[COLD OPEN] I feel like there's no such thing as not Jewish enough. You can be Jewish, have that heritage, have the culture, have that sense of identity, and go to synagogue on the High Holidays, if at all. I think that's okay.
[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. The Unfinished Corner is a middle grade graphic novel that challenges a Bar Mitzvah girl and her group of diverse Jewish friends to finish an unfinished corner of the universe in order to rid the world of evil. It's a bold premise, brilliantly carried out with a mix of ancient folklore and modern thinking. I was excited to speak with author Dani Colman to learn more.
Dani, welcome to The Book of Life, and mazel tov on being a National Jewish Book Award finalist, by the way.
Thank you. Wonderful, wonderful surprise for the whole team.
Yes, excellent. So how did you get into graphic novels as a medium of artistic expression?
Originally, my plan had been to enter the film industry. I came out of film school, right during the 2008 recession. So it was a very, very difficult time to break into any industry never mind film. I became involved with the comics community in San Francisco and found that the skill set between film and comics is very, very transferable. They're both visual media, they're very propulsive, tightly paced. And you have to think about how the story will look, there's no description available, your dialogue has to be on point. So it was something that was very appealing. And the barrier to entry in comics is much, much lower, you can make a readable comic with nothing but a good story and Microsoft Paint. Some of the best web comics out there are very crudely drawn stick figures, and yet they're engaging and entertaining. And that's very different to the, you know, $20 million or so that you need to make a film. And so I shifted my attention to comics. Ultimately, I had the chance to pitch an original graphic novel to Vault Comics.
You mentioned the team.
Yes.
You're not the artist, you don't draw the comic. So do you just write a straight manuscript and they get to interpret it, or you make a dummy to show them what you want? Or how does that work?
So it varies from comic writer to comic writer. I can draw, but I prefer not to. So I treat the script very much as a blueprint that the art team can build off. And one of the things I love about comics is that it's an incredibly collaborative medium. There's a very, very close interplay between writer, artist and editor. And so within the bounds of telling the story that I want to tell and making sure that things fit together narratively, I like to give the artist plenty of room to play. There are entire multiple page spreads in The Unfinished Corner, where I say, you know, "the characters are in a boat, and they flee from a giant whale -- have fun!" and the artist does. And that's one of the most gratifying things about the medium.
Why do graphic novels have separate people as illustrators and colorists?
Color these days is actually a very, very technical thing. Because most art is done digitally, it requires quite a technical skill set. And it also requires some knowledge of the printing process to make sure that what looks good on the screen is going to translate well to the printed page. So you have to know things about you know, ink density and different color formats. It does get very, very technical. And so there are a lot of artists in the industry who do their own coloring, but separating it out is also not uncommon, one, because of that quite technical skill set and two, because it enables the work to go a little bit faster. Western comics, particularly American comics tend to run on very, very tight deadlines, the structure of the industry came about because of this monthly cycle of comics. And that's a lot of work to do month over month; the artists who can do it all are revered throughout the industry. And so by splitting up the work, we get to get the best of every team member and it's also easier to keep things on deadline.
All right, that's fascinating. So let's give a shout out to your team. Why don't you go ahead and name them?
Absolutely. So superstar Rachel Petrovicz known professionally as Tuna handled the art duties. Colors are by Whitney Cogar, letters by Jim Campbell, and editorial by Rebecca Taylor known professionally as Tay.
So is the lettering done by hand? It's not just, they choose a font and print it?
It's somewhere in between. So it's not someone hand writing every individual letter on the page. Although once upon a time comics lettering was done like that. These days, once again, it's quite a technical skill. Letterers tend to work in Illustrator or a similar program. And so they have the ability to choose fonts that fit the book, and begin the work by copy/pasting from the script into the relevant pages. But there's also a lot of highly technical skilled manual work, adjusting letter placement, making sure the kerning is correct. Really good lettering involves a lot of hand massaging by the letterer.
Wow, I am learning a lot. The art really is wonderful, the characters have so much expression, they're just a pleasure to look at. It's very dynamic. Everything is in motion, the lighting is interesting. And even, you were talking about the lettering, there are several places where the character is kind of droning on in the background. And I love how they put the talk bubble behind somebody else to kind of indicate that you don't really need to read every word and worry about what it's saying. You just know that they're going blah, blah, blah. And yet, there are actual words there that you could look at, if you want to see ...
You can read every word. Collectively, we were all very committed to the idea that this book should have reread value. And in order to do that, you want to take advantage of the background details and the spaces that people maybe wouldn't look at the first time. So it's full of puns, it's full of detail. There is a musical joke in there that I expect one person in the entire world to get. And that's my dad. Hi, dad. It's packed with things, visual textual, color, space inference, subtext, it's packed with things that you can discover on a second, third or fourth read. And that's another thing that I love about comics, that the nature of the medium means that you can hide things for readers to discover when they come back to the book.
So it's full of afikomens.
Mm hmm.
Well, now that we have all this context, tell us about The Unfinished Corner!
Absolutely. So The Unfinished Corner is a middle grade Jewish themed fantasy adventure. It's about a group of kids who get kidnapped by a rogue angel who wants them to finish the corner of the universe that God forgot. I like to describe it as Percy Jackson and the Olympians, but with Jewish mythology instead of Greek mythology.
Now, I believe you have been doing comics for a while, but this is your first time working with Jewish content. So why did you make that change?
The publisher, Vault Comics, they are fairly new to the business, but they have been going from strength to strength. And a few years ago, at San Diego Comic Con, they offered the opportunity for open pitches. And this doesn't happen very often in comics, because there's so much competition to break into the industry. So this was them sort of throwing out a huge vote of confidence and trying to find new talent. They're a boutique publisher specializing in science fiction and fantasy. And so given the opportunity to pitch them anything I could possibly want, I wanted to give them something that, one, they wouldn't hear from anyone else, that they'd never heard before. And two, that at least to some degree, only I could write. That's the story, you always want to tell, the one that no one else can tell the same way as you. And so I pitched them this idea of a middle grade adventure based on Jewish mythology. I was able to describe some of the myths and legends that I wanted to draw from. And they were all over it. They absolutely champion diverse voices. And so they were 100% all in to partner with me on a book that would fill this space. That's not really filled for Jewish kids. There's a lot of Jewish content for younger readers that deals with antisemitism. There's a lot of Holocaust literature. And I wanted to do something that was a little bit counterprogramming that was purely fun, and adventurous and joyful. Because I think that's so important to have as a young reader.
I absolutely agree. You are speaking my language with that. So I've never heard of an unfinished corner of the universe. Tell us about the inspiration for that.
It's from an obscure little piece of, I want to say, Kabbalah. And the thing about Jewish texts is that yes, we've got the Torah and the Talmud and the sort of core canonical texts. But there are also so many non canonical texts. These are where the mythology starts to get a little bit weird. And that's fun. And because this is Judaism as well, for a lot of these stories, there's no one version, there's a different interpretation depending on who's doing the telling. So there is a surprising breadth of material to draw from, when I was looking for things that I could pull from for the story, I wanted to find something that was a destination, someplace that these characters could go with a mission to fulfill. So out of all the bits of reading that I did, and all the texts that I absorbed, the idea of the unfinished corner really stuck with me, because it's a place to go, and it's a thing to do. And that's a really strong foundation for narrative. You know exactly where you're headed, right from page one. And then the exciting question is how you get there.
Talk about the cast, so to speak, of the book and the diverse representation that you included.
Sure. So it was important to me right from the beginning to include a diverse cast of characters. Jewish representation in media is overwhelmingly white and Eastern European Ashkenazi, which is obviously an extremely valid experience. That's my experience. But it's not the only experience of Judaism. I want to back up a second, give a little bit of context, because not that long after I pitched this book was the Charlottesville rally. And a year after that was the Tree of Life massacre. And it's sort of it... it makes you think, in that antisemitism is such a problem. Part of combating that that feeling of insecurity, that feeling of fear, is seeing yourself represented. And so for Jewish kids who don't fit into that sort of pop culture model of white Ashkenazi-ism, there's a real lack. And so I absolutely, I wanted a character in there from a Sephardic background, I wanted a character in there who was a person of color, because there are black Jews or Japanese Jews, there are Hispanic Jews, we're such a diverse community. And so I didn't want any Jewish reader to look at this book and go, am I not Jewish enough to be recognized? That was the foundation. And from there, it was about creating a balance of characters who could drive each other through the story. My base principle for writing an ensemble story is that for every single character, there has to be at least one point in the narrative, where if that character were not there, the story would stop dead. Otherwise, they're window dressing.
Introduce us to the characters, name them and describe them.
Absolutely. So our nominal protagonist is Miriam Feigenbaum: artistic and creative and a little bit stubborn, and about to have her Bat Mitzvah and it's raising all sorts of questions for her. Is this something I want? Is this something I'm ready for? What are all the implications that come with it? So she has a lot of uncertainty, but also some insecurity. She doesn't want to admit to being uncertain for fear that she'll come across as weak. Then we have her best friend, Avi Feuerstein, nerdy and academic and loves logic and text and lateral thinking. He knows the Torah back to front, his Bar Mitzvah is at least a year away and he already knows his entire Torah portion. That's the kind of kid Avi is. And then there's David Faroukh. He plays roleplay games with them. He's a big teddy bear of a character, he's friendly, easygoing, loves storytelling, plays the trumpet. He's the kind of guy that you want to have around because he makes you feel safe. And then finally, rounding out the core quartet is Judith Espinoza, who is not a friend to the group at the beginning, she is grouped with them as the result of a school project. And she's a little bit more worldly than the other three, she's very stylish. Over the course of the story has to figure out how she's going to fit into this group of kids.
We can tell from her name that she is our Sephardic character.
Yes.
And then David is a Jew of color.
Yes, it's not laid out explicitly in the book, but his father is African American and his mother's Middle Eastern.
Okay. And it's also interesting to me that they have different levels of Jewish observance. Avi, wears tzitzit, he is more traditional. And then Judith is not observant. So they have just different ways of being Jewish. And all of those are validated.
Again, I feel like there's no such thing as not Jewish enough, you can be Jewish, have that heritage, have that culture, have that sense of identity, and go to synagogue on the High Holy Days, if at all. I think that's okay. With Judith in particular, there was also a little bit of drawing from the fact that a lot of Sephardic Jews have come to knowledge of their heritage recently. The Jews who were expelled from Spain during the Inquisition, and those who ultimately made their way to Latin America, and then to the United States, because of the sometimes perilous nature of that journey, Jewish identity was often suppressed along the way. And so there's been a huge academic effort over the last few years to resurface some of that history and connect the dots. And as a result, a number of Sephardic Jews who are not particularly observant in their day to day life, who haven't had the opportunity really to learn and have that connection, are discovering their Jewish heritage for the first time. I want it to be as open and welcoming as possible. If this is new to you, if you are Jewish for the first time, you're still in this book, you're still part of this community.
That's wonderful. I love that. There's a lot of discussion that I hear about people not feeling "Jewish enough" and I feel like just recently, we've started to see that being addressed in the literature where there are characters who say, I don't feel Jewish enough, and I'm going to claim my Judaism in the way that works for me. I don't think that that had been something that we saw in children's literature until just very recently.
Yeah, and our communities are not as insular as maybe they have been in the past. I do think there's an increase in open mindedness within the Jewish community, this desire to understand and accept Jews of every background. Again, anyone who feels that that is part of their identity deserves the opportunity to explore that fully.
So let's talk a little bit more about the folklore.
Yes!
I have the impression that you have done a lot of reinterpretation. For instance, some of it seems very feminist, which I love, but doesn't strike me as being traditional. So give us a an idea about how you worked with the folklore.
I love that you picked up on it being through a feminist lens, because that's something that was very deliberate. And that hasn't been talked about all that much. And I certainly didn't want to get up on a soapbox, but it's there for people to discover if they want to. So the thing about Jewish folklore and mythology is, expulsion and assimilation are a huge part of Jewish history. Which means that our folklore is inspired by the folktales, of the middle east, of Asia, of Africa, of Eastern Europe, of Western Europe, Spain, there's huge breadth, huge depth. And the result is that I didn't have to do as much reinterpretation as you might think. So the story of Istahar and Na'ama, who were engaged to the angels and had to make very, very difficult decisions about how to proceed. I didn't remix that very much at all, the sort of inherent feminism of Istahar's choice, that was right there in the original text.
And just to make that clear, for people who haven't yet read the book, she was engaged to a man who turns out to be an angel. And she thinks that that's too dangerous. She doesn't want to be with an angel. And so has to make a choice about how to get out of that relationship.
Yeah, exactly. And even on first reading that it struck me, you know, yes, this is an ancient princess and an angel. But it's also so relatable to anyone who was being in a relationship that's not right for them.
I was thinking about the makeover challenge.
Yeah, the makeover challenge was a particular piece of self indulgence, because I love makeover scenes, where the ugly duckling turns into the beautiful swan and I don't know why, but I love it. At the same time, it was an opportunity to say a few things that I think need to be said, especially to teen and preteen girls. And also, it was a real moment for the character of Judith. Judith is kind of my apology to a lot of the Jewish girls that I grew up with, and we didn't get on very well. We had very, very different attitudes towards the world. Some of my disdain towards them definitely came from a place of jealousy. Looking back on it, I was a weird, awkward, nerdy kid who had difficulty sort of existing in a contemporary world and they just breezed through it, and I wanted to know how they did that. And it wasn't until much later in my life that I was able to look back and recognize that they had strengths and weaknesses and struggles and triumphs going on, and I was maybe not particularly fair to them. They probably weren't particularly fair to me either. That's what it's like being a teenager. And so this was something that came up in a folktale that Azazel the demon, one of the things that he did, was to introduce cosmetics to humanity, and to introduce them specifically as a tool of deception, so that women could lie and ensnare men. And it's all quite patriarchal and misogynist. And as soon as I read that, I was immediately taken to a conversation I've seen repeated over and over on the internet and in popular culture, where some man will say, you know, when a woman wears heavy makeup, she is lying to us, and a woman will respond, did you think I was born with gold eyelids? Use your common sense. Makeup style, you know, however you want to present yourself, it's a tool for self expression. Yes, you can use it to be deceptive if you so choose, you can use anything to be deceptive. But I think most people don't. Most young women and even young men and non binary people, when they experiment with clothing and makeup they are doing so to try and bring how they are on the outside, closer to how they feel as a human being. And that's very, very powerful, pure artistry. And so through Judith, who again is more worldly, more stylish, and therefore has thought about this kind of thing more, because she's the one of the group who's experimented with makeup, who thinks about her clothes, who thinks about how she presents herself, she has the opportunity to stand up to this incredibly misogynistic character who came with the intent to deceive women into deceiving and she gets to stand up and say no, screw you. I took what you gave us and made it my own made it a tool of power and honesty.
Excellent. I love it. The clueless angel...
Ma'alachiel. Umm-hmm.
He kind of reminded me of Mrs. Whatsit in A Wrinkle in Time.
Yeah!
So somebody very powerful, but also kind of naive.
I really wanted to play with the idea that when you are a kid, and you're dealing with the wideness of the world for the first time, adults can seem spectacularly useless. That's a Rubicon, when you're young, that moment where your parents, your teachers, your mentor figures, whoever they might be, cross that line from: these people know everything to these people really don't know much at all, do they? And so, Ma'alachiel, very much embodies that, he knows things, he is he is educated, he is wise, but he's not really that helpful. There's a little pun in there, which far too few people have picked up on. So I needed to give him a name for his alias as a human rabbi, and I picked Adam Yehudi. And one of the things that I remember learning about the difference between humans and angels, is that humans have imagination. Angels do not. When we talk about Hashem creating humans in Hashem's image, that's the key difference: imagination and the power to create, not necessarily anything physical. And so I was thinking, what is the most perfect encapsulation of a being without imagination? Well, when he has to name himself as a human, he picks a name that literally means "Jewish man."
That's great. No, I absolutely did not pick up on it. But it's very clever. On the But Why, Tho podcast, which is a great name, by the way, you spoke about wanting to inspire kids, Jewish and non Jewish, to get excited about Jewish mythology. Why is that important to you?
Because knowledge and education are power. You can make whatever choices you want to in life, but if they're not informed choices, they're not real choices. So much of fear and hate and antisemitism comes from a place of pure unadulterated ignorance. I'm a city girl. I've been in diverse environments my entire life, but a lot of people still live in rural or homogenous areas and have very little ability to encounter people who are different to them. And through reading and through narrative and through storytelling, we can begin to approximate the experience of actually encountering people who are different. That, to me is one of the strongest and most effective ways of creating empathy and open mindedness. And that, in turn, leads to less hate and less prejudice.
You're just, like, naming all of the thoughts that are already part of my brain, but with a more beautiful accent. In that same interview, you talked about what makes a story Jewish, and this is a constant question in our librarian community. So can you talk about this? What do you think makes a story Jewish?
When I was researching these folktales, they are so diverse, you can see influences from all over the world, the common thread throughout all of them. And the thing that tended to differentiate them from other stories of the same region that were not Jewish, is that they rely on cleverness and lateral thinking far more than they do punching or swinging a sword around. There's relatively little blood, death, battles, displays of strength, the Jewish heroes get by by out-thinking their opponents, in some cases by befriending their opponents and having that open mindedness. And so, to me, what makes a story Jewish is that you get through the conflict in it by thinking,
Wow, that's great to actually have a definitive answer to that question, because that rarely happens in these conversations. And it's a really good answer.
You know, the old joke, you asked five Jews a subjective question, and you'll get seven opinions. So you know, someone else could have something completely different to say.
Yes, and, and they might have several different things to say. Yes, that's, it's a good answer. Your tagline on Twitter is, "there is no better antidote, no better barrier against growing up to hate than storytelling." What makes storytelling so particularly powerful?
To get a little bit nerdy for a second, we are neurologically hardwired for it. We use narrative in a way that causes our brains to retain information much better. And that allows us to experience empathy much more deeply. And this is not anecdotal. This has been studied. There was a study where test subjects were given a list of items to remember, their recall was tested, and they were given an MRI. And then those same items were integrated into a narrative. And they were once again tested on the recall, given an MRI. And the difference was night and day, when the story was involved, the participants brains lit up, like a Thanksgiving Day Parade. Areas of the brain associated with recall, with empathy, with creativity. So we are literally hardwired to tell each other stories.
It's Tikkun Olam time. So what action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?
Concurrently with and perhaps as a result of the pandemic, we have seen an epidemic of casual cruelty, people's basest instincts coming out, particularly in their interactions with service workers, people who take your lunch order and clean the building you work in and manage the flight that you're on. And this is cruel and unfair, and horrible. And so I just want to ask anyone, the next time that you order from Starbucks or see your mailman or whoever it might be, smile, and thank them and say something nice, because I guarantee you it will make their day.
Thank you. That's such good advice and something that all of us can do. Is there anything else that you'd like to talk about that I haven't thought to ask you?
I want to shout out one specific moment that I think perfectly illustrates how crucial the artwork is, how much of a balance this is. The angel Ma'alachiel. Well, the first time we see him in his angelic form, and it's quite an impactful moment. We wanted this to be something that people really hadn't seen. And one of the fun things about being the writer in a comic book is sometimes you get to be hyper specific and say things exactly as you want them to appear on the page. Sometimes you get to kick the can down the road. My description for Ma'alachiel in that panel is: he is a seven foot construction of fire and ice, a living contradiction and a being of pure majesty. Which sounds great, but it's absolute nonsense. It is meaningless. There's nothing to work with there. It's probably the most writerly piece of nonsense I've ever put on a page. And then to have that incredibly impactful design come out of this piece of complete nonsense I wrote is just, I... never mind could I have drawn that, I couldn't have conceived it.
I'm looking at it. I see fire. I see ice. They did what you said. That's amazing. Dani Colman, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. And I'd love to come back again sometime.
Awesome. Well, write a sequel!
[MUSIC, TEASER FOR UPCOMING EPISODE] This is Susan Kusel, co-chair with Heidi Rabinowitz of the Holiday Highlights committee for the Association of Jewish libraries. I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. Heidi and I would like to dedicate this episode to the Holiday Highlights committee, Amy Lilien-Harper, Robbin Friedman, and Sylvie Shaffer.
[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473 or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. Check out our Book of Life podcast Facebook page, or our Facebook discussion group, Jewish Kidlit Mavens. We are occasionally on Twitter too at @bookoflifepod. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. You can also help us out by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookofLifepodcast.com Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading!
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