[COLD OPEN] One of the themes of the book is how much Shoshana should try to fit into the group. And how can she do that while still holding on to her sense of who she is.
[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly, I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. When I read Susan Lynn Meyer's middle grade novel, A Sky Full of Song, I was swept away by her descriptions of the North Dakota prairie, and really touched by the characters' struggles with prejudice, assimilation, and identity. This story is one of those in which the specific is also the universal. It showcases a quintessential American experience, but at the same time, an extremely Jewish experience. And I thought it would be a perfect interview to bring to you this May for Jewish American Heritage Month.
I'll also mention that I've put together a resource to help librarians and readers celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month using children's books, and you can find that at BookofLifepodcast.com. One more treat for you in the month of May: On Mother's Day, Sunday, May 14, 2023, I'll be posting a print interview on my blog with the authors of two different collective biographies about great Jewish women, both coincidentally entitled She's A Mensch. One book, She's A Mensch: 10 Amazing Jewish Women by Anne Dublin, is coming out on May 15. And the other, She's A Mensch: Jewish Women Who Rocked the World by mother-daughter duo, Rachelle Burke and Alana Barouche, launches September 1. Read all about it at BookofLifepodcast.com. Now, let's hear from Susan about A Sky Full of Song.
Susan Lynn Meyer, welcome to The Book of Life.
Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
Today, we're going to talk about your 2023 book, A Sky Full of Song. But first, can you give us some context about yourself as a writer? How many books have you published?
This is my third novel, and I've also had three picture books published, and I have a new one in the works that hasn't quite been announced yet, co-authored with my friend Jaya Mehta. Yeah, so this is my sixth children's book.
You emphasize children's book. Does that mean you've written for adults too?
Well, I'm also an English professor at Wellesley College and I have written a book of literary criticism. So academic scholarship about 19th century British literature about race as a metaphor in 19th century British women's fiction. So yeah, quite a different kind of book.
Yes. And I recall that you did receive recognition from the Association of Jewish Libraries for your writing in the past, I think it was for Black Radishes. Right?
I did. I got a Sydney Taylor Honor Award for Black Radishes, my first novel, inspired by my father's experiences as a Jewish boy in France during World War II. And then actually, I got a Sydney Taylor Notable for Skating with the Statue of Liberty, which is the companion volume to Black Radishes and is somewhat more loosely inspired by my father's experiences when he came to the US in 1942, a refugee from France.
Is there any particular theme that you think ties all of your writing together?
I have had a long standing interest in race relations and intergroup relationships that actually is in my academic writing, as well as in my fiction writing for children. It's obviously evident in my novels. You know, my first two have to do with being a Jew during the 1940s, fleeing Europe. This novel has to do with a Jewish girl in North Dakota, fleeing the pogroms in the Russian Empire. And even in my picture books, one of them is called New Shoes, and it's a picture book about two black girls in the South in the 1950s. And one of them learning for the first time that she's not allowed to try on shoes in a shoe store.
You started to tell us a little bit about A Sky Full of Song. Tell us more. What is this book about?
Yes, so this book is about 11 year old Shoshana Rozumny, who comes to North Dakota from the Russian Empire in 1906. Her family has been experiencing persecution in the little village in Ukraine where they live. First her father and older brother come to America and start farming on a plot of land in North Dakota, as homesteaders and three years later Shoshana and her mother and three sisters come and join them in North Dakota. Obviously, it's a completely different world for Shoshana. So it's about her experience of life on the North Dakota prairie and the things she loves about that, the natural beauty and the animals, which she is very fond of. And also the difficulties that her family encounters in North Dakota as Jews where they're not especially welcome.
So you mentioned that your earlier books were inspired by family history. What was the inspiration for this story?
I was looking at a photograph of a family in front of a dugout in Oklahoma, and I began wondering, hmm, I wonder what percentage of Americans have their origins in homesteading? I did a Google search. And it's a large percentage 30% or so.
Wow, that much.
It is yes. And most people don't seem to know it's in their family background. Also, I got curious about whether there were ever Jewish homesteaders. And I was really surprised to find out that there were, particularly in North and South Dakota. So I started reading a lot about it just out of curiosity. And that's where the idea for the book came from.
It's impossible for a book about a homesteading family on the prairie in this time period not to be compared to the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Were you a fan of the Little House books as a child?
I'm embarrassed in a way to say that I wasn't. Actually, I liked books with more plot. And I remember trying to get started with Little House in the Big Woods and trying to visualize Pa making that latch for the door. And I just couldn't visualize it. And that made me not want to persist with the book. I just, I just couldn't get into it. And then the bit about playing with the pig's bladder, that also is towards the beginning of Little House in the Big Woods. Now, as an adult, I see their merits and their, you know, their issues. But as a child, I couldn't really get into them.
That's very funny. They are definitely for detail nerds.
Yes, absolutely.
So do you see your book in any way as a update or an expansion or corrective? Or is it completely unrelated? Is there a relationship between your book and Little House on the Prairie?
I think it can't not be related, or seen as similar to Little House on the Prairie in that it's a story about a girl and her family on the prairie. In some ways, it is definitely indebted to the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. There's one kind of little secret nod to Laura Ingalls Wilder at one point, where the girls are talking about how to find out if a cat is going to be good at catching mice, because the kitten isn't yet big enough to catch mice. And Shoshana's new friend Evie says, "If it has big ears and a long tail, then it's going to be a good mouser, that's what my Auntie Laura says." And that's right out of the Little House books, and that is a little sort of secret nod to Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Korean-American author Linda Sue Park also wrote a minority experience novel about this same setting called Prairie Lotus, and an interviewer asked her: if you had the opportunity to meet Wilder today, what might you say to her? So I want to ask you that same question.
I guess I'm, I'm curious about what she would say if you asked her: Who else was there? What else happened on the prairie that you decided not to include in your books? And how did you make those decisions? I mean, she lived experiences that fed into those books, but still every writer is choosing and selecting and excluding. How did she make those decisions? Yeah.
Yeah. You've had an interesting mix of responses in the reviews of your book. So Kirkus, in a mostly glowing review, incorrectly says "a friendly interaction with a Dakota girl allows Shoshana to feel anger for the displace Dakota though she doesn't ponder the relationship between that displacement and her own family's safe refuge." And then Publishers Weekly, on the other hand, gets it right, because actually Shoshana does ponder that very thing. And then a review in The Wall Street Journal seems a little bit kvetchy when it says that Shoshana's sympathy for the Dakota is believable because she's an outsider herself, but that it's really a 2023 point of view. And they say your novel seeks to correct the past. So a lot of different points of view. And I feel like we've almost got some culture wars playing out here with Kirkus being mistakenly disappointed with the supposed lack of acknowledgment of the displacement of the Dakota, and then The Wall Street Journal grudgingly accepting that this acknowledgement might be appropriate. So what are your thoughts on the wide variety of reviews that you've been getting?
Shoshana does exactly think about that, she thinks my family and I are able to be here because the Dakota have been pushed away. And she thinks, who lived here on this spot of land before we did? Was there a girl her age? What had she liked to do? Had she had a cat? Had she done chores? What games did she like to play? Did she argue with her brothers and sisters? Shoshana explicitly reflects on the fact that she is able to be there because other people who were there before have been driven away. And her brother tells her that sometimes when they're plowing the land, they turn up arrowheads, so there, there are actual traces of the evidence of those people who were there before. In a way, it's interesting they're all focusing on that issue, because that's one part of the book, but not a lot of the book. But of course, I knew it was a cultural flashpoint, and it was very important to me to have Native readers review the manuscript and make suggestions. They were really helpful. The Wall Street Journal review, I think she is really mainly concerned with how Little House on the Prairie is read or not read today rather than responding to my particular book, even though that's the book she's reviewing. But for me, the question isn't what's the most probable thing that a character could do at a historical moment, but is it conceivable or possible? Is it possible that a Jewish immigrant girl in this place and time could see a parallel between the way her family and other Jews have been treated in the Russian Empire, pushed out of other places they were living and pushed into the Pale, for a Jewish girl in this era to see a parallel between that and the way that Dakota were pushed out of their lands and restricted to less good reservation lands? It seems to me it's entirely possible and not far fetched at all.
So when you had Native American sensitivity readers look at the manuscript, did they give you any particular advice? Did you need to make changes? What did they have to say?
Kisha James was a Native American student activist at Wellesley where I teach, she gave me incredibly helpful advice. One thing she said was, I need more positive stuff about the situation of the Dakota. So I had at first simply had Shoshana reflect on the exclusion of the Dakota, but I hadn't included any Dakota characters, because that made me apprehensive that I would do it wrong in some way. Encouraged by Kisha James to put more more joy and more positive stuff about Dakota culture into the book... she mentioned beading and because of her, I wrote a whole new chapter in which Shoshana meets a Dakota girl and sees on her bag, a beaded crane, and thinks about how both of them have a response to the beauty of the prairie and to the flight of the sandhill cranes overhead. So that whole chapter is in existence because of that comment from Kisha and I'm really grateful for it because it just sort of really clicked and I thought, Oh, I see how this could really fit so nicely into the book. That was wonderfully helpful.
I love that, that was a very special part of the book. I'm a birder and I love sandhill cranes. So I really enjoyed that connection that the two of them were making.
My husband is a birder and he's my expert on all things are beautiful, logical, he told me about the andhill cranes and they are indeed a magnificent sight.
So you must have done a lot of research for this historical novel. Was there anything interesting you learned that you just couldn't use in the book or something? Or that you used but you'd like to expand on and tell us more about?
Early on in the book, I think it's in the first chapter, the mother is injured in an attack on market in Liubashevka, in the little village they live in in Ukraine. And the girls have to take over the housekeeping and they have twin baby sisters, and they have to do the laundry as well as the cooking. And luckily, the next door neighbor takes over the washing of the diapers, which is the thing they least want to do. So they're lucky and glad that the neighbor takes over washing the diapers. And my friend Jaya Mehta, who's my daily writing companion, we work together on Zoom, and we write together and then we read bits to each other and comment on each other's work; and I read her that bit, and she said, But wait, would they have actually worn diapers, in a rural poor area, in a tiny village, in the Russian Empire? And I didn't know, would they or wouldn't they? So I tried to find out, I asked two historians of Eastern European Jewish history. I tend to know a lot of scholars because I'm also a college professor. So I asked these two people, and neither of them had the slightest idea, because it's just not the kind of thing they would investigate these details about daily life. So I thought, Well, how am I going to find this out? I was actually able to find it out through the magic of Google Books. So I did a Google search, restricted it to this region of the Russian Empire in these years, and put the word "diaper" in and found kind of a horrible story, in a newspaper about a woman in Odessa who ran a baby farm, basically, where she took care of babies of unmarried women who had to work and so they needed someone to take care of their babies. And she had been busted basically, for endangering the babies. And this was a newspaper article about the terrible conditions the babies were living in. And they were wearing dirty diapers. So I learned that in fact, yes, diapers would have been used, but I guess, Jaya's thought was that in some places in the world, people can't even afford diapers. So they might just sort of try to suss out when the baby needed to go and put the baby, you know, outside at that moment and not use a diaper at all. I mean, put the baby out the window, or something. I don't mean throw the baby out the window!
Is that a thing that people do, just hold the baby out the window?
I think so. I think that is the case in some rural areas.
I never heard of that. That is not an answer I expected!
Well, those are the kind of of little arcane historical details that you wouldn't realize you didn't know until you think about it. And you think, oh, wait a minute. Would this song have been available then? For example, like Oyfn Pripetchik is a song that's referred to in the novel. Shoshana is learning to play it on the fiddle. But then I suddenly thought, Wait, when was that song written? So I needed to check. I mean, that was relatively easy to find out. But things about daily life can be more of a challenge to find out.
Shoshana faces that eternal immigrant struggle of how much assimilation is the right amount of assimilation. Can you talk about that?
Her great desire is to make friends in the primary school. And she learns English fairly easily. Her older sister Libka, who is three years older, isn't learning English as readily. And there isn't a group of girls her age that's very welcoming. So Shoshana is having a bit of an easier time fitting in socially. And one of the themes of the book is how much Shoshana should try to fit into the group. And how can she do that while still holding on to her sense of who she is? And her initial desire is to fit in and be like the other girls, whereas Libka is much more wary and not so enthusiastic about the choices that Shoshana is making to fit in. And the two of them have always been each other's best friends. So it causes a real rift between the sisters.
I think that that was a good way to show both points of view, two different approaches to the issue of assimilation, and to bring that issue to the forefront because of the conflict that caused between them.
Yes. I got the idea from reading a memoir of an actual Jewish girl who was living in this general area and going to school with mostly Christian children. And they sang Christmas carols in the school, and only she and her sister refuse to sing. I mean, they didn't refuse the way children might now as a protest, they just sat quietly at their desks when the others were singing the Christmas carols. But as an old woman, when she was interviewed about her past, she remembered this detail.
Well, it's interesting, I feel like recently, we're seeing more and more books about Jewish identity, like actually thinking about your identity. So even though this is a historical novel, it fits into that trend.
It does, I don't think it's something that's only of the present moment, but it may be the present moment that's allowing people to write about it, or encouraging people to write about it.
Exactly. You are an English professor at Wellesley College. How does being an English professor affect you as an author of children's books?
I think one challenge I have as a writer is to think like a child, you know, have my characters engage in dialogue that's genuinely childlike, because I'm used to, you know, talking the way professors talk. But I think, basically, I have lived my life immersed in fiction, immersed in literature and language. So that definitely shapes me as a writer. And I kind of feel these other writers behind my work sometimes when I'm writing, like Willa Cather's writing is very sort of very closely behind my work in a way in this novel. And there is a moment which nobody but me likely will, will ever notice, where I'm kind of alluding to Emerson. Yes, there are some moments where what I want to write has sort of glimmers of other writers in it, just because I'm so steeped in literature, but I'm also very much steeped in, in children's literature. I read children's literature all the time. And I do teach a course on writing for children at Wellesley, creative writing.
So, you mentioned that there's kind of an Easter egg or I would like to call it an off afikomen, about Emerson in Sky Full of Song, do you want to reveal that to us?
Well, it's it's in the chapter where Shoshana is learning the fiddle, and learning to play the krekhts, which is a sound, it's just indescribable in klezmer music, except to say it sounds like a moan or cry. Finally, kind of everything comes together. And she feels as if she's playing right and she's playing well. And she feels as if she hears the sound of Liubashevka in her playing. And she thinks about the joy and the grief that's mixed together in Jewish music, or in that particular song that she's playing. And she thinks about the grief. And then she thinks at just the right moment comes a golden shaft of joy, made deeper by the pain. And just at the moment when-- I forget exactly what I said, but something like "just at the moment when it felt as if the angels would weep, then comes a golden shaft of joy. Up again, sad heart." It's a moment from Emerson that I often think of where Emerson tells himself in the essay Experience "up again, old heart," about human endurance. It's about remembering the loss of his child, and how he had to go on anyway. And he thinks to himself "up again, old heart." And of course, Shoshana doesn't have an old heart. She's only 11. But she has a sad heart at times, remembering Liubashevka and also things that are happening in North Dakota, some of the antisemitism that she's encountering, she is nonetheless determined to go on.
Awesome, thank you for sharing that.
Yeah. Thanks.
What was the easiest part of this book to write and what was the hardest?
Well, I have five brothers and sisters, and Shoshana has four so actually, I think that dynamics among the children and this large family came very readily to me. They love each other, but they fight with one another, and the older brother teases Shoshana, and torments her in various ways. It's very much based on my own childhood experiences, and some of them are even kind of transposed into the book. Like I have a scar on my left elbow; it comes from a time when my older brother and I were having a competition to see who could bounce more times on the pogo stick and I was beating his record and he was very competitive. And so he shoved me over backwards and I landed on my elbow on the sidewalk. Got this big gash on my elbow. Well in A Sky Full of Song, Libka and her older brother are having a competition to see who can stand on one foot longer. They're trying to see who can recite what Rabbi Hillel famously said was the core of Judaism: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man" and to say that while standing on one foot, and so the kids see who can say it the most times while standing on one foot. And then Anshel the older brother gets mad, Libka's beating his record, and he pushes her over backwards. Those kind of childhood dynamics just came very naturally to me, coming from a family with lots of siblings. What was hardest? I think mastering the complexities of the situation of Jews in the Russian Empire well enough to write the book. That was hard. There's a lot to understand about that history.
I like how you have book-related memories on your website. Can you tell us the story about your book that got stolen?
Oh, my book that got stolen! I still have it. Yes, my copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, my childhood copy. I had an aunt and uncle in Scotland. And they sometimes sent us books. I loved British books, I just loved seeing that they were printed differently, they smell a little bit different. And sometimes on their bindings, if you look at the spine of the book, the title goes from vertical, shifts to the right, sometimes their titles shift to the left. And that's the kind of little detail that I noticed from these British books that my relatives sent me. And I loved, loved, loved The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that they sent me and I brought it to school with me one day in elementary school. And there was a girl in my class who stole things. I actually didn't notice that she had stolen my book. So many kids complained about her that the teacher actually that day decided to send her out of the room on an errand and looked through her desk and pulled out things. This was maybe not the best way of conducting things. It must have really humiliated the girl. But when she was back in the room, she went through her desk, and she picked up things like, here's a necklace, here's a ring, Who does this belong to? And the kids would say, that's mine. I'm lost that, that's mine. And then she pulled out The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And I said, Hey, that's my book. And for some reason, the teacher decided not to be convinced of that in the same way she was of the jewelry. And she said, Well, she could have a copy of the book. And the girl said, Yeah, I do. And I said, Well, where did you get it? Because I knew that book so well, knew every detail about that book. I'd read it so many times, I'd studied the illustration on the cover, the back cover, how the price was written in pounds, which I thought was kind of cool. And she said, I got it in -- you know, she named a bookstore in Towson near where I went to school. And I was a very shy kid, but not when it came to my book. And I said, No, you didn't! Look at the back. And the teacher looked at the back and said, What about the back? and I said Look at the bottom, and at the very bottom, it says in tiny letters, "for copyright reasons this edition not for sale in the USA." The teacher saw that, she handed me back my book, and I've had it ever since.
That was like, worthy of Arthur Conan Doyle, noticing those little details. Do you have any Jewish book-related memories from childhood?
Yes, you know, everybody says, oh, there were no books about contemporary Jewish kids. But I read some! Canadian author Jean Little wrote two books that I loved as a girl. One was called Look Through My Window, and one is called Kate. And in Look Through My Window, the point of view character is a Christian girl. She makes friends with a Jewish girl. But it's not mostly about that. It's mostly about them being friends and the girl Kate being this fascinating, wonderful person, and the stories they start writing together and the fun they have. But then she obviously realized Kate was a very vivid and interesting character and she wrote a spin off novel called Kate which is about Kate and her relationship to Jewish identity, in part because she's got a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother and hasn't been brought up to be observant and is trying to figure out her relationship to Jewish observance. So uh, yes, I read those in childhood and really liked them.
Well, that almost sounds like a Canadian version of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret with the interfaith Jewish girl thinking about her identity.
It's true. It is. And Jean Little is not Jewish, but I thought she did it really well. And I think that's an example of a writer writing outside of her own ethnic background and doing a really good job of it. I don't know why nobody else that I've ever run into, who has become, you know, a Jewish adult children's writer, nobody else seems to have read those books in the United States. But I loved those books. I thought they were really good. And they certainly were about contemporary Jewish... well, in fact, it was Jewish Canadian life, so I loved those books as a kid.
I'm gonna have to look for that.
Yeah, you don't know them either?
No, I don't.
I did read Judy Blume but she didn't speak to me as much because in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Margaret is really looking forward to getting her period. And that seemed so at odds with my experience as a child. I did not want to get my period. I was not excited about it. The book just didn't resonate with me. There's actually an episode in A Sky Full of Song where Shoshana's older sister Libka gets her period and a little bit of my own childhood ambivalence about that comes out in that moment in the book.
All right, thank you. Very interesting. So it's tikkun olam time. What action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?
Well, this book is very much about Shoshana's delight in the prairies, which don't really exist in the same state anymore, except here and there in little little pockets of preserved land. So if listeners would like to do an act of tikkun olam in relation to the book, you might want to make a small donation to the American Prairie foundation, which is trying to preserve a large area of prairie and return it to its wild state in northeastern Montana. I haven't been there yet, but I'd like to see it.
That's a great suggestion. Thank you. Is there anything else that you'd like to talk about that I haven't thought to ask you?
Actually Shoshana's name. I thought about giving her a more classic Yiddish name, but I really want to call her Shoshana. So I wasn't sure whether a Hebrew name would be plausible in this place and time. And I had chosen for the family the surname Rozumny, which was a plausible Jewish surname in that region at that time. So I thought about would Shoshana be a name that she might have. So I put in the name Shoshana Rozumny into the internet and up popped somebody named actually Rosa Shoshana Rozumny, which was startling to discover there had once been a real person with that name. And she was almost exactly the age of my character. So I decided, yes, I could use that name. However, the grievous thing is that her name was on the internet because she died in the Holocaust. I had that experience once before actually, when I was writing Black Radishes, I had at some point, the inclination to look up my various characters' names. I was in a library, and I came to a book that was a listing of all the names of all the French Jewish children who had perished in the Holocaust, and also photographs of them, and also all the biographical information. So I looked up my main character, and his name was not there, which was a relief. And then I looked up his cousin's name. He's the second main boy character in Black Radishes, and his name wasn't there. But then I looked up their friend Marcel, who doesn't get out of France in my novel, and I was quite devastated to encounter his exact name, Marcel Landau, in that book, that listing of all the Jewish children from France who were murdered in the Holocaust. At that point, the book was already on its way into print, but I thought about whether I should change the name, but I decided not to. I decided that meant I had gotten it historically accurate, because I'd given him a Polish Jewish surname Landau. And I'd given him a French boy's name that was popular at the time, Marcel. So yeah, I had very similar experience with Shoshana.
Susan Lynn Meyer, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
[MUSIC, DEDICATION] This is A.J. Sass, author of Ellen Outside the Lines. I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. I'd like to dedicate my episode to advocates against against censorship, the folks who push back against book bans and other attempts to silence marginalized voices. Your efforts are needed and so very much appreciated.
[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 @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!
[MUSIC, PROMO] We may not be able to live in the past but it sure is nice to visit it sometimes. Join me for a nostalgic journey back to Jewish sleepaway camp with Eric Glickman, as we talked about his graphic novel, Camp Pock-a-Wocknee: Dyn-o-mite Summer '77. Find our discussion at JewishLibraries.org/NiceJewishBooks.