THE BOOK OF LIFE - Am Yisrael Chai: Tammar Stein (2017)

2:37PM Oct 12, 2023

Speakers:

Heidi Rabinowitz

Tammar Stein

Fawzia Gilani-Williams

Keywords:

israel

book

war

books

day

write

story

kids

read

readers

interviews

israelis

rabbi

children

yoni

mom

yom kippur war

talk

ended

experience

[INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. On October 7 2023, the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the terrorist group Hamas launched a brutal attack against Israel, murdering and kidnapping civilians young and old as well as striking military targets. At this time of recording, Israel is at war. With Israel on my mind and in my heart, I went back and listened to Tammar Stein's 2017 interview on The Book of Life, about her middle grade novel, The Six-Day Hero, which is about the 1967 Six Day War. I thought you might like to hear it too. Before I play it for you, I also want to let you know that in 2020, Tamar came out with Beni's War, a companion book about the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which I highly recommend. For more children's books about Israel, please check out the Association of Jewish Libraries' "Love Your Neighbor series," which has Jewish book recommendations for readers of all backgrounds. Love Your Neighbor book list #8 offers top notch books for young people about Israel. I'll put a link in the show notes. I'll also link to other past podcast interviews related to Israel, like the episodes about The Language of Angels: A Story About the Reinvention of Hebrew by Richard Michelson, The Nazi Hunters by Neal Bascomb, Yaffa and Fatima Shalom Salaam by Fawzia Gilani-Williams, and Unsettled: The Problem of Loving Israel by Marc Aronson, as well as many others. Finally, a tikkun olam moment of my own. I'm making a donation to Magen David Adom, the Israeli version of the Red Cross, and I hope you'll join me, I'll put a link in the show notes. Am Yisrael Chai. We pray for peace.

Tammar give us a brief summary of The Six-Day Hero.

So it's a book set during the Six-Day War for kids. It's about Motti, a 12 year old boy who lives in West Jerusalem. And we live with him from the month leading up to the war through the Six-Day War. I did a lot of research. So it's a very immersive experience. You really get the feel of what it's like to live in Jerusalem then, the sights, the tastes, the smells, the sounds, the culture. Kids had so much freedom, even with the danger of the border so close by, kids could run around the city without supervision. So in the book, Motti has complete run of the city, and that gets him into plenty of trouble.

Can you talk about the research that you did?

Yeah, so I did a lot of interviews with former IDF soldiers, Israelis who were children during the time of the war. My own parents; my dad was an 18 year old soldier who fought in the Six-Day War. My mom was a teenager who lived in Haifa. I read a lot of books, I read a lot of sort of serious research books, and then lighter hearted books. And I watched documentaries, I really just tried to just soak in as much information as I possibly could.

Was there anything you learned in your res earch that surprised you?

A ton, actually. I really went into it not knowing all that much about it. And I knew the Six-Day War lasted six days, right? How bad could it be? And it was really, as I started learning about it, and I realized that the story really starts the month before the Six-Day War. And that month leading up to the war was a time of true fear and intense tension in Israel, people really believed that it's possible that the end of their country was about to occur. The Holocaust had ended, you know, barely two decades before that. That was not an idle threat. That was not an idle nightmare. It felt very real to them. It had happened before, and it felt like maybe it was going to happen again. And then of course, it didn't, and they were incredibly victorious so quickly and decisively, but it certainly wasn't a given heading into it.

I understand that your manuscript was critiqued by kids from the PJ Our Way program. What kinds of comments did they make and was it helpful?

It was helpful, it was such a nice thing, to get that kind of feedback, it was great. The kids who do these kinds of reviews, they are readers, they love books, they read a lot, they really kind of get storytelling. So I did take their comments very seriously. And actually one of the comments that really caught me by surprise was that... I hope I'm not giving anything away, but there's a cat in the book, a snowy white cat who dies. And they said the cat death was too disturbing the way that I'd written it. And I was really taken aback by that, because I'm very conscientious not to have anything be too graphic or too gory. And I'd never meant for that. So I definitely, following their advice, went back and sort of toned down some of the visuals of that scene.

The characters in this book are very lifelike, are they based on any real people in your own life?

No, there's no direct person. But my research really helped me all the Israelis I talked to, each of them left their fingerprints on the book, their point of view, their emotions. My interviews were really powerful to me to hear the stories, firsthand accounts of people's experiences, and it has definitely left a lasting impression. And then there was also this documentary called Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story, that also left a big impression on me. Yoni Netanyahu was Bibi Netanyahu's older brother, and he ended up dying while rescuing a plane full of hostages in Entebbe. But even before that, he was just this sort of larger than life personality. And at that same time, well, I don't know this, but I just got the sense that he was sort of pretty modest about it.

I must admit that I was reluctant to read this book at first, because I don't like war stories. But I found it so readable that I read it all in one sitting. So I just wanted to ask, how did you do that? What's your trick?

Well, first of all, thank you. That's a huge compliment. I love books that just pull me in and then I just read in one sitting. And that's definitely the kind of book I try to write, I try to give that back to other people to just have that incredible experience of just feeling like you just got sucked into another world. So that's awesome. That's great. I don't know how I did it. I just never lost sight of the fact that it's a book for kids. And even though it's set during war, and it's real history, it's a story about a hero, a child hero. And I think that watching children struggle with the world around them, but grow and thrive through it despite that is fascinating.

This is a war story in which we never see actual fighting. Why did you decide to tell it in this way?

I think because it's for kids. And it's about kids and kids can be affected in a very direct way without experiencing current events in a direct way.

What is the most important thing that you want readers to know about the Six-Day War after they come away from reading this book?

So every historical event in the book is true. There's no other books right now for kids about the Six-Day War, or really even about any sort of modern historical event in Israel. And so the first thing that I want them to take away is just some knowledge, just some basic knowledge of the time period and the place. When children hear about the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and Jewish settlements, which they probably do because they're in the news almost daily, you know, and if they ever wonder, how did all of this get started? Well, this is how. The Six-Day War is the war that started that. My book is not meant to comment in any way about the current geopolitical events. But if people are ever going to solve this problem, they have to know how we got here.

Are you working on any other books at this time?

Yes, I am. I'm actually working on Beni's story. Beni is Motti's younger brother.

Oh, very nice. So it's going to be a series.

Yeah, it will be a companion, hopefully, if Beni cooperates.

Is he difficult to corral?

Yeah, he's very difficult. He's a very difficult kid.

Is there anything else you'd like to talk about that I haven't thought to ask you?

Yeah, actually, there is. So I want to talk about my mom. The reason I wrote this book, it's actually because of her. She called me up one day. And she said that she was chatting with Rabbi Tom, who is the rabbi at our old synagogue. And Rabbi Tom told her that he had nothing to assign his fifth graders about Israel. And he wanted to know whether my first book which is set in Israel would be good for them, and should he give that for them to read. And my first book is Light Years, and it's a very intense young adult novel and it's 100%, not for fifth graders, which my mom told him. But so then when she called me, and she was telling me the story, she said, I think that you should write something. And the thing is, I never take other people's ideas, because it takes me a really long time to write a book, anywhere between two to five years. So it has to be something that I personally feel extremely passionate about, because you can't live with something for that long without loving it yourself. And I'd also not written for middle grade before, all of my books are for really kind of a young adult slash adult audience. When she said you should write something, there was just something about that, that really resonated with me. And after I double checked to make sure that Rabbi Tom was right.... and he was right, there really wasn't anything about Israel, which was just so strange. So I ended up writing the book. And it was great to have my parents as resources, I was calling them all the time, constantly clarifying small points, which is part of the reason I think that book was able to be so accurate and so rich in detail. I mean, everything from the magazines that kids were reading to the snacks that they would have had, I was constantly calling my parents and asking them to confirm this detail and that detail. But the sad part of the story is that my mom had cancer. And she was losing her battle with cancer. So she never did get to see the book published. But she read it as a manuscript. And she calls me up and she said, "I had a dream," which in my family if my mom says she had a dream you have, you have to listen, you have to, you have to kind of do what comes next. And she said, I think that Motti's dad needs to have a friend, a Jordanian friend that he hasn't seen in a long time. And when the city gets united, they should see each other again, so that your book ends on a hopeful note. And she said I even thought of his name. His name is Daoud. So I didn't have a choice. I had to put it in because she dreamt it. So the reason that there's that beautiful part at the ending is because of her.

That's lovely. What a nice legacy.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a question I've been asking most of my guests recently, because I feel like there's such a need in the world right now for tikkun olam, for repairing the world. So I'd like to ask you, in what way does this book help heal the world?

All of my other books, I always set about writing the book that I wanted to read. And I really sort of thought, I'll let this book find its own readers. And I really wrote this book from a different point of view. I really wrote this book because I was very troubled that publishers and authors were not writing about Israel for children. I think that the entire topic of Israel has become very fraught and people feel really strong feelings about it. And that's okay, but I think it's not okay, not to talk about it at all. That creates a vacuum for bad things to happen. And so I do feel very passionate, that it's really important to set a historically accurate story out there to inform children about what happened.

Tammar Stein, thanks so much for speaking with me.

Oh, thank you so much.

[MUSIC, TEASER] Hello, this is Fawzia Gilani-Williams. I'm the author of Yaffa and Fatima Shalom Salaam. I hope to be joining you on the Book of Life podcast. I'd like to dedicate my episode to the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, because they love the message of peace and that's a wonderful message. So until then, goodbye.