ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM ASSOCIATE EDITOR
The exhibit
includes
works from
Lvov, Tel
Aviv and
Buenos
Aires.
I
S IM
f only Lenin and Trotsky could have been there
when space aliens landed in 1934 and delivered
their message — in Yiddish. "Proletariats!" they
declare in the book Dos Telerl Fun Himl (The
Saucer from the Sky). "Unite!"
Amnon is a little "olive-skinned Jewish lad!'
from Judea who goes on adventures with his
pet goat, Aleez. He buys a suit from a friendly
Arab shopkeeper, then sees a familiar face in
the market. "Why, there is my cousin Shalom
from the university!" he calls. (Where else but
in 1930s' books does anyone speak this way?)
And long before the days of political correct-
ness, Fannie Engle wrote a cookbook for "moth-
ers and daughters." Just reading the recipes
(Honey Candy combines nuts, sugar and gin-
ger) is enough to make even the most vocifer-
ous fat-free addict beg for some of that
old-fashioned cooking.
The aliens, Amnon and a tasty collection of
recipes are all living in the pages of books, part
of the "Letters Dipped in Honey" exhibit that
opens Jan. 14 at the Janice Charach Epstein
Museum/Gallery at the Jewish Community
Center in West Bloomfield. The exhibit, which
runs through Feb. 29, comprises the Moldovan
Family Collection and was organized by the
Yeshiva University Museum of New York.
• Jean Moldovan, of Manhattan, said her in-
terest in collecting began after a store owner
asked whether she might like to see some of his
_Jewish children's books.
lheir pages were often acidic and brown,
the edges of their covers usually rubbed or
cracked, the bindings weak and ripped," she
said. "None of this mattered. Only the books
themselves concerned me: where and when they
were published, if they were illustrated and who
were the artists."
She "gathered them up like poor bereft or-
phan children." Today, hundreds of these little
"orphans" have found a home with Jean
Moldovan.
Visitors expecting a collection of dry Hebrew
texts will be disappointed. This exhibit is breath-
taking, offering a chance to step into a history
filled with nostalgia (will anyone be unmoved
by Laila Toy [Good Night], an anthology of lul-
labies published more than 50 years ago?), ter-
ror (see how Jews in Germany and elsewhere
used literature to speak to their children about
the Nazis) and excitement — like those space
aliens.
The aliens are part of a curious book by Aleph
Katz, with illustrations by Yossel Kutler. Katz
(1898-1969) is probably best-known for his chil-
dren's books, written after the Holocaust, which
promote Jewish tradition. So why the message,
here, of liberating the world's workers? Com-
munism and socialism were the fashion, and
besides, the book was published by the Sholem
Aleichem Institute, a bastion of secularism.
The books come from everywhere — Lvov,
Hanover, Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv — and
every decade. Often their pages are brown and
fading, with a single scribble all that's left to
show the books once were much-loved by some-
one.
"To dear Bonnie, from grandfather," reads
one dedication. A textbook published in 1893 in
Warsaw, listing the names of all the czars and
featuring a poem for 'the holy motherland" (Rus-
sia), bears within a parent's handwritten note:
"Moshe must know (this)." Many of the works
are fun — sometimes intentionally, sometimes