Hearty Recommendation:
The Golden Dreydl
ISBN: 978-1-58089-135-6
Written by Ellen Kushner
Illustrated by Ilene Winn-Lederer
Reviewed by Brenda Sutton

The Golden Dreydl is a story for any Jewish child whose holiday candles may have felt dimmed by the super-charged wattage emitted at Christmas, for the kid who loved the menorah but longed for a tinseled tree. The hero of this story, Sara, feels too old to play the traditional games with spinning four-sided tops and childish songs, but not old enough to be accepted by her teenaged cousins either. Enter Tante Miriam, someone the grownups view as some combination of Gandalf and Mary Poppins:

It was an old, old lady, with a huge old satchel on her shoulders. Her hair was as white as the moon, and she was all wrapped up in layers and layers of scarves, scarves, like all the colors of the world.

From her satchel, Tante Miriam pulls out strange and wonderful gifts for the children. "...costumes and candy, sailboats and dump trucks, glitter and spangles and paint sets and drums." But Sara's gift is just odd — a Chanukah dredyl. "A shiny, gold metal dreydl, almost as big as a book." She is so dissapointed, but when her brother snatches it away to play, a commotion ensues and the dreydl goes flying — right into the family's new giant-sized television, cracking the screen. And everyone is looking at Sara like it's her fault!

That night Sara can't sleep. She gets up to wander the halls to the bathroom and sees a glowing light, hears strange voices urging her to follow. A glittering girl Sara's age appears and hauls her through the crack in the television and into an adventure in a magical land. On her quest to return to her own time and place, she encounters the Queen of Sheba, King Solomon, and an archetypal Fool who helps her in a battle of wits with a Demon King.

The story of Sara's fantasy experience is engaging, and Winn-Lederer's accompanying line drawings show these characters as warm, intense, emotional people. It's almost as if they are looking right into your eyes while the words draw you into their minds. The reader is swept right along on the back of a camel, a willing participant in the journey through time. Kushner has a gift for dialoge, which is difficult to accomplish when writing for teenagers. This book contains none of the clunky, dated conversation that too often mars YA fiction. You know these kids. Maybe they are your kids.

One would think that the biblical references of King Solomon's world would anchor the tale in religion and history, but there is a "once upon a time" quality to this story that brings dusty figures from the past to life in the present and on to the future. This is a story that will be read and appreciated through the years. So, if there is a "tween" in your family who seemed a little out of it this Chanukah, brighten everyone's lives by gifting himr or her with The Golden Dreydl.

As a delightful sidebar to the story, you can hear author and radio personality Ellen Kushner in a musical reading of The Golden Dreydl presented by WGBH, Boston for her program Sound and Spirit. Enjoy the lively and fanciful renditions from the story's inspiration, The Nutcracker Suite, as you have never heard them before, interpreted byt the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra!

Read more about Ellen Kushner at her website www.ellenkushner.com.

Brenda Sutton is the publisher of Mythic Passages, Operations Director, Corporate Secretary, and Office Administrator for Mythic Imagination Institute. She is an award-winning singer/songwriter with the internationally reknown band Three Weird Sisters. She works in a support and consultant capacity for the non-profit music organization Interfilk, and maintains their website. She is freelance writer whose work has appeared in newspapers and magazines. She is also the mother of five, grandmother of two.

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