Sydney Taylor Book Award Winners Named
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By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 01/18/2010
Stories about the Jewish New Year, Staten Island in the 1980s, and the sale of Cuban visas to Jewish refugees during World War II were named winners in this year’s Sydney Taylor Book Awards, which celebrates new books that combine literary excellence with an accurate portrait of the Jewish world.
Author April Halprin Wayland and illustrator Stéphane Jorisch picked up the gold medal in the Younger Readers Category for their book New Year at the Pier: A Rosh Hashanah Story (Dial, 2009), which tells the tale of a little boy named Izzy and his family as they prepare for Tashlich, a Jewish New Year ceremony where people toss pieces of bread into water as a symbol of casting their sins away.
Izzy "compares Tashlich to cleaning out his toy closet, an example of the wonderful way this story conveys to children, at their own level, a contemporary version of the healthy Jewish way we start fresh at the beginning of each new year," says Susan Berson, a member of the award committee, in a release.
Robin Friedman, who wrote The Importance of Wings (Charlesbridge, 2009), received a gold award in the Older Readers Category for her coming-of-age tale of two Jewish girls, Roxanne and Liat, the latter of whom has just moved to Staten Island from Israel, and their friendship amid immigrant experience and middle school crushes.
Author Margarita Engle earned her gold medal in the Teen Readers Category for Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (Holt, 2009), a story that explains the complicated and not well-known agreement by the country to take some Jewish refugees in—for a price—after Kristallnacht in Germany.
Named for Sydney Taylor, author of the "All-of-a-Kind Family" series, the awards launched in 1968 and were renamed to honor Taylor 10 years later. This year, eight additional titles were named honor books, with 22 other stories earning the designation of Notable Books of Jewish Content for 2010.
The eight Honor Books were:
Younger Readers Honor Books:
Nachshon Who Was Afraid to Swim (Kar-Ben) by Deborah Bodin Cohen with illustrations by Jago.
Benjamin and the Silver Goblet (Kar-Ben) by Jacqueline Jules with illustrations by Natascia Ugliano.
The Yankee at the Seder (Tricycle) by Elka Weber with illustrations by Adam Gustavson.
You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax? (Random) by Jonah Winter with illustrations by Andre Carrilho.
Two works in translation were named Honor Books for Older Readers:
Anne Frank: Her Life in Worlds and Pictures (Roaring Brook) by Menno Metselaar and Ruud van der Rol (translated by Arnold J. Pomerans).
A Faraway Island (Delacorte) by Annika Thor (translated by Linda Schenck).
Honor Books in the Teen Reader Category:
Lost (Marshall Cavendish), a historical novel by Jacqueline Davies.
Naomi's Song (JPS), a biblical fiction by Selma Kritzer Silverberg.
Winners will be awarded at the Association of Jewish Libraries convention being held this year in Seattle in July.
