I haven't checked the weather yet, but I know it is the perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl, thanks for joining me here at Nice Jewish books. I had the pleasure of meeting Maggie Anton years ago when she was doing research for her book Rav Hisda's Daughter at Hebrew Union College, where I was a librarian. I've had the pleasure of meeting with her on and off since then at AJL conferences and Jewish events, and we spoke about her earlier book, the Choice. So today I'm especially happy to welcome Maggie Anton back to talk about her latest book, The Midwives Escape. Welcome Maggie.
Well, it's like I'm glad to be here. I'm here in my office at home, so I'm I would be here anyway.
Well, it is lovely to see you, yeah. So usually I start by asking that the author to tell me about their book, so I'm but instead, I'm going to tell you about it and you tell me all the things I've got wrong.
Okay, I better have a another bit of coffee here. Rev up my brain.
Go for it. So this is a story that revolves around the Exodus and what happened when the Jews left Egypt. So the Jews left Egypt all by themselves, with the things they could carry on their back and things that they could pillage from the Egyptians. And then they wandered without stopping in the desert for 40 years with no GPS, no stopping and asking for directions.
Okay, already? Two things, yes. Two things wrong. First of all, back then, they weren't the Jews. They were the Israelites.
Great point. Thank you.
They didn't get to be Jews. Only the tribe of Judah eventually got to be Jews. And then so that I think there weren't actually Jews, as opposed to Hebrews or Israelites, until there were Christians anyway. So there's one piece of information, and the other thing you mentioned, the Jews did not wander in the desert for 40 years. They actually didn't wander very long at all. I mean, they followed God's cloud that kind of took them around. And there's when you read the piece of Exodus about about this in the Torah, there's a chunk of time, like 35 years that nothing, the Torah says nothing. They're .. they're what... They're not wandering around there. They have camped at Kadesh Barnea, and the next thing you know, is 35 years later, and Miriam has just died at Kadesh Barnea, which actually is an oasis in Israel, that is in the south of Israel, near like Solomon's, what used to be Solomon's copper mines, it's so they're way down in the south, is in the south of Israel. And essentially, they stayed there for the 35 years in which the Torah is absolutely silent and archeologists have found, I mean, our Kadesh Barnea is a very nice vacation place. Now it's if you're it is winter time in in Israel. But anyway, they stayed there. And Kadesh Barnea is right on a trade route between the Mediterranean Sea to the west and already along in Israel, along the Mediterranean Sea. There was a lot of trading, because Egypt was down at the south end of it, and Anatolia, which is now Turkey, was at the north end of it. And it's a it's right along the sea. So you have traders coming from all over the place, in the Mediterranean, but at the other end of the trading route, which would be essentially where a lot is, you have all the traders from Babylonia, from India, from Africa, because they're coming from from the east, and that's probably one of the reasons they stayed at Kadesh Barnea because they could earn some income if they make when they learned how to make stuff that they could trade. They set up their they didn't have to travel to do any trading. They set up their booths and their tables, and Kadesh Barnea is at the the. There's a river runs through there that the lake now,
okay, so you did an amazing job, kind of filling in the that 35 year gap, and you told it through the eyes of a couple of the midwives. So one thing you didn't correct me on is that I had it in my head that only the Israelites left, but in fact, other people left with them. So will you talk about the other people? And then who your your main characters are,
okay? Well, the other people's Okay. In order to to write this book, I joined the biblical archeology society, otherwise known as BAR.
I think their journal, B, A, R is the biblical archeology review, and
they are amazing. They have been in business. Well, I don't, wouldn't call it business, but they've, they've been doing their thing for, I think, almost 50 years, and as soon as I discovered them, I joined because it's not very expensive for joining a organization that is going to send you a very informative magazine quarterly. But the thing that's really great is all 50 years of all their magazines, other books, all the articles that various members have written is accessible on the internet. If you're a member,...
It's an amazing resource.
oh, it was an amazing resource. And and we coincidentally were going to Israel this that summer, because my now 15 year old grandson wanted to have a bar mitzvah in Israel. All right, back to who was the mixed multitude, or the [] rav, as they call it in the Bible. One of the things I learned in the Bible Society, archeology society, is that what they call the 12th century, the end of the Bronze Age collapse, they've actually dated it to 1188, BCC, when there was like an incredible drought and famine all along the Mediterranean, except for Egypt. Because Egypt doesn't worry about rain. They get the Nile coming down and providing water all the time. So, but all these other peoples had had to, you know, they went, actually packed up and went to Egypt, where they were going to sit out the drought, which is essentially what you know, Jacob's family did when there was a drought. They went down to Egypt as well. So one of those things that in the from the Torah is not merely legend, but it actually really happened. And you know, they have the evidence. And anyway, the people there was close to a dozen different peoples who came to Egypt during the time of that, that drought. And let's see if I can remember, there were the Hittites, there were the the Philistines, the sea, all these various different sea peoples. But like from Crete and from from the north, and also people came, the Canaanites came down there. That's how the Israel people came. But anyway, they were and there was lagosh and people from Babylonia. It was a Nubians really quite extensive famine. Ah, yes, the Nubians are the same as the cushites, which, which, which actually clears up some things about the Cushite woman, that that Moses married was same as a Nubian who apparently okay. The the Hittites had been an on and off war with Egypt for centuries, and during the time they were not at war, then the Pharaoh's daughters would marry the princes of Anatolia, which is where the Hittites came from. But during and the Hittites were such great warriors, they would rent themselves out as mercenaries. So at this time, the they were the guards in Egypt. They were the mercenaries who, if they weren't fighting your army, then they would help you fight some other army. And remember, from the Bible, we have Uriah, the Hittite, that the Bathsheba's husband, poor husband that David sets off into and who's like a general in the army, and David puts him at the front line, so that. Hitittes were, were one of those. And so I decided to use the Hittites as my male major characters. And then, of course, the Egyptian midwives would be the main female characters only. We only see everything from the midwives perspective, the there, and they're, they're heroes, but they're, we don't ever hear them talk to us in the first person like the midwives do. But anyway, at this, at this time period, which they say is 11, the archeologists say is 1100 88 BCE, to me, it's amazing. They can establish the date so accurately, really, yeah, that many years ago.
And so when the Israelites left, a lot of those people left with them. So it wasn't just the Israelites, exactly, if you traveling to Kadesh Barnea, it was these other groups as well, right, right?
Well, let's face it, whether you are Israelite or a Hittite or or or Cushite, if you if you were in Egypt when the plagues hit, and you saw that the Egyptian gods were absolutely impotent to do anything, and you saw how powerful the Israelites God was, you'd probably say, Okay, I'm I'm going to go with the Israelites there. I don't think people were all that fussy about what God they were worshiping when they were just idols, but the Israelite God put on a very impressive, powerful show, some of which I mean, having a plague that only kills the first born, not the second born, not but only the first born, is a pretty miraculous thing, as opposed to locusts, which come all the Time, right?
Something that's very specific and targeted, not just general.
Yeah, very targeted.
So tell me more about the midwives, Asanet and Shifra.
Asanet is the mother, and Shifra is her daughter who's her apprentice, and Asanet has a sister, Pua. I used those names from the Egyptian midwives who was married to a Israelite man. There's a lot of intermarriage in those days. People may complain about intermarriage now, but I would say that probably the majority of the non Israelites who left Egypt with the Israelites, what had a family member who was an Israelite, so that they had incentives, and they would have really seen, they would have seen the plagues hit their Family, whereas any of the Israelites who had intermarried, the plagues wouldn't have hit them, because the Israelites would have done the Passover stuff and put the lamb's blood around their doors.
So that's the motivation of the non Israelites. But why would the Israelites marry out?
Well, first of all, if you're an Israel, if you're if being married to an Egyptian or a Hittite, or whoever else there was, you probably wouldn't have been enslaved.
Ah huh, right. Okay, so let's get back to a Asanet and Shifra and Pua.
Okay? So they they've been living in Egypt for few generations, and when the plagues happen, Asanet's husband and son, who are first borns, you know, like die right there in their house during the night. So if that's not a show of power by the Israelite gods, or how you know, Which God do you want to be your protector? Egyptian gods didn't do anything. And your sister, who is married to an Israelite, is leaving anyway, once the Israelites, once the group of people are out after they've had their 40 years. They go out and and scout, not scout. They're they're going to find some land in Canaan that they're going to live in, and they have battles with all these different peoples that I had never heard of. But the this is where the archeologists come in and say, No, all those battles that are described in the book of Numbers and Deuteronomy didn't happen then; they happened during the time of the kings, when Saul and King David are fighting the Philistines and other peoples. And you can see the difference between, well, let's just say a city that has fallen down because of an earthquake and a city that was destroyed in a battle. At least. Archeologists can do that. And one of the things that that I do in Midwives Escape is the very end, you they, they're, they're coming into Jericho, which actually had fallen down. But it had fall, you know, they had carbon dating and that kind of stuff. Now, it had fallen down hundreds of years earlier, and people still were living in it. It fallen down from an earthquake, fascinating. And so it wasn't that difficult for the Israelites. You know, they walk around it for seven days and make the inhabitants very nervous. But once you're you have still 1000s, 1000s of people jumping down, up and down, and stamping their feet and yelling loudly, and you have a place that's already partway falling down because of an earthquake. It doesn't take that much to get more of the walls to fall down. So the walls of Jericho did fall down, but it wasn't a giant attack by the Israelites and the other people that were there with the Israelites.
So I want to go back to Kadesh Barnea, because you came up with, yes, ton of fascinating things. So I'm kind of assuming that most of these you found in your research and not out of your imagination, but I want to check in with you. Most of the babies and mothers didn't die at childbirth when they first left.
That's straight out of the Torah. It is okay, right at that, those years, okay.
Shame on me for not reading, rereading it.
Oh no, but come on,
you got to read the Torah with a magnifying glass to come up with all these little tidbits of information. One of the things that God promises the Israelites after, I believe it's at Sinai is that their their women will not die in childbirth. This is God's promise to them while they're in before they've gotten to Canaan, and I think I quoted Torah somewhere in there, where God says this. But of course, all the men had to the men who had were old enough they all got, you know, none of them got to get into the promised land. They all died. And Rashi was the one that tells us that little story about how Tisha be'Av came to be a day of mourning.
Okay, so I was going to ask you about that next. So tell me about Tisha be'Av and the men dying, right. Okay,
so at the point where, okay, the point God thinks they're close to to being able to stand on their own feet. And they need they send out spies to the to the promised land, to Canaan to report back what it's like there. So people would be all excited and enthusiastic about about moving on to the Promised Land, although, frankly, for everything I've seen about Kadesh Barnea, I wouldn't necessarily want to leave it. I mean, it is a very beautiful oasis, and
and many of the Israelites didn't want to,
right? And actually, the tribes of Simeon or Simon, that's, that's their land. I mean Kadesh Barnea is in Israel still, as well as the land. I think the Solomon's copper mines are still in business. I mean, they're still mining there anyway. So they sent out men from each of the 12 tribes to be spies, and when they came back, 10 of them said, we're terrified. We don't want to live there the lands of giants and mean people and we don't want to go, they didn't say, we want to stay in Kadesh Barnea. But that is, apparently, logically, what they did. They didn't want to go wander around anymore, and they liked where they were staying. So they, you know, the spies had a good reason for saying, Ah, we don't we, we're fine here anyway. So they, they didn't want to go, except for Joshua and Caleb. And of course, God is really angry with the other 10 that says they don't want to go. And says, okay, you don't want to go. You guys are going to die here, and it's going to be your your sons, your your next generation, who's going to go so and I was amazed to find Rashi was the guy who tells us this, that there was God didn't want to kill all the people who were out spying and their age range. And so everybody who's over the age of 25 is not going to live to get into the promised land. I'm going to wait for the next generation up to who won't have done any spying, let them be the new leaders. So instead, I mean one thing God made easy for all the Israelites was instead of having, first of all, instead of having the entire generation of the people who who were, who were the spies. Die at once. You would have had like everybody, every male over the age of 25 would have died more or less at once.
Utterly traumatic.
Yes. And also, if you're trying to make a life in Kadesh Barnea and you need to have some skills and have some items to trade with when the caravans come through anyway. So God didn't do that. God had one, I guess, 1/40 or 1/35 anyway, something, you know, one percentage of the males died on Kadesh Barnea, first year in their beds or whatever, and then No, no man died the rest of the year. The older men but on Kadesh Barnea. The second year, another batch of the older men died, and the ones who were left weren't, weren't stupid. I mean, they noticed, whoa, nobody dies during the year, except for this day. We're going to make it simple on ourselves. We're going to have those guys dig their own graves and lay down in them at night, and if they're one of the group that is destined to die that night, they'll be dead in the morning, and we just bury them. So, so
So easy to say that, but how traumatic for the families right to go out to the graves in the morning, right way to see who's been wondering, you know, who's going to go home.
And I can just see I have that scene where they have to wake up the grandfather by bringing him some, you know, fried onions, and
that nice set would wake them up anyway. So they one, 1/40 or 1/35 by the time you get to Tisha be-Av you know, the guys that night are gonna dig their dig their graves and hope that they're awake in them in the morning. And so you get to the 40th year, 35th year. However, Rashi says the 40th year. So you get to the 40th year, Tisha be-Av and everybody wakes up. I mean, all the, all the guys who who were old, and in their in their graves, their beds, they all climb out. Oh, wait a second, so they didn't have calendars that that good. And so they'd say, Oh, we must have miscalculated the date Tisha be-Av is probably tomorrow. So they go back and they lay down in their graves again. But the next morning, they all get up again, and actually, you end up with a very nice pun that my husband, well, no, some puns aren't nice. But anyway, that pun that my husband pointed out, if people were speaking English, you could say there was mourning in the morning of Tisha be-Av
Yeah, some Oh, and let me just throw in. So Tisha be-Av is the the ninth day of the month of Hebrew month of Av.
and eventually, there are things that happen on that day that people mourn for. But Rashi throws in this, this particular little scene anyway. So once, as you said, it's the night. So they're not and they don't have good calendars. So they think, okay, you they'll stay in their graves another night, and we'll see what happens. And they all get up the next day. And finally, you get to T"u be-Av of which is a full moon. It's the 15th of the month. I'll believe me, Passover starts the 15th of the month, and there's that big, big full moon for you. So when they saw the full moon and everybody was still alive, they realized they had gone past Tisha be-Av. Nobody died. So all the guys who were supposed to die before we could go into the Promised Land or dead now it's time to leave, or at least time for the the men of army age to start going and conquering the promised land. The women, most of them, stayed in Kardash Barnea, because by that time, they had a nice trading post. And the car, you know, caravans are going by there regularly. And I mean in terms of why did they have just you know, God was not a punishment to stay at Kadesh Barnea. This is how all these people who were slaves, who never ruled themselves, who just followed orders from the Egyptians, they managed to turn themselves into a society, into a community, they learn new skills that they could do business off of. So they needed those 40 years to get their society functional.
And they also had the safety net of having the mana still every day while they were learning to hunt and fish and gather and yeah, and all those other things, right, right?
Make, like olive oil. There's still olive trees there. Olive trees live tremendously long lives. So they turned into a society and CO, and the different groups that had left together, kind of CO, besides just marrying each other, they learned from each. Other, because people from different ethnicities in Egypt would have had different skills that they that they did, and that was part of the really fun research that I had done. I already knew how you make date beer, because Rav Hisda did that, but I learned how you make olive oil. I learned how you make goat cheese, which we still have these days, and they had the manna, and the animals ate the manna. So I imagined that the goat cheese would have been like, really tasty, having come from, you know, goats that were eating manna also, and I couldn't resist making a save the cat moment
They found some orphan, uh, wild cats that they raised.
Save the cat moments are like a like a trope for showing that your characters are good, nice people, that they find a way to save the cat. Or in our in our case, two cats
it's wonderful. So you mentioned some of your earlier work. So rashi's daughter took place in the 11th century. CE and then Rav Hisda, you went back 700 years, where all of a sudden you pop into the 20th century with the Choice in the 1950s and now you're back way back, 2-3,000 years. So what inspired you to swing the pendulum way back the other way?
Well, actually, it was seeing Prince of Egypt, because we see it every year, and watching all of the people leave as they're singing Mi Ca'Mocha, which is was really, that was if you were Jewish and you knew Mi ca-Mocha. That was a very emotional moment. But to see see some of the mixed multitude intrigued me, and I wasn't going to write about the 1950s anymore. That book was one and done. And I was wondering, like, what it would be like, what was it like? And since the only female Egyptians that we ever hear about in the Torah are the midwives, I thought, Oh, they won't, you know, they won't be the exact midwives that that we have, but I certainly felt no no guilt giving them the same names. I mean, these people are not going to sue me. And I love doing research, especially into the lives of women, and there was that's why I joined the Biblical Archeology Society and discovered that there was a lot of very recent. When I say recent, I mean archeologically recent. So maybe the last 50 ... 100 years, the archeologists in in Israel and in Egypt and other places are literally digging up all they
Suddenly discovered that women existed in the past also.
So somewhat they they did. One of the things that I thought was what, you know, there are a lot of stuff I learned that I thought I can throw into this book, and people are going to learn a lot that them being midwives. Egypt already had forceps.
Wow.
What the some obstetricians, the salad spoons for, for, you know, if the mother can't push the baby out, then we can give her some help and pull the baby out when she's pushing. And there's, there's a lot of, I mean, we the herbs and medicinal things that, frankly, they had in Rashi daughter's time and that they had in his time. Yeah, so
you mentioned birth control.
Yeah, they knew. They had certain, you know, spices and herbs that would and I don't know what they are, but they knew, but they were back then, so that would prevent, prevent conception. They certainly had drugs and herbs that would cause a abortion.
So why did you decide to tell your story from the non Israelite point of view. I mean, the Israelites are there, they're very much involved in the story, but it's from the point of view of the outsiders.
Okay, for two reasons, I actually, for the first time my life, read the Torah, word from Word, starting at Exodus, all the way until they came into, you know, until the end of Deuteronomy that I read very carefully with the idea of, how do I know what it'd be really like for these women and for the men also? And I noticed, okay, most of the time when you're. You're reading the yearly cycle of of the Torah. You most people don't ever get to Joshua. It's the haftarah for the very last section of Deuteronomy. And since so I actually read all the haftarahs also, and I get to the one about Joshua, and I read that all the No, there was no circumcisions going on during the so called 40 years. Really, there were, I mean, the number 40 is a biblical number. That's what the archeologists call it so. But during the time that they were coming into the to Canaan, nobody was they didn't circumcise any of the men. I mean, you needed to have fighters at the ready. I is the they didn't say that, but they didn't circumcise anybody. So when they get to Jericho, Joshua says, Okay, we're here. We're crossing the Jordan and all the men have to be circumcised,
ouch!
. At this point, I guess for the best it's too late to turn around and go back to Egypt. At that point, every man who is circumcised becomes an Israelite. Is a giant conversion for all the men, just like today, if a man is, I mean, a convert, although, let's face it, did modern times, many, most men are circumcised as babies, whether they're Jewish or not. So they circumcise all the men, and they wait for them to heal, and then they attack Jericho. And so I realized, like, oh my god, you had, like, all these 1000s of converts right at that time. You had a it wasn't just the tribes. You had a whole lot of and Joshua actually says you are going to be Israel, as opposed to Judah or Simeon or God. Anyway, G, A, D,
fascinating.
So I I'm married to a convert. My daughter is married to a convert. So I particularly wanted to to show off converts to at their at their best.
That's wonderful. And I'm sorry. I'm laughing. I'm just thinking of them going back to their wives and Hi honey, how was the war, and they're like, yeah, something happened. So do you have any projects in the works? Do you have a new century or Millennium that you're going to be diving into next
Funny you should ask one of the things that we didn't mention was about the character in midwives, Sarah, who left with the with the Israelites, and is mentioned in the census of the people who left with Jacob and and met up with Joseph and became slaves. For the most part, she was there. So she was in the first census of people that came in, the 70 that left with Joseph's family. And then, lo and behold, there's another census before they actually enter the promised land. So, but this is like five generations later, and she's and she's coming in to the promised land with them. So the rabbis, of course, met, you know, they they saw this and going, Whoa, who was this woman who lives so long. So they started coming up with all these incredible Midrash stories about her, that she doesn't die, that when, when the brothers had come back from Egypt and come to tell Jacob that they're afraid to tell him that Joseph is still alive, because he's so old that this might be such a shock for him, it'll send him over the edge. So they asked Sarah, if she she plays the lyre and she sings, if she could kind of gently come up with a song or some way to tell Jacob that his son is alive. She she tells gives him the news. He is so thrilled to hear that Joseph is alive and doing well in Egypt and everybody, and he's also so pleased that she told him in such a way that he didn't have a stroke or heart attack. And so He blesses her. This is all Talmudic. Blesses her by saying, The angel of death will have no power over you. And lo and behold, that's what happened. She lives. There's questions whether she actually ever dies, but she is alive all the way through tell metic times, and she corrects them when they're discussing the Exodus. She corrects them as what really happened, huh? So I thought, Okay, this is a way, from another female perspective, I could cover like, 1000 years of Jewish history, you know, David and Goliath and Solomon and Esther and all this. So I'm doing research on all the most interesting. Places where she would have been an eyewitness. Wow, interesting. But once I learned there was this woman, and the Rabbi say that every time in the Bible you hear about the wise woman of so and so of some place it's her,
All right, sounds like it's going to be fascinating. So my typical last question is to give you a chance to put out a call for tikkun olam, for repairing the world. What would you like to speak out for
here? I'm ready on this one. Okay, when, as I said, there were no according to the archeologists, who know what they're doing, there were no wars or battles when the Israelites came into Canaan, those all happened in King David, King Saul's time they came into Canaan. And there's a debate on whether there weren't still some Israelites left there. Not all of them came into Egypt. In any case, there were the Canaanites are living. And if you've ever been to Israel, you know that there's the hill area and the flat area and the flat areas where you can very nicely grow wheat and barley, and up on the Hill area is where you can have vineyards and olive trees. But there was, there was nobody living in the hill areas because there was plenty of room on the flats and way less work to to farm that area. So they're not going to go up in the hills, and we have to terrace them, and we have to plant trees that take 100 years before they're going to make any dollars. You know, we see them now, but, but anyway, the point being is the Canaanites and the Israelites lived like right next to each other. They traded with each other. Archeologists see that they have the exact same four room houses. The Canaanites probably, you know, obviously the first and they can carbon date to when those, when those dwellings were built and when were the hill dwelling built. So they know the Israelites came later, and the Canaanites, I mean, they, you know, let's face it, the Israelites were living in Canaan when they went to Egypt. And they, essentially, most you know, came back. And the way the archeologists know is okay, they excavated when they're excavating the dwellings, the houses of the people in the flat lands. Of course, archeologists love to dig up the remains of the hearths so they can see what people were eating. So and with carbon dating, you can tell when they were eating that. So they found that the Canaanites had the remains of of cattle, the remains of sheep and goats, and then some wild birds there were. There were not domesticated birds then, and pigs really. And you go up to the hills and the dwellings there, they're hearths. Well, they got remains of oxen. They got remains of cow, cattle, sheep, goats. Maybe you know birds, if you know you could catch them, but no pork.
Wow Interesting. And
you go over the hills all the way to the other side by the ocean where the Philistines are. There's more more remains of pork than anything. That's what the Philistines like to eat. And you could very are, but looking at their hearts, see what peoples were there and they weren't. Israelites were not eating, or at least a group of people were not eating pork way back then, with proof on it, and we know what dates they weren't eating pork, so I'd say, and they, the archeologists, also say, reasonably, this is where the Israelites were, and they were already for whatever it was the reason they didn't eat Pork, but that's how they know the Israelites were there back 1000 BCE,
okay, so how is this a call for Tikkun Olam?
Because the Palestinians and the Israelites are both indigenous peoples, or at least indigenous from three, 4000 years ago. They shared the land then, and apparently, they, well, they, they got along well enough that they, they fought the Philistines together. So
it sounds like you're saying, if we did it once, we can do it again, absolutely.
And I think one of the main barriers to peace is that nobody knows the history, and there's enough land for everybody.
All right, wonderful. Well, thank you for sharing that, Maggie. If people want to contact you, what is the best way? The
best way is, is my email, Maggie, anton@gmail.com, no spaces between Maggie and Anton. I answer my emails eventually. And. Website. My website is also www Maggie anton.com
All right, great,
and you can go on there, and you'll see all my books, and there's book group discussion questions and all that kind of stuff. And one last tidbit, because I never had this on. Any of my other books is midwives escape. There's 25 chapters. It's not that long, because the book isn't even 300 pages. And we have illustrations that my husband, the retired attorney turned artist, Drew.
Okay? I did. I did notice
those. Yeah. So you have, you have one from the the sand cats,
yeah, I see one of the olive press and an olive tree the date collection. Yeah, they're wonderful. All right. So Maggie Anton, thank you so much for speaking with me about your latest book, The midwives escape. If you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite board and brick or online bookstore or at your local library. Thanks to diyanki for use of his Freilich, which definitely makes me happy. This podcast is a project of the Association of Jewish libraries, and you can find more about it at www.jewishlibraries.org/nice Jewish books. I would like to thank AJL and my podcast mentor, Heidi Rabinowitz, Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode.
Hi. This is Miri Lechem Peli, author and illustrator of a feather a pebble, a shell. I'll be joining you soon on the bookoflife podcast, and I'd like to dedicate this episode to my parents whose love of nature has always inspired me.
The Book of Life is the sister podcast of nice Jewish books. I'm your host. Heidi Rabinowitz and I podcast about Jewish kidlit join me to hear my conversation with author illustrator Mary lesham Pelley about a feather, a pebble, a shell@bookoflifepodcast.com you.
