pseudorandomlog

I figured some of you would be interested in Newbery books with Jewish themes, so I’ve made a list. (As usual, it’s entirely possible I’ve forgotten some, since I’ve been reading this books for nigh on thirty years.)

1931: Agnes Hewes’ Spice and the Devil’s Cave. A kindly older Jewish couple help matchmake our hero and heroine and also lend money to the king of Portugal for voyages of exploration. (The modern reader may have a low opinion of voyages of exploration, but in Hewes’ eyes these are very much a Good Thing.) The entire Jewish community gets kicked unjustly out of Portugal.

1941. Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree features not only a kindly Jewish shopkeeper but an extended musing on how Hungary was formed when everyone - Hungarian landowners, Jewish shopkeepers, some third group that I’m forgetting right now - came together as one. This is a building block toward the book’s central theme: not only are all the people of Hungary one, but in fact all human beings on this earth are one, and therefore can’t we stop tormenting each other with the horrors of war? (A cri de coeur in 1941.)

Then a trifecta of short story collections, written in Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer and then translated into English: Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1967), The Fearsome Inn (1968) (actually a short story made into a picture book), and When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories (1969). Stories of eastern European Jewish life, often very funny or with a supernatural twist.

Then in 1970, the Newbery committee followed this up with Sulamith Ish-kashor’s Our Eddie (Jewish life in the Lower East Side in the 1900s) AND Johanna Reiss’s hiding-from-the-Nazis memoir The Upstairs Room. Another Holocaust memoir followed in 1982: Aranka Siegal’s Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1939-1944.

2008: Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village is a series of poetic monologues told by different members of a medieval village, including a Jewish child.

2017: In Adam Gidwitz’s The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog, the narration rotates between the three magical children, one of whom is Jewish. (I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to plug Gidwitz’s Max in the House of Spies and Max in the Land of Lies, even though they’re not Newbery books. Yet. Max in the Land of Lies is eligible for 2026! Just putting that out there, Newbery committee!

Most recently, Ruth Behar’s 2025 Across So Many Seas is a generational saga of a Sephardic Jewish family, based loosely on Behar’s own family history. The story begins in the 1400s when the family is forced to leave Spain, then continues in the 1900s when a daughter of the family emigrates to Cuba for an arranged marriage. (Behar based this section on her own grandmother’s story, which she recounts in the afterword. The real story seems much more romantic than the tale Behar told to tell instead, which is such a strange choice.) Her daughter becomes a brigadista teaching peasants how to read until she emigrates to the US, and then her daughter vacations in Spain which the family was forced to flee so many generations before.

Edited to add: landofnowhere pointed out that I forgot Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, which is both embarrassing and inexplicable because I read that approximately 500 times as a child, and have reread it at least twice as an adult.

And also E. L. Konigsburg's The View from Saturday, but that one is much less embarrassing, as I read that book once and remember nothing except the fact that I didn't understand any of it. (And also during the quiz bowl at the end, the judges would allow posh to count as an acronym, but not tip. Why did this stick with me? The human mind is a mystery.)