Awards, and Missing Mom
sydney-taylor-award-medal
They do give award winners a heads—up—that is, the Association of Jewish Libraries, for their award for children's books "that authentically portray the Jewish experience"; and the Jewish Book Council, for their National Jewish Book Award for Children's Literature. And so, recently, I received advance notice from the AJL that I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark is the 2017 Sydney Taylor Book Award Winner for Younger Readers, and separately, from the JBC, that it is winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in the children's books category.
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My husband and I, on the evenings that we learned of these honors, raised our glasses to toast Ruth Bader Ginsburg for being such an outstanding subject for a kids' book. I violated the secrecy I was asked to maintain around the awards, but only to tell our grown children and my in-laws. I was thrilled as could be. Imagine! Two separate Jewish groups dedicated to children's books both selected I Dissent. We Jews will argue--excuse me, DISSENT--about everything, and yet these two convocations of book lovers were in agreement over this book, which, at its core, is about the power of disagreeing.
This morning the respective award-giving organizations made their announcements public. I still felt as thrilled as could be. I was thinking about how the one award is named for the author of my favorite childhood books--Sydney Taylor, who wrote the All-of-a-Kind Family series. I was thinking of how I used to go to the Silver Spring, Maryland library on Colesville Road, week after week, taking out piles of books, and multiple All-of-a-Kind Family titles at a time. And so I was thinking, and this was inevitable, about my mother, who of course was driving me to the library all those years.
These awards for I Dissent may not be the shiniest, most-coveted awards in the wider world of children's literature--after all, they're for books that relate one way or another to Jewishness, which means vast shelves of outstanding books aren't in contention. That doesn't diminish my gratitude, and OH MY GOODNESS, how my mother would be reacting to this news if she were still here. "Yes, I remember you and the All-of-a-Kind books," she would say. "Cindy Taylor?" Sydney Taylor. "Debbie, you have to write it down so I get it right." And--"the National Jewish Book Award--for the whole country?" she would ask, and I'd promise to write it down so she could get that right, too. Then she would tell me she was so proud of me and, assuming we were on the phone, we'd sign off, me saying, "I love you," and Mom saying, "I love you more," and then hanging up real fast so that she could have that last word. And then she would start calling her friends--Norma, and Patsy, and Shirley, and Adele, and Sybil, and Lotte, and on and on.
So it's a good thing I had a water exercise class to get to this morning after the news went public and I got to thinking of these things. I had some tears to cry about the indignity of a world that has taken my mother away, and the pool is a perfect place to deal with that. It's a good place to blow out the bubbles of a laugh, too, as I did when I thought that my mother would likely be on the phone to the U.S. Supreme Court right about now to make sure that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg knew about her daughter's good news. Somehow I think she'd get through to the justice's private line ("tell her it's Jutta Levy"), and she would get all the details just so.