[COLD OPEN, ANSWERING MACHINE BEEP] Hi, this is Toby Harris. I just finished listening to Gavriet Savit on the Book of Life podcast. What a fabulous interview that was! I am so struck by how articulate and creative and what a mensch he is. I really enjoyed it. And I'm looking forward to the next one, about Whistle. Take care. Bye!
[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. We've met today's guest before, or rather we've met her mild mannered alter ego. In December 2018, I interviewed Emily Jenkins about her picture book All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah. Now Emily's back in the guise of E. Lockhart, the pen name she uses for her young adult fiction. She'll tell us about her graphic novel Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero, from her home in Gotham, or New York. City, so you're going to hear some atmospheric traffic noise in the background kind of setting the scene for us.
I'm pleased to tell you that this episode is sponsored by Every Child a Reader in honor of Children's Book Week, November 8th through 14th, 2021. The theme is "Reading is a Superpower!" Go to bookoflifepodcast.com to find out how you can join the Superpower Challenge.
Whistle is one of over 100 kidlit titles listed in The Book of Life's new Casual Jewish Diversity section. These are books which include Jewish representation, but the story doesn't rely on the Jewish identity of the characters. Check it out under the READ tab at bookoflifepodcast.com And if you have more books to suggest, email me at bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. Okay, are you ready to visit Gotham? Up, up, and away!
Welcome to The Book of Life.
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
Tell us about Whistle.
Whistle is my first graphic novel. It's out now from DC Comics and is the story of a young woman, a Jewish teenage activist living in a neighborhood in Gotham City, which, if you don't know is the city where Batman lives and all of his terrible villains reside doing their nefarious things. And she's in a tough place. She's supporting her single mother who is a professor of Jewish history and culture who has become too ill to work any longer. They have no health insurance. She's trying to make her way through high school while working nights and she ends up taking a job in the Gotham City underworld and succumbing to some of its temptations. So while she's in this dark place where she is doing maybe some bad things for some very good reasons, she gets superpowers, as you do in this kind of story, and so does her Great Dane friend Lebowitz. So the two of them become the superhero team and then Willow has to figure out what kind of person she really wants to be and how she's going to really navigate the world with these powers.
And why is she called Whistle? Why is that her superhero name?
She has canine related superpowers. So she and this Great Dane have a mind meld and can talk to each other because you know what would be better, if you became a superhero, than to talk to your incredibly awesome dog? But she also has super powered hearing and super powered smell, which are very good detective powers. And she has a whistle that calls an army of dogs, which is a really really great power for combating crime. And I invented it, as far as I knew, kind of out of thin air or out of things I'd read as a child and things like that, and then I recently saw the Suicide Squad, the new Suicide Squad movie in which Ratcatcher 2 commands an army of rats with a whistle, and I had never heard, I mean Ratcatcher is kind of an obscure villain and was reinvented as Ratcatcher 2 in the Suicide Squad, but it turns out in the movie --spoiler alert-- to be basically the best and most powerful of all the superheroes on the team. It's just the best power, it's really incredible to command an army of animals and dogs are even more awesome to command than rats. I'm just saying.
Love it! How did you get the opportunity to create a brand new superhero?
Oh, thank you for asking. DC invited me. I mean, long story short, they called me up and said would you like to invent a superhero? And I said, Yes, please. A slightly longer version of the story is that I met them at this wonderful convention called LibraryCon. It was a conference that brought all of these librarians who worked on pop culture, a lot of youth librarians, but also adult librarians, people who do comics, who do gaming in their libraries, who do young adult literature, manga, all that kind of stuff. So I was at that conference talking about a young adult novel, and that's where I met these DC editors. When I went to LA next they invited me to come and have a tour of the DC archives and that was incredibly cool. You know, long ago in my life, I got a PhD in English literature, and I wrote a book history dissertation and I spent a lot of time in rare book rooms, looking at old beautiful illustrated editions of famous novels and so to be taken into this archive that was like full of first editions and original art and movie memorabilia, and to be shown, like the visual history of some of these characters that had meant so much to people over the years... I was sort of like, ooh, do I want to write a superhero? Well, yes, I did want to write a superhero. I kind of always wanted to write a superhero. But I was really, really swayed by this incredible archive tour because I just remembered how much these characters have meant to people, how much they had meant to me since childhood, and how much they've meant to people since the 30s. So it really gave me a sense of like, being a part of something.
And what was it about your earlier work or about you that made DC invite you?
I think that they read this book of mine called Genuine Fraud, which is a story of a con artist and a very intense friendship that goes wrong between the con artist and her mark. In that book, a lot of the protagonist's kind of psychological state is filtered through action movies, and superhero narratives. So it was really like engaging with these narratives in a kind of maybe a meta sense. Or maybe, you know, what do they mean to people like deep down in their psyche, especially if their psyche's a little twisted? But I think they knew that I was kind of into that stuff.
Why was it important to you to make Willow Zimmerman an identifiably Jewish character?
Well, I think it started with the neighborhood. So Gotham City has been reimagined and reimagined and reimagined by different filmmakers and different comic book artists and I was looking for a way to use that wonderful roster of Gotham City rogues, all the villains that my heroine might fight. I wanted to try my hand at these characters, but I was trying to figure out a way to make what my hero might do in Gotham City matter when there's all these large heroes like Batman and Nightwing running around already so I thought, what if she is a neighborhood superhero? We know that local issues make a huge difference, right? That working on problems at a local level can end up influencing things on a national level and can make a very big difference in the lives of the people in the local area that you're working on. And we've been thinking about that in politics more and more in recent years, and I've been more aware of it, because I thought what if she was a local hero, and I could make a neighborhood for her to operate in and I had done a bunch of research on New York's Lower East Side for All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah. It was a really fascinating and I also grew up going to the Lower East Side. My dad lived on East 15th Street when I was a kid for many, many years. You know, that is the East Village, which is adjacent to the Lower East Side. I also grew up reading Sydney Taylor's books about the Lower East Side and connecting with them, because those are stories actually about like my paternal family, like not actually, but you know what I mean? Those were my, yeah, my people came over around that time right at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, from Poland and from Russia. My grandma's family had a grocery store and my grandpa worked in a lace factory. That was a family history that I was really proud of and connected to even though I'm a pretty secular person. But I always identified with this Jewish heritage and with the Jewish side of my family and with what they had gone through in earlier generations to come here to make a life for themselves, was always proud of that. So I was like, yes, the Lower East Side is going to be the neighborhood that I create in Gotham and I kind of used a lower East Side in the 1980s when it's pretty run down, but it's still a historically Jewish neighborhood with important historical Jewish businesses and culture, but that's also populated by a bunch of different kinds of people. I thought this is a rich and interesting neighborhood that I could see somebody caring about saving, about keeping, right, if it's under threat. I think a kid who understood its history and what it might mean to her and her family would care. So I started with that. My dad is Jewish. My mom's in a new age religion. So in that sense, a lot of people wouldn't consider me Jewish. My spouse is Jewish. And many of my friends in my community are Jewish, more religious or equally religious to me. People are in Workers Circle, things like that. And especially the Workers Circle kids, like those people are active, active in like good works and community service and really aware, and other kids I know also in New York City are incredibly aware of the issues that are at stake in their world, doing things, writing zines, and going to protests and raising their voices and doing journalistic projects or art projects related to the things that they would like to heal in their world. When I was a teenager, I'm like Willow in that I lived with my single mom and money was tight, but I was just looking to make out with a boy, drink beer, go to a party. I wanted to act in the school musical, like that's what I cared about. I was not thinking about the rest of the world. I was thinking about me, me and also me, and so many teenagers I know are not like that. So I could see a connection between those teenagers that I knew, the teenager I once was, the activist values of the Workers Circle kids I knew, and there was room for a Jewish hero. You know, I started looking and there weren't so many; in fact, Whistle is the first DC hero to launch as Jewish, that is not to be retrofitted as Jewish in a re-invention, since 1977.
Wow, that's interesting.
Yeah, Harley Quinn is Jewish. She is a villain. She is their most popular and most famous Jewish character, but she is not such a good person.
Right. What was the response of DC when you told them you wanted to create a Jewish superhero?
They were just fully on board. They just said yes. Then we had some conversations about, should she be maybe more religious than I was at first inclined to make her? should we lean in harder? And I wanted to stay in my lane, so to speak, you know, I wanted to write what I felt I could write honestly and truthfully. I didn't want to be writing a relationship to Jewish identity that I didn't share completely. So they were like, oh, okay, we get that, that's cool. They've been completely, completely supportive and lovely.
Excellent. You give the Riddler the last name of Nachtberger. It's not canon, but are you suggesting that the Riddler is Jewish?
Yes, my version of the Riddler is Jewish for sure.
Excellent. I read in J. Weekly, that you drew some inspiration from the way G. Willow Wilson created Kamala Khan, the Muslim American Ms Marvel. Tell us about that. And also, is that why you named your character Willow?
No, that's not why I named my character Willow. I've never met her. I named Willow after a young student activist that I know, the daughter of one of my friends, you know, it's a beautiful name. I love a plant name. I thought Poison Ivy would like a plant name. I knew I was going to work with Poison Ivy, thought that was a nice parallel. It's always nice to have some mirrors of your hero in your villain and vice versa. About Ms. Marvel... Oh, that's such a good book. Everyone should go out and have a read of the first book that collects the comics together into a single narrative arc, illustrated by Adrian Alphona. I just thought that team of creaters did such a wonderful job on many, many levels. But one of them was thinking about Kamala Khan's relationship to her own superheroic body. So when she first becomes Ms. Marvel as a Muslim teenager, she literally transforms physically into Carol Danvers, who is now Captain Marvel. That's the character that Brie Larson plays in the movies, who is like, you know, blonde, what we used to call all-American type superhero physique. Kamala is sort of like, why am I turning into Carol Danvers? It is because that's the model of superheroism that she has and in the, in the powers that she has her body can transform, and she can sort of superpower strength through especially her fist, but the whole of her could possibly transform. And so it basically takes a while for her to figure out how to be a superhero in something resembling her own body, in the kind of superhero version of her own teenage Muslim body. I thought that was so smart, right? Like she's wrestling with it. She doesn't have hold of it at first, and she admires these heroes and she doesn't know how to be a hero except in the mode that she has seen thus far. And then she claims it for her own self and I just thought that was so cool. It was not just thoughtful. It was heroic and a little bit funny and teenagery and sometimes a little awkward. And I just thought you know, it was really, really interesting. You know, she made room I think for thinking about identity in superhero comics in a way that I hadn't seen. I thought, Oh, I could do something like that. I have something to bring to this kind of narrative. Not just about identity, but also about the body and power and adolescence and relationships to heroic narratives.
In Whistle there aren't just good guys and bad guys in a traditional comic book kind of way. Talk about the moral complexity that you have made integral to this story.
Thank you for noticing that. I mean, I think a lot of comics are getting very complex. We generally think of comics has good fights evil and that's how it rolls. But a lot of the stuff that I've read recently is really complicated. White Knight, for example, is a really dark and complicated adult Batman comic book, really fascinating in terms of the way it treats good and evil, the recent Harley Quinn appearances in various movies are also complicated. You understand Harley even though she's a villain, you understand she's acting out of rage. She's acting out of wounds. She's also you know, a PhD psychiatrist so she understands exactly what she's up to. In her more sane moments, she can unpack her own villainy. That is to say that I don't think I'm the only one doing this. But yeah, the villains are really interesting in Whistle, I think. The Riddler, Poison Ivy, even Killer Croc who makes a brief appearance, they all think they're up to some good in one way or another. And they all have sympathetic elements to their characters. You know, those are the juiciest villains. Don't you think? I feel like that's always... and comic book villains, there's room to have some fun. There's room to let them spread their wings and you know, cackle and do theatrical things.
Chew the scenery.
Yes!
There are some great discussion questions for Whistle on the Jewish Book Council's website. And I would like to hear your thoughts related to one of those questions.
Sure.
They ask "How does Willow bring her religious identity to the project of heroism?"
Well, I think she does it in two ways. The first way is that basic way that I kind of already talked about, she's thinking about world repair. She's thinking about how to be a good person. She's thinking about social responsibility, and I think of those as core Jewish values. The other thing is that she's never done thinking about what it is to have chosen to be a vigilante superhero. You know, the Jewish intellectual tradition, I don't mean to reduce it to anything. But there is a fundamental interest in unpacking things, in arguing things, in dialogues, right? And in those dialogues not being conclusive necessarily, you come back the next day and you keep talking about it. And that, to me, is what's really interesting about inventing a superhero, is putting somebody in a moral dilemma that is not going to be easily solved, and that person is going to continue on what is hopefully a righteous and useful path. And yet that path will need to be continually interrogated. There are conflicting loyalties. Being a vigilante is not an obviously correct solution to the ills of the world. And this character is going to continue to think about that and I think that's clear. There's a lot of moral tangles that are not untangled at the end of the book, but remain sort of a fundamental part of who she is.
Many superheroes were created by Jewish writers.
Yes!
...and their mission is usually to save the world in some way. So does this tikkun olam mission make superheroes inherently Jewish?
There are definitely scholars who argue that. Siegel and Shuster who invented Superman, it's pretty clear that they were influenced by the story of Samson, the story of the Golem, the story of Frankenstein, which is not a particularly Jewish story, but relates to the Golem story, among other things, including a famous circus strongman who was also Jewish, Sigmund Breitbart, "superman of strength." He used to appear with a Star of David below his name. They sometimes called him "Samson, our hero." He was a very openly Jewish Yiddish-speaking strong man from Poland who was touring the US doing these like strength competitions and exhibitions in like a kind of a Tarzan outfit.
Neat!
Yeah. People have written whole big things about Superman as a Christ figure. But they've also written a lot about Superman through a Jewish lens. Batman was created by Jewish creators, Spider Man was created by Jewish creators. So I think there's a sense in which these characters can be very fruitfully read in multiple ways through a lens of Jewish identity. But I think one thing that's really cool about superheroes, and it's a little bit mysterious to me exactly why this happens, but that readers from all over the world from all different backgrounds, connect with these kinds of characters and project themselves, even when those characters are not at all mirrors of their own experience. That's not to say that every kid is going to see herself, himself, themselves in Batman, but that a lot of kids who are nothing like Batman will see themselves in Batman. I did. It's a cool thing about this kind of story, that we can fantasize that the hero will come to rescue us and we can fantasize that we are the hero, both at once.
Last time we spoke in 2018 we were talking about your Sydney Taylor Book Award winning picture book All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah.
Yes.
And we talked about how it was kind of like fanfiction because you were working with pre existing characters. With Whistle you are working with both new and old characters. So what draws you to writing for characters you didn't invent?
Heidi, you're the first person to ask me this question. That's awesome. Thank you for making that connection. Sometimes it is just really fun to play with characters that you already know. Well, it's just a treat to be offered that chance. I think that early in my career, I might not have wanted to do that because I would have been so invested in getting all the things that were deep inside my mind, that felt original to my own brain, out onto the page. But I've written a lot of books and it's been wonderful, but I'm happy to be handed something wonderful to exercise my mind upon.
What's next for Willow slash Whistle?
She will show up in the Teen Titans Academy comic book. In case you didn't know, the Teen Titans have a school, it's Teen Titans Academy. She's going to show up with the dog in that comic book's next run.
It's Tikkun Olam Time. So this is your chance for a little bit of activism. What action would you like to invite listeners to take to help repair the world?
Oh my gosh, when you told me you were gonna ask me this question, 700 things ran through my head because we've had such a hard year and there's a lot to repair, and I decided to just say something simple, which is: many people in my life have Type 1 diabetes, and I encourage people to read up about it a little bit and to consider donating to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the JDRF; they do very good work. They've made a lot of progress in treating a disease that we still don't know the cause of.
I'll put a link in the show notes.
Thank you.
Is there anything else you'd like to talk about that I haven't thought to ask you?
Oh! Lebowitz, who is named after Fran but looks nothing like Fran...
Lebowitz is the Great Dane.
Oh yes. Lebowitz is the Great Dane sidekick. I just like literary names for dogs and cats. She is the first ever female superhero dog! Krypto, Scooby Doo... I have a list somewhere on my computer of like 15 superhero dogs. But they're all boys. So I'm excited to have brought this big, powerful, funny, Great Dane into the world.
That's great. And because Lebowitz gets to talk with Whistle you get to know her as a person, so to speak, as a character.
Oh, yeah. She has a lot of opinions!
That's great. E. Lockhart, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Heidi. It was a pleasure.
[MUSIC, DEDICATION] I'm Jeff Gottesfeld, author of The Christmas Mitzvah.
And I'm Lee Wind, author of Red and Green and Blue and White.
We're happy to be with you in an upcoming edition of Tthe Book of Life, and I would dedicate this episode to interfaith understanding and friendship.
And it's a perfect match because I want to dedicate it to everyone who's been made to feel bad about being different; here's inspiration to stand up for yourself, to stand up for others, and to move us all forward to a place where our differences are celebrated.
[MUSIC, OUTRO] Don't be a stranger. 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 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, or by making a one time donation to our home library, the Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida. You'll find links to 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] Hi, I'm Sheryl Stahl, and I'm happy to tell you about my new podcast, Nice Jewish Books. I will be speaking to authors about the Jewish content or characters in their fiction. My first episode contains a wonderful conversation with author Mary Marks about her cozy mystery series Quilting Mystery. We talk about Jewish practice, quilting, her fantastic protagonist Martha Rose, and of course, murder. Find us at Jewishlibraries.org/nicejewishbooks.