Moving Beyond Fishele and Fraydele

When my children were young, a frum woman decided to write some books in English for frum children. She wanted them to have reading material where they could see themselves in the books. She wanted frum kids to read about frum experiences. She wrote a series of books about two characters, Fishele and Fraydele.

Okay. So I went down to our Jewish bookstore to take a look at the books. And I didn't buy the books. They weren't an "exciting" read. The characters were not fully developed. The plots needed work--or even being there. The language was not correctly geared for the target readers. The vocabulary was pedestrian. The English wasn't standard. The illustrations were only so-so. About the only thing you could say for sure was that the characters were certainly frum, or at least someone's vision of frum.

Ironically, someone else bought the first two books as gifts for my kids. They read them once and then the books moldered on the shelf, never to be touched again. I read a lot to my children when they were little and they all became readers and lovers of books. They recognized about Fishele and Fraydele what far too many people today don't: it takes more than Jewish names and events to make a book a good one.

Too many of the books that are published by the various Jewish presses are books with an agenda; they put the "moral" of the story before all other elements. There is an obvious intent to make a "Jewish" point. When "propaganda" and "philosophy" are the main points of a work, then why bother with the "mundane" elements of a written piece? There isn't enough care taken to write well. Yinglish is not English and no amount of wishing will make it so. There are recycled and hackneyed plot lines. Character development is spotty. The books are second rate, but no one seems to care.

There are numerous sources available for recommended vocabulary lists by age appropriateness. I wish some of these Jewish authors would spend the time and find those lists and then use them. I recently posted on the overuse of the words nice and good. Being sometimes stubborn, I took one of the books aimed at teenagers and went through it looking for the words nice and good. Nice appeared 147 times in that fairly short book; good appeared 202 times. In virtually every case another word was called for. Nor was the rest of the vocabulary used much better. And it wasn't only the vocabulary that needed fixing.

I took the same book and went through it looking for grammar and usage errors. I wasn't being persnickety either. Dozens of errors were found. When I pointed this out to someone who works for that particular publishing company, he thought I had missed the point entirely. "The kids don't see those errors, just the story being told, so what's your point?" is what he told me. He did hasten to tell me, however, that he uses very experienced editors for the works he publishes. (Pardon me if I define "experienced" differently from him.) He also told me that Judaic publishing is "niche" publishing and the target audience readers of Judaic books are "looking for something else" in the books they read. I reasonably pointed out that I am a member of that targeted audience and I am indeed looking for something else--better books than what is being published by his company.

My point is that among the other things that great literature does is it expands our vocabulary, it shows us the richness of the English language, it teaches and reinforces the rules of our language and yes, it gets us to think about ourselves and what we do. There has to be a marriage of form and content; it's not either one or the other that should be there.

It has always been believed that great writers were first great readers; exposed to good reading they endeavored to make their own writing something that others would also see as "great." What do those who have constantly and only been exposed to mediocre books do when they sit down to write? They write mediocre books. (Not to mention mediocre school papers.) When more and more yeshivas insist on switching their reading lists to those containing only "kosher" material taken from frum authors, when they insist on eliminating "goyish" writing--whatever that is--they create readers who are only partially literate.

When last I taught high school I ran into the "them versus us" philosophy of reading head on. I worked for a right wing girls high school and I was hired to teach the juniors and seniors. Macbeth and Hamlet I knew would be on the reading list, or so I thought. Macbeth was allowed--it only showed violence-- but Hamlet was nixed by the administration because, as one Hebrew administrator put it, "he had unnatural urges towards his mother." No Austen works were permitted because they were "romances." Basically, any works in which unmarried men and women appeared together were considered as "z'nus" and were unacceptable. No writers who were Jewish but not frum were allowed--their works were all apikorsis, regardless of the subject matter of their works. No "modern" authors were acceptable because they tended to write about "those things." In desperation for something to give the students to read I used Watership Down, by Richard Adams. The book is about a group of rabbits, albeit rabbits who have been anthropomorphised. Their warren is destroyed and the book details the destruction and their journey to find another place to live, a utopia where life would be the way it should be. And there were complaints from a few parents because they couldn't understand why their daughters were being forced to read a book about "stupid rabbits." The story I recommended to all of you, Asimov's "The Feeling of Power," was not allowed because "science fiction is about things that are strange and will never happen." I killed myself putting together a reading list that would satisfy me--good literature and well written--and that would satisfy the school. We had an uneasy alliance for all the years I taught there. The school never could understand why their students should read English works to get lessons about life and people. And as I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog, the menahel at that time believed that all English books should be put into a pile and burned.

For the record, I don't read only "great" literature. I admit to liking murder and mayhem and mystery of the type found in "lemonade" literature. I read "best sellers." I also love reading the works of the "masters." I clearly know the difference between them, and there is a time and place for both. But I do not claim, as so many yeshivas do, that watered down Koolaid is equal to and even better than Chateau Lafitte Rothschild Champagne. I know differently.

I'd like to end with this story. A student came to me to ask for a recommendation for a few stories that he could use in writing a paper for his English class. I mentioned a few works and with one of them he shook his head and said "no." The story made no sense. Having taught that story more than a few times I was puzzled by his attitude. I met with him again and brought in a copy of the story. I asked if he would reread it so we could discuss it together. He rolled his eyes but complied. About half way through he stopped reading and said to me: "This isn't the same story I read in high school." I was puzzled. To my knowledge there weren't two stories with that same title. And then the light went on in my head. I asked him to take a pen and underline or circle those parts of the story that were different from what he remembered of the story he had first read. By the time he finished, about half of the story had been crossed out or changed. Elements of plot development that had been deemed by his teacher to be "not appropriate" had been removed. Words that would have required some dictionary work had been changed to those of the "nice" variety. A female character had been changed to a male character, further changing the dynamics of the story. He was right; what he had read in high school was not the same story I had given him. The story had been sanitized and "Jewish-ized" all out of recognition.

The story? "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson. And if you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it. It's a pointed lesson in what happens to people who blindly follow "tradition" without thinking about what they are doing, among other things. http://www.americanliterature.com/Jackson/SS/TheLottery.html

So what grade do I give that general class of writing known as Jewish "literature" written in English? C-. We readers really do deserve better.