THE BOOK OF LIFE - Emi Cohen's Dragons & Golems, Creature Double Feature Part II

7:28PM Oct 20, 2024

Speakers:

Heidi Rabinowitz

Joanne Levy

Emi Watanabe Cohen

Henry Herz

Erica Perl

Keywords:

Jewish heritage

golems

antisemitism

dragon mythology

Japanese culture

memory themes

diverse books

community support

historical trauma

multilingual puns

golemcrafting

Jewish folklore

cultural identity

emotional response

literary influences

[COLD OPEN] So much of who we are as Jews is taught to us, either just by being around other Jewish people, or learning our history, our language, our culture. And so it seems like golems should be something our grandparents give us.

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. Welcome to my Creature Double Feature two-part series about antisemitism and the supernatural. My guest in this episode is Japanese-American Jewish author Emi Watanabe Cohen. Her debut novel was the Lost Ryu, about dragons, and her sophomore novel is about Golemcrafters, about golems, of course. I loved the Lost Ryu so much that I volunteered to review it for the Sydney Taylor Shmooze blog, because I wanted to point out a moment of allyship that touched my soul. Then along came Golemcrafters. I must admit, I was wary at first, because golems are kind of overdone, but this book drew me in even more than The Lost Ryu, with how much it mirrored my own emotional response to antisemitism. Both of these books are like hands reaching out to hold yours. I highly recommend that you reach back and read both books yourself.

My other Creature Double Feature episode is an interview with Deke Moulton about their vampire and werewolf middle grade novels, which make great companions to Emi's books. You will find links to both episodes in my Creature Double Feature series, to Emi's website, Emi's reading suggestions, a transcript, and more at bookoflifepodcast.com, where you can also leave a comment or email me to let me know your thoughts about dragons, golems, or anything else.

Emi Watanabe Cohen, welcome to The Book of Life. Thank you for joining me.

Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

I'm so excited to have you! So I want to dive right in. Your books, The Lost Ryu and Golemcrafters, celebrate your Japanese and your Jewish heritage. And I read in an interview that you did on the website Middle Grade Book Village that you've suffered a bit of imposter syndrome because of that. So can you talk about that?

Yeah, I spent the early part of my childhood at a school that had a lot of Japanese students. Think about a third of them were Japanese, and the bulk of them were native Japanese speakers. There, I was always the least Japanese person in the room. My mother was friends with all of their mothers, so they knew that I was Japanese from that, but I basically always took a back seat when it came to engaging with Japanese culture. I did speak Japanese at home at the time, but I was obviously not a native speaker. But then when I moved to a different school where there were pretty much no Japanese kids, suddenly I was like the ambassador, you know, people would come up to me and be like, Oh, man, you're Japanese, I love anime. Do you know how to make sushi? I was just like, waiting for a real Japanese person to pop up behind me and be like, She's not actually Japanese. And also, I don't watch anime, and I don't know how to make sushi, so that was always kind of an awkward conversation. And I think that really informs a great deal of my work in both The Lost Ryu and Golemcrafters, the protagonists kind of have that feeling of having to prove themselves, but also not wanting to prove themselves and not thinking they can prove themselves. It's a it's a very convenient point of conflict.

You used your trauma effectively to make art.

Yay!

Yay! What are each of your books about? Can you summarize and maybe tell us the inspiration behind each of these books?

Sure. So The Lost Ryu had a charming origin story. The first year I was at that new school, an author came to talk to my class about a book that he written about dragon mythology from all around the world. This was very exciting for me, because I was very interested in dragons. It was a picture book. It was beautiful. It had all these illustrations. I believe it was called just Dragons, published, would have been like 2007. It was a fantastic book, but I remember getting to the end and feeling like, Wait, where's the rest of it? Because there were all these stories about Eastern dragons and Western dragons, but those dragons never interacted in this book. Obviously, because it was more of like a history of myth kind of book. I was in third grade, I was already writing, and so I thought I should write a book where Eastern dragons and Western dragons meet up and have families, and maybe there will be a dragon that's half Eastern, half Western, like me. And then it was recess, and so I forgot to write the book for about was it 12 years and so. So I finished my sophomore year of college, and I am very bored over the summer, and I think, I should try writing middle grade because those were the books that I lived in as a kid. I loved middle grade literature. I still do. And then it came back to me. It had been sitting in the back of my mind, kind of percolating for over a decade, and so I wrote the book, and so that's The Lost Ryu. It is about a little boy named Kohei. It takes place in Japan in 1965. He goes on this adventure trying to uncover the history of these big dragons of myth that he's heard about through Japanese mythology. But in Japan in 1965 in the book, (not in real life, unfortunately) everyone has little dragons, you know, teeny, tiny, little pets that sit on their shoulders. But he wants to see the big dragons, and so he, with his new Jewish neighbor, go on a journey to find the big ryu, and end up uncovering some unpleasant history about the war, about the role of big dragons, which kind of represent nationalist mythology in the war. And there is a mixed Eastern and Western dragon. It was kind of like the fulfillment of that childhood dream.

In The Lost Ryu. I couldn't help but think of the way that every person had their own small dragon seemed very much like the daemons in The Golden Compass. Was that an inspiration or an influence?

It wasn't, actually. The funny thing is, I had never actually read His Dark Materials, is what it's called, right?

Right.

But my editor, who acquired the book, said that the dragons reminded her of daemons. During the editing process, I read The Golden Compass and the following books. And was like, Whoa, this is amazing. I wish I'd read this as a kid. Yeah. And then Golemcrafters. When I finished writing The Lost Ryu, my thought process was basically Okay, so I wrote a Japanese mythology book. Now it's time to write a Jewish mythology book: Golems. The book takes place not in 1965 but in 2022, I believe. It stars an 11 year old girl, Faye Meisel, and her older brother, who recently became Bar Mitzvah, so he's 13. As a Bar Mitzvah present the brother Shiloh receives a box of clay in the mail from his estranged grandfather. They have no idea what the clay is for. They think it may be a metaphor for life, but they really don't know what to do with metaphors that come in the mail. They end up contacting their grandfather and finding out that their family has a long history of what is, in the book, called golemcraft. The book is about them exploring this history, exploring the role of golems in mythology, in folklore.

Okay, well, thank you for the summaries. So I loved The Lost Ryu, your first book, and I was totally swept away by Golemcrafters, the newer book. And both of them lean into the folklore of your heritage in these kind of opposite ways, and I see them as like a yin and yang, like they're opposites that fit together, but each include a drop of the other one. So do you think that there are any themes that tie them together, even though they're about different characters in different settings?

I think the theme that ties them together is memory. Unreliable memory, the importance culturally of memory, is very much a central theme that doesn't necessarily come up immediately in either. Folklore deals a great deal with memory. All culture, really, is the result of all of us, kind of collectively remembering these stories and adapting them to fit our own times. Yeah, I wish I had something more profound to say, but...

That was pretty profound, and that actually kind of relates to this other question that I had noted down. In an interview with my friend Barbara Beitz (Hi, Barbara!) on her blog, Jewish Books for Kids and More, you said, in reference to The Lost Ryu, "confronting the past is something we all have to do together." So can you talk more about that and how that idea relates to your writing?

So in The Lost Ryu, coming face to face, spoiler alert I guess, with dragons, was kind of an unearthing of a shameful or traumatic past that Kohei, this little 10 year old boy, obviously couldn't have done alone. I mean, none of us really remember the vast majority of our history. We hear that from our parents, we hear it from our grandparents. We absorb it from our community, in the way our communities act. But all of that has a very real influence on us and in The Lost Ryu, one thing that Kohei was kind of resentful about, upset about, is that he was forced to do a lot of remembering on his own. His parents, his grandfather, they were traumatized, and so he was angry. And his Jewish friend Isolde, she was angry because this history that she had managed to get a little bit out of her parents, but she really didn't understand what had happened to her family during World War II. She is kind of angry and resentful that she has to carry this burden, and she feels she has to carry it alone, because it's so painful for her parents to talk about. In Golemcrafters, there's almost this inverse where Faye also feels angry and upset that she has to carry these memories, but she does learn that carrying them means being a part of the Jewish community, and that is where she can get this this kind of sustenance. Faye does eventually learn that remembering the past is what brings the members of our community that we've lost, back into the fold and back into our lives, and that sense of community is what sustains us. It's better to have these memories. That is very much worth the price of remembering, the burden of remembering.

So with this theme being so important to both of your books, have you personally experienced some kind of confronting the past?

Yeah, so I'll give two examples, one from each side of my family, corresponding to each book. With The Lost Ryu, one thing that Kohei finds out is that his parents were essentially exiled from Japan during the war. They were accused of being communists and had to flee to the continent. And this was actually something I found out about my grandfather's family at my grandfather's funeral, like in a eulogy given by one of his colleagues. My great grandfather was an economist, kind of a dangerous thing to study when you're fighting against the Soviet Union, so the Imperial police raided his office, found unauthorized materials, and they had to flee the country for the duration of the war. And I remember sitting there in this church because my maternal grandfather was Catholic, and thinking, like, wow, this is really interesting. And also, what a bad time to hear this story when the person who really should have been telling it is already gone. That's that side of the family.

But then with Golemcrafters, there was this really kind of funny incident. So in the latter half of the book, Faye is surrounded by ghosts, including the ghosts of many of her Jewish grandmothers. They're having a Passover seder, and one of her like, great, great something or other grandmothers, gets very indignant about the fact that they are eating canned gefilte fish and not using her recipe, which is the best recipe, of course. I felt like it was something that would happen if you had the ghosts of many Jewish grandmothers all watching your seder and critiquing it. But then, after I wrote that, at my family's own Passover seder that year, my aunt, who converted to Judaism, was recalling her very first Passover Seder, which was with my father's family. And she remembered my great grandmother was there complaining, like, oh, you know, back in my day, we made the gefilte fish from scratch, we didn't eat it from these jars, to which my grandmother allegedly said, Well, yes, but some women have jobs now, mom. But what really struck me is that this great grandmother, whose voice, I guess I intuited, is the Jewish great grandmother that I never had a chance to meet. I was lucky enough to meet my other Jewish great grandmother, and I have memories of her, but I don't have memories of my other great grandmother. And so what struck me was that in writing this book, she kind of came back to me. It's a little weird that she chose this time to complain about gefilte fish, but, you know, maybe that's what she really wanted me to know. And I will say it's one heck of a power move.

That's great. I love that.

So everything about The Lost Ryu was fascinating, but I was particularly touched by the character of Isolde. She is a Japanese American Jew, and all four of her grandparents died in camps: her father's in European concentration camps and her mother's in Japanese internment camps in the US. And her Jewishness is not a major part of the story, but to me, it felt very significant. So can you talk about her and what she means to you?

I mean, she represents a part of me, obviously, her very ethnically specific heritage, but in the book, her role is essentially showing the cost of not remembering. She really did not have any idea of the history a single generation prior to hers. All she was able to get out of her parents was the names of her grandparents and where they died. And so there are all these gaps, and the gaps are painful and the gaps are harmful. All she knows is that there is this horrible thing standing behind her and she can't turn back and see what it is. Yeah, I think Isolde is the character that most resembles me physically, but also is least like me. I think am a lot more like Kohei, and I also know a lot more about history because of the efforts of isolde's generation when they grew up, and also the efforts of Jewish organizations to archive the past, to examine the past, all that critical work.

I loved when Kohei tells Isolde, "I promise to be your ally," he says, "I promise to take your battles seriously, even though they're different from mine, I promise I'll be there by your side," he says. And that was such a beautiful moment of like, literal allyship. Have you experienced allyship like that, either the giving or the receiving end?

I suppose it's difficult to say, not because I haven't had those moments, but because kind of my entire family is one of those moments. My parents come from very different backgrounds. My aunt comes from a very different background. But we all sit at that Passover seder table together. It's simple when I say it out loud, we may have complicated history behind it, but when we're all sitting together, it's a very simple thing.

That's beautiful. I found Golemcrafters to be remarkable in how it captured what antisemitism feels like from the receiving end, how it messes with your mind. It can cause you to turn that hate inward. And I want to read you a quote, and I have to tell you that when I was reading Golemcrafters, I didn't have a physical copy. I was reading a digital review copy, and so I couldn't put sticky notes. If I had had the book, it would have been full of sticky notes. But instead I was like, cutting and pasting bits that I wanted to sticky note. So on page 168 your main character, Faye, says, quote, "Shame washes over me, hot and vile. What's wrong with us? I wonder, what did we do to deserve all this violence? It must have been something we must be doing something wrong." So can you talk about that passage?

Yeah. So that passage tries to address the cognitive dissonance that I think a lot of us feel where, you know, there are these intelligent people, people we maybe admire, who have these preconceived notions about Jewish people. So we think, Well, maybe I'm the one who's wrong about this. Because how could, how could someone who is kind, how could someone who is empathetic, be so cruel to me? I think a lot of us, in order to resolve that dissonance, ends up kind of turning it inward. I see it almost as an extension of what we do to try to justify God's action or inaction, where we think, okay, all these horrible things are happening, and that's a really difficult thing to reckon with. I think it's a lot easier to turn it inward and to say, Well, clearly we're doing something incorrect that God is just trying to rectify. Because if we want to believe in a just God, we have to believe that everything that happens to us is justified. And I think that that can twist up emotions and, and kind of how people reckon with trauma. And it's one of those big questions that, again, I kind of feel almost silly bringing up, like, Why does a good just God allow bad things to happen? It's like the eternal question. I think I saw it on The Simpsons once.

Well, the Simpsons is more profound than people give it credit for. But yeah, it is the eternal question, why do bad things happen to good people? You know, it's even the title of a book. So your book also addresses that same question. Faye also thinks that Jewish kids don't get to have a Narnia, that all will ever get to be is a sad lesson for someone else to learn, in a sort of People Love Dead Jews kind of way.

Yeah.

So Faye believes that. Do you believe that?

I don't believe that. In recent years, we've had this beautiful explosion of Jewish children's literature that has allowed Jews to live even past the end of the book. A.J. Sass's work is phenomenal. Deke Moulton's work is absolutely phenomenal. What Faye was saying is kind of like a reflection of my own feelings. I was lucky enough to grow up in a time when there were diverse books, but only to a point. There were books about Asian Americans, but it could only ever be about the immigrant experience, or like this super ancient folklore stuff, and also a bit of frustration about how the only books I read about Jewish kids had to do with the Holocaust. I think Faye saying that out loud is also to some degree, a condemnation of myself, in a way. I promised myself I would never write a Holocaust book. I don't think it's my place to write a Holocaust book, for starters. I instead managed to write an everything-but-the-Holocaust book. Like, this book I wrote, it still centers around Jewish pain and suffering, and while I tried to infuse some amount of joy into it, I think Faye is also kind of calling me out a little bit, which is, I think, an important thing that I had to keep in mind while writing the book, and I'm still keeping in mind, and I promise to myself, to listeners, to everyone, my next book will be exclusively goofy Jewish joy.

Well, that'll round out your offerings. You'll have represented so many different aspects of the Jewish experience.

Faye goes through despair about how implacable antisemitism is, but she comes out the other side. So can you talk about how she learns to deal with it?

I mean, I already mentioned the ghosts who show up and are very funny and try to make her laugh. I think a lot of the despair is from feeling like she's alone, even when she has family around her, because these are family members who either don't want to talk about the past or who only want to talk about the past in like, super academic terms. Her grandfather is a much nicer person than Kohei's grandfather was, but he still has his limitations when it comes to talking about feelings and messy emotions, and he sometimes kind of talks past her. And so Faye feels alone and isolated when she has to take this burden on herself, but then the ghosts show up. It is fundamentally a direct effect of golemcrafting, of remembering, of telling stories that maybe hurt to remember. And so when the ghosts make her laugh, when they do something silly... her great grandfather causes some shenanigans for her grandfather, as he did in life... that is the only thing that really makes her feel better. And I think what it is, is community. You know, she's gonna have to carry this burden even if she doesn't know what it is. And I would argue that carrying a burden where, you know, you don't know where it came from is so much worse than carrying it knowing. And so by the end of the book, she realizes that she isn't alone, and that by remembering all these horrible things, she ends up with an army of ancestors to support her, which she wouldn't have if she didn't remember.

All right, thank you. On a lighter note, Faye's grandfather makes a really interesting point when Faye reminds him that Jews only believe in one God. Here's the quote, "'We're only allowed to *worship* one God,' Zeyde says. 'There have always been others. He wouldn't have needed to specify, otherwise.'" So can you talk about that?

I did a great deal of research. The bibliography at the back is chapter length. The bulk of this book was written during quarantine, so I really had nothing better to do. So I basically spent all my time on JSTOR, researching not just history, but the history of religion. And I had a great deal of fun. I ended up getting really fascinated by the question of biblical authorship, which I love because it's basically literary analysis with a historical bent and a spiritual bent, which is like my favorite thing. And so what kind of struck me was how much history is in the Bible, not in what's written, but what isn't written, or what contradicts itself and all of that. And it's the kind of thing that I don't necessarily want to get into too much, because it's a sensitive and complex topic within the Jewish community. But one thing that I like when it comes to that period of time before we were purely monotheistic, when we were, and I'm going to pronounce this incorrectly, I'm sure, monolitristic, when we believed in the existence of many other gods, but did not worship any of them because we agreed to only worship our God because of the covenants. What I find fascinating about that is the room there is for syncretizing, that we can hear stories of the gods of other cultures as long as we don't worship them, we can learn from those stories and respect those stories. I think that that's something that I love about Judaism, is that we don't universalize our own religion.

That's so interesting. So, I was so fascinated by your exploration of antisemitism, we haven't really talked about the golems.

Oh, yeah. So that was the experience of writing the book, too. I was, I was, you know, writing all this historical stuff. And my editor, Arthur, was like, so, so, so, when do they craft golems? It's like, oh, right, that's the title. I should have remembered that.

Yeah. I think many listeners are familiar with golems, but let's just be thorough. Go ahead and explain what golems are.

Golems in Jewish mythology, generally, are humanoid figures sculpted from clay and brought to life with the name of God or the word EMET inscribed either on a piece of paper under the golem's tongue or on the forehead. There's a lot of variation, because it is a folktale, the golem has ended up representing a lot of different things. I mean, it's a lump of clay. You can sculpt it into anything that it needs to be, which is very meta. The book that really informed my sense of golem intertextuality was The Golem Redux, a summing up of golems in media. Jewish golems, specifically, not like the Pokemon, which is not a golem, although there is a golem Pokemon that is not called Golem or Gollum, it's one of my favorites. Anyway, the golem has been used to represent hubris, the kind of classic Frankenstein narrative, although that comes along a lot later. It's been used to represent stories, storytelling, memory, all that kind of stuff. I mean, I did not come up with any of this symbolism, which I think is apropos given the role that golems have taken in the Jewish collective consciousness.

And what is the role of golems? Why do people make them?

The role of the golem has traditionally been protection. The golem can take beatings, take bullets, in a way that people can't. In Golemcrafters, I kind of leaned into it in a more symbolic sense of, golems provide protection of the spirit more than the body, because golems, they're animated with memories. They're animated with the truth, with the Hebrew language, with Hebrew memories; because of this, they can protect our souls. So that's my contribution to golem canon.

So how did you come up with the idea of golemcrafting as a skill passed from generation to generation?

I don't know. I think it's something that I kind of took for granted. This is the first time I'm thinking about that. Yeah, it just kind of seemed intuitive. So much of who we are as Jews is taught to us, either just by being around other Jewish people, or learning our history, our language, our culture. And so it seems like golems should be something our grandparents give us.

For those not familiar with Japanese culture, what do you want readers to most understand from reading The Lost Ryu?

From The Lost Ryu, there's a set of kanji, of written characters that Kohei thinks mean one thing that actually mean another. One thing that I think Jewish people will really be able to appreciate about the Japanese language is that it has a great propensity for puns and dual meanings and bilingual tautologies, which is a huge thing in Yiddish and in other diaspora languages. I think one thing that we can come together for is puns. I mean, golems are kind of brought to life by wordplay. The version of the story I'm using is, you know, you write emet on the forehead and then erase the aleph, and it becomes met, which is death. So there's like death in truth and all of that.

And for readers who are not familiar with Judaism, what do you most want them to learn from Golemcrafters?

I want them to learn that Judaism is as much a people as it is a religion. That was one thing that was kind of difficult to articulate, certainly when I was younger, the idea that Judaism is the traditional practices and culture of the Jewish people. That we make Judaism, as opposed to, you know, on on my mother's side of the family, Christianity making them Christians, if that makes sense. And it's something that in the book, Faye's mother understands implicitly, because she has had, you know, this erasure of her own ethno religion because her parents converted to Christianity, it's something she understands, but can't quite articulate. And so her role in Golemcrafters is basically to, almost like Isolde, kind of represent erasure, and she tries to articulate that to her children. Doesn't really work at first, but they get it later on.

So that's reminding me there's sort of a hint that Faye's Japanese heritage is also from a minority within Japan. Can you explain who those people are?

Yes. So this is also something that comes from my mother's side of the family. Many people don't know, and I think this is one thing that I would like people to learn about Japanese culture from Golemcrafters, is that within Japanese people, there's a very diverse set of different practices, different cultures. There's this kind of, I guess, flattening of Japanese culture here in the West. You know, it's sushi and anime, but there are different dialects of Japanese and within Japan there are ethnic minorities as well. So Faye's experience with the ghosts of her mother's ancestors, who try to show up alongside all the Jewish grandmothers, but can't quite manage it because they've been forgotten, is this frustration with the way that genealogy is remembered in Japan. So in Japan, there are family records, and they're very extensive. They often go back centuries, if not millennia. But they are all Confucian in style, which means that it's the man, head of the household. Everyone else is kind of superfluous. And so looking at maternal lines can be very difficult, especially if they are from a minority culture. My family is from Hokkaido, which was not annexed by Japan until, I believe, the late 1800s, and so I have this branch of my family, my maternal line, that is just kind of, I guess, blurred, if that makes sense, like, I know my great grandmother's name, but her name is a little bit odd. Her maiden name, it's not a name. And so then there's the question of, like, Okay, did my grandmother romanize it incorrectly, or was this a deliberate erasure? That's the branch of the family that aren't samurai. In family lore, she's referred to as a war bride, but I genuinely don't know which war it would have been, given the timeline. And so there's all this kind of messy questioning. And I think Faye expresses this frustration that she has, that I have, of history being erased, and it's the question of, okay, well, whose history gets to be remembered? Oftentimes it's not women, oftentimes it's not cultures that are minorities.

And what was her name?

Her family name is listed as Matade. It means "later." And so I like to imagine that like there was the census, and they were like, What's your last name? And she was like, oh, Matade, matade, I'll answer later. And they were like, Ah, yes, okay. Her last name is Later, but you know, it could be Madate, which is kind of a surname. It's just very uncommon, yeah, it's just weird.

Wow. What was the easiest part and what was the most challenging part of writing either or both of these books?

The easiest part for me in writing is always the dialog, the characters, the way they speak, that comes to me pretty easily. The hard part for Golemcrafters specifically was finding a balance between my academic, verbose, talks way too much about linguistics, part of my brain, and the part of my brain that wants to write a good story that people actually want to read. There's so much history in our culture. There's so much cool, juicy linguistics bits. Arthur kind of had to reign me in a couple of times. There's this one scene basically just like gushing about the existence, not only of bilingual tautologies, but also like bilingual tautological, like, verb nominalization, and yeah, I've had editors have to basically tell me, like, Okay, this is very exciting for you. Let's maybe go back to the children's book you're writing.

[MUSIC, ANNOUNCEMENT] Listeners come and hang out with me! During November 2024 there are two ways we can spend some time together. You can bid on my Jewish Joy Reading Party at The Artists Against Antisemitism auction, which takes place November 13-20, 2024, to have me host a private virtual event for you and your friends. And you can join me for Cheering On Jewish Books, a free online talk that I'm giving on November 20, 2024 at 7pm Eastern. Details are in the show notes at bookoflifepodcast.com. I can't wait to see you! Now, back to our Creature Double Feature conversation. [END ANNOUNCEMENT]

So you've written a supernatural Jewish story, and I'm wondering if there are other books that you think might be good read alikes for your own book.

So Deke Moulton's Don't Want to Be Your Monster, and Benji Zeb Is a Ravenous Werewolf. I love both of those titles. They do a fantastic job of subverting expectations with mythology. Aden Polydoros' golem book, Wrath Becomes Her, is actually another golem book. There are a lot of great golem books. And not supernatural I don't think, if I recall correctly, but The City Beautiful as well, was beautiful, and as Chicagoan myself, very educational and also very bloody and scary.

Yeah. Well, it has a dybbuk, so it is supernatural.

Oh, yes, yes, yes. Okay. And speaking of which, Aviva versus the Dybbuk by Mari Lowe and also, When the Angels Left the Old Country, which is not middle grade, it's very much older, YA, but it's still absolutely phenomenal.

All great choices. I love all the books you just mentioned.

Thank you.

It's Tikkun alum time.

Yes.

So what action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?

Well, at the risk of sounding like a side character on a PBS show, visit your local library and request diverse books that you want to see on the shelves. That's something that I didn't realize you could do until I became an author. But you know, talking to librarians, putting in purchase requests for diverse books, will show them that we want diverse books. We want to see lots of diverse perspectives on the shelves, including Jewish books. Right now, obviously there's an organized assault on the right to read diverse literature, but it's by a very vocal minority of people. I looked up the stats earlier, it's like an astonishingly small number of people making an astonishing amount of noise. And so if you are part of the silent vast majority of people who love kidlit and who love reading diverse books, speak up for your local library and talk to librarians. I think they like talking about books, I'm pretty sure.

We do! Thank you. Is there an interview question you never get asked that you would like to answer?

Oh, that's such a good question. I think that counts as one. That felt like a very Jewish exchange of like, what questions are good to question like, oh, well, the question's a question.

Well, if you think of something, we can circle back to it.

Okay.

What are you working on next?

So I'm working on my goofy Jewish joy book, which is a highly fictionalized, but nevertheless surprisingly mostly true account of my Hebrew school class's shenanigans. I attended Hebrew school at a very strange synagogue at a very strange moment in American history. I attended the synagogue that was across the street from then Senator Barack Obama's house in 2007. I was, you know, third grade. And also the synagogue was, like, completely broke because the recession and all of that. And so we had a lot of fun doing experiments with, like moldy water that was in the classrooms. One of my classmates ate part of the ceiling that fell in. Yeah, it's, it's, it's absolutely wild, but also a very special part of my life.

Okay, that sounds like a lot of fun. I look forward to that. Where can listeners learn more about your work.

I'm not on social media anymore. Very glad I did that, but my website is EmiCohenWrites.com.

Is there anything else you want to talk about that I haven't thought to ask you

The audiobook. I narrated the audiobook for Golemcrafters. That was a very interesting experience. I don't really write my books with the audiobooks in mind. But I will say that when I was writing Golemcrafters, which has many languages in it, including one that is completely made up, I was writing, I was just thinking, oh, man, I really feel for whatever poor sap they get to narrate this audiobook. And then it turns out it was me. I was the poor sap. I guess I flew too close to the sun, but it was very fun. It was, you know, it was a brand new experience for me, which is always great. Basically, in Golemcrafters, there is Hebrew, there's Japanese, there's what the characters call Effalese, which is kind of a Judeo-Japanese pidgin language that I made up because, again, I had a lot of time on my hands in quarantine. There's a little bit of Mandarin, though not as much as in earlier drafts. And there are lines in Yiddish, in Ladino, which I really struggled with in the audiobook. If I had known that I would be reading it out loud in public, I probably would not have included those quotes, because I do not speak either language. So if you want to hear me struggle through that, and if you want to hear lots of different languages that all in some way tie to my personal Jewish experience, the audiobook would be the place to do that.

So is that the reason they asked you to narrate it because of all of the languages?

Yeah, basically. My editor received an email from the casting director at the audiobook company. Very considerate of them, actually, they were concerned about finding a narrator who was half Japanese and half Jewish, which is obviously kind of a very specific ask. And Arthur, my editor was like, well, we have the author.

Okay, so one more question. In your end note, you said you wanted to write your d'var torah for your bat mitzvah about Doctor Who. And I am a huge Whovian, and so I loved seeing that. Did you end up writing about Doctor Who?

I did end up writing my d'var torah about Doctor Who. I managed to fool my rabbi into thinking that I was also writing about the torah. But let's be real, it was all Doctor Who. My parsha was Shemini so the smiting of Nadav and Avihu, and so I was like, Okay, this is exactly like that episode of Doctor Who where Queen Victoria gets bitten by a werewolf, because something about punishment. I don't really know how I how I managed to make that connection, but it was apparently very convincing, because I had older relatives come over and be like, Wow, that was so profound, you managed to tie in, you know, all these different things. And I was just kind of smiling and nodding like, Okay, it worked, they didn't know that I just wanted to talk about Doctor Who to a captive audience.

I'm trying to remember the name of that episode. So that's a Tenth doctor and Rose.

Yes. It was like, Tooth and Claw or something like that.

Yeah, Tooth and Claw, that's the one. Okay, did you happen to think of any other question that you wish you would be asked?

Yes, actually.

Oh, good!

About the languages. What influence did all the languages that I've been exposed to in life have on my work? The experience of being raised surrounded by all these different languages really informs the role of language in culture and storytelling, the role of a language dying, the tragedy in that, it's very important to me as a Jewish person, as a Japanese person with questionable kind of blurry heritage. Also, it's just really fun to work in multilingual puns in my work, big fan of those.

So are there any particular puns that we should be watching for, any Easter eggs or afikomens?

Okay, so two things. One is a pun that has been a big part of my life, and the other is: in the book, the names of some of the characters work in multiple ways. Faye's name, Faye is derived from the Yiddish word for bird. Faye's Japanese name is Asuka, which is also a bird name. But then Faye, in school, learns Mandarin, as I did, and so the way that her Japanese kanji are read in Mandarin is Fei-Niao. So "fay" is in both and so she's just a bird. That's a little bit of fun kind of multilingual bird play. And the other pun was the very first pun I ever told. I was two years old. My family lived in this cozy little one bedroom apartment that was up several flights of stairs. So you know, every time we were climbing those stairs, my mother and I, we would count the stairs in different languages. Apparently, when I was two years old, we were doing Japanese, you know, ichi, which is one, and then ni, which is two, and then I apparently stopped like in the middle staircase. Was like, wait, wait, this is very important. And then I pointed to my knee, and was like "Ni!," and just burst out laughing, and that was my very first pun.

That is so adorable!

So yeah, multilingual puns have always been a big part of the ways that I annoy my parents, so.

Awesome. Emi Watanabe Cohen, thank you so much for talking with me.

Thank you so much for having me. This was a wonderful conversation, and I love this podcast, so it's really just an honor to be here.

Oh, thank you!

[MUSIC, ANNOUNCEMENT] If you want to hear the rest of EmI's and my conversation about Doctor Who, be sure to listen all the way to the end after the credits. In the meantime, here's a dedication from upcoming guests will be joining the podcast for a celebration of Hanukkah in December 2024

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi, this is Henry Hertz. I'm an author and the editor of Festival of Lights, which features short stories from a number of people, including Erica Perl and Joanne Levy.

Hi, I'm Erica Perl. I am one of the authors that Henry mentioned, and was featured in Festival of Lights.

And I'm Joanne Levy, another of the authors from Festival of Lights, and also the author of Let It Glow. And we would like to dedicate our episode to any Jewish kids or adults who have ever been overlooked or were made to feel less than around the holidays.

[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!

Doctor Who was like my entire life in middle school, like I had parts of episodes memorized. I think I kind of fell off like mid season seven, and then I've watched bits and pieces here and there, but I will say that my favorite duo is the 10th Doctor and Donna, just because I love that they were just friends. I love their kind of dynamic. I love that that Donna was so ordinary and that that became why she was so special, is because she was so ordinary. They were also just very funny together.

Absolutely, yeah, I was the same way in high school. I just like, lived and breathed Doctor Who, had passages memorized, went to conventions, dressed up. So who was your first Doctor?

Chris Eccleston.

Okay.

Who is also very underrated, honestly.

Yes.

Yeah.

Have you watched classic Who?

A little bit. When I was younger, there would always be one or two seasons on Netflix, but it was always a different set of seasons, and never chronological. But I really liked going back and watching the very earliest episodes, especially the ones, you know, all black and white, terrible special effects. You know, the the Daleks were literally trash cans. That era is just very special to me.

Yeah. I'm a lot older than you. So before, you know, the new thing was still a twinkle in Russell T Davies' eye, I was watching classic Who on PBS. And so what you're describing about just sort of random episodes, not in order. You know, that was our experience on PBS. But Tom Baker was my first Doctor.

Oh, Tom Baker, the legend.

Yeah. And what do you think of Ncuti Gatwa?

I've only seen one episode, but it was a very delightful episode, just very joyful and, yeah, silly, but also profound, yeah, which is, I think what Doctor Who is at its best. It's silly, and then you realize you're crying.

Right! All right, fun!