GENRE: *Diverse, Holiday, Historical Fiction
WORDS: 796
Query:
Dear PB Party Judges :
Palm Tree Passover is a 796-word picture book about leaving all you love behind and finding community once again. Additionally, it highlights the little-known history of Sosua, a Dominican Republic community specifically created to rescue Jews from the Holocaust, where diverse groups lived, worked, and celebrated together with no recorded incidents of antisemitism. I believe it is also a timeless story of the refugee experience.
At the start of World War II, when a Jewish girl, Yula, flees her home in Vienna with Mama and Papa for a safe haven in Sosua, an isolated farming community in the Dominican Republic, she struggles with the sweltering heat, mosquito netting, yucca and plantains for dinner, and new people. And as the holiday of Passover draws closer, her first without her beloved grandparents, Yula fears she’ll never have a joyous holiday again. Until she discovers the power in raising your voice.
I am the author of three picture books: Say Hello, Lily, a multiple-year PJ Library selection and a Sydney Taylor Notable Book for Young Readers, as well as Joey and the Giant Box, and A Place to Belong – Debbie Friedman Sings Her Way Home. My debut middle grade novel, Things That Shimmer, which released this past April, won a Sydney Taylor Notable award last week and was a PJ Our Way selection this past October. I write for all age categories, with several board books and pictures books completed, and a young adult novel ready for submission. As a gold member of the 12 X 12 Challenge, and frequent participant in both Highlights and Writing Barn classes, I’m constantly at work to improve my craft. I was represented by agent Susan Cohen of Writers House until her retirement.
Excerpt:
I clutch the bag holding my doll and pencil box, but what I long to bring most I must carry inside my heart: Oma and Opa, my grandparents, too old to flee.
They will miss my singing of The Four Questions at our Passover Seder, but my parents say we must leave.
We Jews are no longer welcome in Austria.
Mama, Papa, and I sail across the ocean for weeks.
What inspired you to write this story & what do you have in common with it:
It is essentially the story of my mother-in-law’s childhood. The only country in the world willing to take in Jews as Hitler came to power in Europe, the Dominican Republic became a new home to her and a few hundred other fortunate Jewish refugees. Suddenly they were no longer city dwellers, but dairy farmers on a tropical island, saved by people who welcomed them. I believe it’s a story that needs to be preserved for future generations. What I have in common with the story is that as a Jew today, I and my people are still experiencing threats and antisemitism, are sometimes forced to leave our homes for safer environments, but still find ways to thrive.
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