tell people now. And I was very excited. And I went back up to the Javits Center where the trade show was being held and I ran into a friend of mine, Paula Willie who's a wonderful librarian, and Paula said, Hey, who's your Illustrator? And I said, Oh, Paula let me show you, and I took her over to the booth of Sean's publisher Archaia, because Sean done this magnificent book called Bolivar, which if you haven't seen, I can't recommend enough. So I said, Paula, here, look, Bolivar, this is the illustrator of my book, and Paula happened to have reviewed Bolivar. And she said, Oh my gosh, Sean Robin?! You got Sean Robin? How'd you get Sean Rubin?? And I said, Oh, okay! That wasn't the reaction I was expecting. And while we were having that conversation, the marketing person kind of leaned over to us and said you know Sean's gonna be at a party tonight, he's here at this trade show, do you want to meet him? And I said yes, yes I do. So...
Great! When your editor found out that you had met, did he try to keep you apart or anything? because I know that they don't really want the cross pollination so much right? Was it a problem?
So, after I went to that party. I happened to have another meeting with Neal to do some editing on the book. And so I went back to Holiday House, and I said, Hey, Neal, can I meet Sean? He's going to be at this thing tonight, and Neal said yeah for five minutes. I think we talked for an hour and a half. So...
It was just too late to do anything about it, you'd already made friends.
Yeah. Yeah, what, what's your take on it, Sean?
In a lot of, a lot of circumstances I probably would have been a little bit more like hey we need to maintain more of a boundary, as I'm working on this, but the project was just very specific which I really liked. I mean it's one of the reasons why I was drawn to it to begin with. But in order to sort of execute that, well, it meant that I was either going to have to replicate 10 year's worth of research about the DC Jewish community in the Depression, which I couldn't do that. So, talking to Susan, of course, really helped out with that a lot. In addition to really getting a better sense of where the book came from, what was the intent behind the creation, the manuscript and the overall tone of the story. Our art director, Jennifer Brown, she said something like, just a lot of balls in the air with this one. This particular book there was the Depression, there was Pesach, there was Washington, you're talking about a theme or an idea that for most titles that would be enough to carry an entire title. Oh, we're going to do a Depression book, we're going to do a DC book, or we're gonna do a Pesach book, so when you had a title that was combining all three of those things, and had to be done just so or else it was going to make any sense, being able to talk to the author regularly, I would argue it's actually necessary to ever finishing the darn thing. I'm sure there's probably some people in publishing who would listen to that and their skin is crawling. But I don't mean to make a habit of it, but in this case I was actually on board with making an exception to the usual practice.
And I will say that everything major went through the editor and our director, we, we didn't make any major decisions together, things were still on an official level. I keep saying we mainly talked about food.
It is tricky. It's a very different experience in some ways, if you really do have the author's voice in your head, beyond the manuscript. It's a funny business, making books.
I feel that the book is really our book, mine and Sean's, like here's an example where Sean said, Did you know that they had these really funky awnings on the White House in the 30s? And I said, Oh hey, I found a picture of that, and then he was able to use that.
I think I wantedto ask you for photography of a police officer.
You did! You asked for a photo of a White House police officer and it's in the book.
Right.
There's also an archival photo I found of a man crossing the street, and that's in the book. I joke that Sean used me as his personal librarian.
Well, when your author is a librarian that just naturally happens. Sean, what attracted you to this manuscript for The Passover Guest in the first place?
Typically, a lot of illustrators work like this,but when I'm reading a manuscript, you'll like start counting things that appear in the text that you want to draw, you'd like to draw. Sometimes it's a perfectly fine manuscript, but you could get many pages in and be thinking I don't really want to draw any of this stuff. Somebody else will. But this is not something that really makes me excited to draw. The Passover Guest, I basically wanted to draw things starting on the first page, even if it was just a bunch of people in trench coats and hats. I like trench coats and slouch hats and fedoras and I wasn't as up on trees at the time, actually struggled through trees for a couple of titles, I think I got a lot better. And because I had to do all those cherry blossoms, I had to develop a sort of a new technique for handling it and the next book I'm doing, it's actually quite a lot of tree illustration. So yeah, it was really just reading the manuscript and saying okay I want to draw this, I want to draw this, I want to draw this, I want to draw this, and then I got to the page with all the food and the opportunity to draw a Seder feast was a lot of fun. I couldn't not do it.
Excellent. So we've been talking a lot about the 30s setting. Susan, why did you choose 1933 during the Depression, as the time period for your story to take place?
This is back to Neal Porter, as most things tend to be with this book. So, when we sat down in the very first meeting we ever had in 2015, Neal said where and when? He said, Is this a shtetl book? I said no, no, it's not a shtetl book. He said okay, but when? and he said to me, it's got to be the Depression. He said it's the only thing that makes sense, because the family is so poor. So I said, no, not the Depression, it's so depressing! I said how about the 20s? And he said, No, how about the Depression? I said how about the, you know, whatever I came up with, again he said, No, I think it should be the Depression, Susan. And I said, you know, Neal, how about the Depression, and he said, Wow, that's a great idea, the Depression, let's do the Depression. And so, I told you that story about DC and it was a very similar story where I said Neal How about DC? and he said nah. How about DC? Nah. And then here is DC! and he said, Hey, DC, what a good idea! So the where and when I think came collaboratively between the two of us.
Sean, what interesting details about the 1930s, did you discover as you researched it or did you get to use that you had always been waiting to use? Give us some fun little 1930s things that we should be on the lookout for as we look through the pages of this book.
The details I've always wanted to use would involve a lot of like pontoon planes and there really weren't any in this book. I didn't try to get pontoon planes added either. My favorite historical detail is probably that the National Archives are under construction in the background in one of the spreads. It dates the events, to a very particular time and place. That's another thing actually Susan found for me.
I have a map, and the route that they take, and I had made a list of every building along the map, every major building and when it had been built, and the archives was built at the right time to fit into this book. And when Sean and I were walking around DC we kind of ended up as the last stop in front of the Archives. And I said, Oh, this was under construction then and we were able to find some pictures, I love this, of the Archives under construction from the Archives, that they had, their own pictures of course. So, but I did a lot of stuff like that with spreadsheets, where like I took every erev Passover, and every day of the peak bloom of the cherry blossoms and I lined them up on a spreadsheet and found the right year in the Depression where the two coincided, so a lot of nerdy librarian stuff with spreadsheets.
The magic of spreadsheets.
I should thank Excel.
I'd like to dedicate this episode to Excel!
And HebCal, definitely HebCal, because HebCal had the dates of Passover in the 30s.
References I think for the most part are more subtle on there are a few like newspaper headlines in one of the illustrations and they're in the Hooverville, but we don't have like FDR showing up somewhere or anything like that. Like a high school production of Annie.
So, spoiler alert, the guest of the title is the prophet Elijah. So, for those who might not be familiar, can you explain Susan, who Elijah is, and what is his significance in Jewish tradition?
Elijah is a prophet who probably most famously we hear of appearing at Passover Seders but to me, the really interesting part is he often appears to people that are not so well off. And if they do even the smallest act of kindness, he grants them great joy. He does amazing things for them. And that's what happens in this book. And what's interesting to me about Elijah, having grown up knowing Elijah, you know, my whole life, and thinking of him is such a well known, such a major character in Judaism he's so important. This book went through I think three writing groups and a writing class, and many many many other people doing critiques and stuff. And every time somebody who wasn't Jewish read the book, the first question was, who's Elijah? And every time somebody who was Jewish read the book, they said, Oh, it's Elijah, I can tell right away. So it was interesting to me, the divide.
Well, yes and with that in mind, the book is sort of subtle about pointing out who it is, at the end, it's sort of... What's the last line it's like, can you guess who that Passover guest was? hint hint nudge nudge?
Heidi, I can't tell you the last line because I swear it changed 40 times, nothing changed more than that last line. It's interesting because in some ways, it's this big surprise cliffhanger. And in some ways, the other half the audience, totally knows. It's very interesting.
It is. Sean, how did you get into illustrating books in the first place?
Not the way that a lot of people do. When I was 12 or 13, I don't remember now, I went to a book signing for Brian Jacques' Redwall novel, The Legend of Luke. It's a world, sort of a medieval world that's populated by mice and all sorts of other mostly British mammals that have swords and fighting wars and live in an abbey and sit down and eat a lot of feasts, so see there's food in Redwall as well. And I really liked the books, my mom actually used to read them to me when I was in elementary school and then I picked them up and started reading them myself when I was in middle school. I had been drawing pictures of characters mostly from the books. And that was something that I used to do for fun, Redwall, Lord of the Rings, Phantom Tollbooth, although I don't know why I was doing that because Jules Feiffer's illustrations are perfect. I just like to draw pictures from books I was reading, and I had all these pictures sort of in an envelope or a folder. My parents said okay well, we want to take you to this book signing but we're only going to do it if you bring your artwork and show Brian Jacques your artwork. I didn't really want to do this, I thoughtit was a little showboaty but agreed to it because otherwise I was going to be able to go to this book signing. So Brian did his shtick, which if you've never seen Brian Jacques do his shtick it's available on YouTube. It's fantastic. I think I was the last person in line, and then I showed him my artwork and he really liked it so much, he asked me to send it to his webmaster, who was actually a teenager himself, this guy Dave Lindsey from Calgary in Canada. Long story short, I sent, David my artwork and he started putting it on the Redwall website redwall.org. Years later, they asked me to start doing illustrations for audio book covers with Recorded Books, you know, before the days of Audible, where you had to buy a box of cassette tapes, sort of barbaric to think back on. I was 15 when I started doing that. I did that through college, then started taking on other illustration jobs. When I was a senior in college I was asked to do an interior of a Redwall novel. And frankly, that's as far ahead as I ever thought illustration wise. So I got the two interior of two Redwall novels. Unfortunately Brian passed away in 2011. That's how I got into it, I just showed Brian Jacques my artwork at a book signing. People always ask me for advice, how do you get into this? and I always say I don't really know. It is the case in publishing, as in a lot of industries I think, that, you know, there's a big wall around the whole thing and every time somebody makes a hole and like runs into it they just patch that hole up and you have to find another one. So my very unlikely hole in the wall would be that Brian Jacques just decided that it would be fun if I were an illustrator and went out of his way to help me become one.
What a great story! Sean, as well as illustrating other people's work, you've authored your own book, Bolivar. So, talk about the differences between illustrating your own work versus someone else's.
One of the things that I often talk about is the importance of collaboration in making books. People always say, well is it difficult to collaborate with somebody, versus just working by yourself? It's actually somewhat similar because when you're doing a book that you wrote you're just collaborating with sort of a past version of yourself. I always think as I'm working, like, this guy does not care very much about illustrators at all. He always wants ridiculous things to be drawn, very complicated backgrounds and details and I'm often very annoyed with him at about 2am. So, if anything, this was somewhat easier. I didn't find myself being angry with a previous version of my own personality.
That is not an answer I expected!
It's very very true, there's very little hyperbole or editorializing in it, I have to say. It's even worse when you're doing multiple phases of cartooning because you do pencil and you do your layouts, you do line art. Months later I'll come back and color it and I'll just think man, the guy who did this was a sadistic egomaniac. How am I supposed to color all this stuff? This is ridiculous. And it was just me, I have nobody but myself to blame. As is often the case in life, I'm sure.
Good point. Sean, can you tell us about how you create your illustrations, what is your technique?
Yeah, staring into space a lot is very helpful. It's about 75% that. Roz Chast the New Yorker cartoonist said that illustrating looks for all the world like the person is just goofing off. A lot of exploration of the idea by using sketches, layouts, doing a ton of research. I have something of a research background and when I studied in school. Actually art, it was art and archaeology actually like going to libraries and, you know, spending a lot of time on the internet for images, just ideas, creating folders, printing things for reference. Then, once I kind of have a lot of stuff in front of me to work with, I'll start creating thumbnails, very rough versions of the spreads, that are going to be in the book, and then those get refined over time working with the art director and the editor. Final art is typically done, I draw on a bristol board or illustration board with graphite pencil, typically mechanical, sometimes regular HP wood pencil, that gets scanned into a computer, edited in the computer and then all the color is actually done on Photoshop. A large graphics tablet called the Cintiq that Susan has seen. They keep on getting bigger and bigger. The one I have now is like 32 inches diagonally. So it's almost one to one in terms of what I'm working on ,on a drafting table when I scan it, it's it could be the same size. So, it's pretty time consuming, just a lot of different steps and things you've got to think through. I'm happiest when most of the thinking has been done by the time I do final art. If I'm still solving problems actively when I'm doing final art, it usually means I did not do enough work in the sketching and sort of drafting phase.
That makes sense. Were there any details in the text or in the illustration that ended up on the cutting room floor so to speak, that you wish maybe you had found a way to use?
I really like that one line about miracles and magic that got cut. Susan might actually want to talk about that, but I remember I called like "I really love this" and Susan goes "we just cut it yesterday," and I'm like...
Oh my gosh, we worked on that line forever. I actually got a Rabbinical consultation on that line. I'm the librarian at a very big congregation, and I asked three rabbis. It's actually one of my favorite memories of working on the book because I recorded the meeting I had with my three rabbis; that sounds like a Jewish sitcom, doesn't it? And it, and then when I was in New York a little while later in Neal's office and I played it for him, the two of us were sitting there like listening to the rabbis discuss about miracles and Judaism, oh my gosh it was so fantastic. But then in the end we cut the line.
What was the line?
It was about performing miracles and there was also a line about kind of dark magic, that was problematic as well that we took out, that just didn't quite work for this particular version. It's a line that was in the original Yiddish and I had the fourth Rabbi at my temple translate it from Yiddish for me, and I consulted 12 other translations from the Yiddish, to try to get it right.
For each of you I wanted to ask, what was the hardest part of bringing this book to life and what was the easiest?
I don't love drawing fluted columns and there were a lot of them in this. I just have a hang up with parallel lines. It's funny that book I'm working on now actually involves quite a lot of parallel lines. I'm not a huge ruler user, which is funny because some people say, oh you know your artwork can be very precise, which is true, but also I like more organic forms and shapes so if I find myself doing a lot of parallel lines, or in the case of fluted columns, the whole thing tapers, it's very tricky to do that. So I found myself doing a lot of fluted columns. I do like classical architecture, I just would probably put more people in front of the columns if I could.
I don't have much of an opinion on fluted columns. Although I do love the architecture of Washington. And I do think that Sean did it fantastically. I thought that the hardest part was getting this book published. It was a very long journey. And speaking of miracles, it feels like a miracle that this amazing, incredible editor was interested. I'm just so delighted that it's a real book that I can hold my hands. The thing that I am looking forward to beyond words: you know I'm a librarian I can't wait to share this with children, I can't wait to do a storytime, I can't wait to put it on the shelf. I can't wait to catalog it. I'm excited it has an ISBN number.
Have you memorized it yet?
I haven't but, but I will!
Yeah, I figured you might.
I was so excited to see the Library of Congress information, oh my gosh in the, in the front of the book. Oh, you know, that was really amazing. And the easiest part has been working with Neal, working with Sean, working with Holiday House.
Sean, you said the hardest thing for you. Did you have an easiest thing that you wanted to add?
No, it wasn't, it wasn't a particularly easy book to be completely honest, which isn't a criticism that at all. I don't know that you really want to finish your project and go Eh, that was a cinch; that probably means you didn't want to work on it very hard. What I enjoyed the most was probably doing, well, two things actually: the food spreads and also just different faces and characterizations.
Here's another question, this is for both of you. You know how people talk in books or movies about finding Easter eggs, meaning little hidden delights that not everybody notices. So in this case, are there any afikomens hidden in the text or in the art? Anything that has secret significance that you wouldn't notice at first glance, but that you can clue us into?
When I became a synagogue librarian, I found, as I was looking through my collection, that pretty much all the girls were named Rachel, and all the boys were named David. I very much wanted to not use Rachel or David and I really wanted to honor my grandmother. The name of the character Muriel, that's my grandmother's name. She was incredibly special to me. So, every time anyone talks about, Sean does this particularly, he's like "oh well Muriel in this scene" and I'm like "oh my gosh, how do you know my grandmother?" And then Sean did really something special with what Muriel is wearing on her head.
The red tam or beret?
Yeah, the red beret on her head.
Yeah, that was actually from my great great aunt, although she was Sicilian, she wasn't Jewish. It was just sort of a reference to that time, we kind of looked at a number of different hairstyles that were common with eight year old girls in the 30s and I wound up doing something that was pretty similar to how girls wear their hair now. I didn't want to do something that was too unusual or alien, I thought it was going to make it harder for a young reader to relate to the character. So it really became more about the clothing and then the red hat sticks out in a lot of the more sort of dreary Depression, scenes and especially when the sun starts to get lower, it's more visible.
And so, to me it ends up being this great homage to these two important women in our lives. And so the character kind of merges to be important to both of us.
That's lovely. Susan, when you saw the illustrations that Sean done was there anything that was a surprise to you?
Yeah, well he did this thing that was really interesting. There's a scene in which Muriel puts a penny into Elijah's hat and then this is the good deed that she's later rewarded for, putting that penny in the hat. By the way, was my husband's idea so I'm gonna give him credit for that. And so I just had her put a penny in the hat because it was the Depression and she had no money and it's the lowest form of currency, right? But Sean took the penny and just took it to a place that I wasn't expecting. Sean, do you want to talk about what you did with it?
I think there's like two instances where it sort of takes over spread. We're looking east from the top of the Lincoln Memorial, as you're standing there if the sun is setting, you'll see the sun reflected in the reflecting pool. But you won't actually see it in the sky, frmo like the top of the steps to the Lincoln Memorial. It does have this interesting effect of, you kind of get this orange glow that gets reflected literally into the interior space of the Lincoln Memorial. It was kind of a fun opportunity for me there, where that particular scene, you're sort of seeing from the point of view of the Lincoln statue, and the Memorial. There's sort of a famous photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr speaking, I think it was the I Have a Dream speech and it's great because somebody must have climbed up behind there. I don't know how many times anyone has done this. So I kind of looked at that to get an idea of the composition, so similar although not exactly the same perspective, it becomes Lincoln's statue looking at Muriel and the magician, and then it's Muriel's putting the penny in the hat, the orange glow became a copper glow. I started adding green highlights and so the entire image is the Lincoln Memorial as though it were made of copper. So Lincoln's head becomes sort of a penny, it's sort of weird, you kind of have to see it, but it's it's as though the whole thing were a penny, I guess you could say.
Yeah, so he took this little throwaway thing I did, and he turned the whole spread into a copper colored spread to signify a penny, and then I didn't even think about this, but the Lincoln Memorial is a very key part of the book and Lincoln is on the penny. And so it all kind of connects and at the end, there's a penny, with Lincoln on it from the year 1933.
The penny at the end references to the scene where she gives him the penny of course. But I also like the idea that, I mean, Elijah doesn't need the penny so he just gives it back.
And to me it's a signifier to say, Hey, I was here.
Yeah, exactly.
I love that. What was the most special Passover Seder that each of you has ever been to?
I've been to two very special Passover Seders. The first one, I was in college, and I went to Brandeis so you know we got Passover breaks. And my friend Carman, who I hadn't seen in a while, I had invited her to my Seder and she calls within about an hour of the Seder and cancels. And I say, Oh come on, how can you cancel? Like the food is on the table, you know, we're ready. She said, Oh, I'm moving apartments right now and I have a friend from high school and he's over and he's helping me move. You know Passover is all about every door's open to you, which is very much important in the book as well. So I said, Bring your friend, what's one more, we're all ready. So she brought her friend. And his name is Ken. And that was special Seder number one. Special Seder number two was three years later. Ken and I had been dating for three years, and we're in the middle of a Seder and we get to the four questions. So I was still the youngest, so I say, Why is this night different from all other nights and Ken pulls out a ring box and says, Because tonight I'm asking you to be my wife.
Awww!
You have to awww at that story. Everybody, everybody does. And we have two kids now, and have been married for a while, so they're both special Seders to me. Very, very special Seders.
Oh well, Sean I don't know if you can top that.
I can't.
You probably should have gone first!
In fact, I can't.
That's fair.
But do you have any Seder that you would like to fondly remember at this time?
It's actually also two Seders. Probably the first one, that my wife and I hosted after we got married, which is with my parents, and her parents. Her parents had never been to a Seder before. Long story short, the following day, my mother in law came over to just sort of talk to me very carefully to figure out if my parents and I were having some sort of conflict, that we felt like we needed to work through, and I couldn't quite understand what she was getting at. She's like well you know you didn't really agree on what parts of the Seder to do or what any of it meant and I'm just sort of staring at her and I'm like yeah I know, that's a Seder. That's, that's it's normal. It's fine.
She thought you were having a fight.
So, yeah, very unusual to my mother in law, she'd never been in a situation like that before. So, it was just very funny to me, just just sort of that moment of realizing I didn't really do a great job of primin g someone for this cultural experience. This past year, although I didn't love not really being able to see my parents for Passover because of the pandemic, it was nice for my wife Lucy and I to just kind of have our own Seder with our kids, we were able to just do exactly what we wanted to do and not have to argue with anyone about anything. So it's sort of two sides of the same coin. [PLEASE GO TO PART 2 FOR THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW]
