We're Golden

By PENNY SCHWARTZ

Talk about spin.

Ellen Kushner’s, The Golden Dreydl, is an original Hanukkah tale on its fourth landing: in just seven years, it’s been recorded with the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, broadcast on national radio, performed live in theaters, and most recently published as an illustrated children’s book.

So far, it’s a Gimel every time.

“At first, I thought, ‘This is going to be easy,’” Kushner told JBooks.com, referring to the process of writing a children’s book based on her earlier versions of the story. She figured she’d take her script, add a few he said, she saids, and the writing would be done. But that would be the lazy way out, Kushner admitted.

“I wanted to make it a book you wanted to read when you were a kid,” she said in a phone conversation from San Diego, where she was speaking about her book to a group of young children.

In the book, Kushner’s characters and the family relationships are developed more fully. She set a high bar, to see if she could make one kid feel the way she felt as a child when she read the Narnia books.

The tale, whose spirited 11-year-old heroine, Sara, finds herself transported from her family’s disappointing Hanukah party back in time to the days of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, is itself a loosely based spin on Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.

The host of WGBH’s Sound and Spirit, a weekly radio program broadcast nationally on public radio, Kushner is also the successful author of several novels, including her latest, The Privilege of the Sword.

Kushner was inspired to create the story when she first heard Boston-based Shirim’s performance of their Klezmerized version of the Nutcracker Suite, described by Shirim’s band leader, Glenn Dickson, as a playful and somewhat irreverent musical revenge against the yearly onslaught of Christmas music.

As a child, Kushner recalled, she basked in the delight of the original Tchaikovsky ballet, dancing around her living room dressed in a frilly petticoat dreaming of Clara, and the Sugar Plum Fairies.

The original collaboration with the band, which resulted in an audio CD and yearly live productions, was all about the music, Kushner said. When writing the children’s novel, she would play the music to remind herself of its roots and to keep her in a good mood.

The Tale

The tale begins at a large family Hanukkah gathering with aunts, uncles, and lots of cousins. The all-too-predictable annual party is interrupted by the unexpected appearance of the mysterious Tanta Miriam.

“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.”

Winn-Lederer’s full-page black and white illustration depicts a grand and worldly-wise woman with wild hair, and penetrating eyes.

“It’s been some trip!” Tante Miriam announces as she makes her entrance.  “Deserts, mountains, rivers…. I crossed the Red Sea with the rest.”

But it’s the sack of gifts that beckon the cousins and Tante Miriam seemed to know what each one wanted. Except poor Sara. No telescope, autographed baseball, or costumes and candy for her. Instead, Sara gets a gold metal dreydl, “almost as big as a book,” with fancy squiggles and scrollwork all over.

When a fight ensues among the cousins over the Golden Dreydl, Sara accidentally tosses it through Aunt Leah’s giant television screen, setting off a mysterious adventure taking Sara back to ancient Biblical days where she discovers that her Golden Dreydl is really a golden princess, daughter of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

When a pack of ne’er do well demons kidnap the Golden Girl, Sara sets out on a journey to rescue her.

Along the way, Sara teams up with The Fool, an endearing character who provides a mixture of Chelm-like humor and wisdom, along with a handful of sometimes hokey, sometimes baffling riddles.

Kushner’s original idea to create a young Jewish heroine whose dreamlike adventures mirror The Nutcracker’s Clara was turned upside down when Shirim band member Michael McLaughlin insisted she push the envelope.

She chuckled as she recalled McLaughlin’s admonition: “’Sara has to kick butt, she has to save the world,” he told her.

Indeed, Kushner’s young girl is feisty, inquisitive, and at times, moody. By outwitting the demons at their own game, she rescues the princess and saves the day.

While magical, Tante Miriam strays far from the Uncle Drosselmeyer character of the Nutcracker.

“She’s a cool, older woman,” something missing from magical tales she read as a kid. “Even in Harry Potter, there are no cool magic women,” Kushner said.

After a decade of performing and writing about Sara, has the fictional character become Kushner’s Hanukah companion?

“No, in some ways, she’s completely different from me,” Kushner told JBooks.

But, Kusher acknowledged that the fictional Sara is like a part of her when she was a kid. “It wasn’t that I didn’t like Hanukkah. But I wanted Christmas,” she said.

Kushner disagrees with some early reviews which suggest that by book’s end, Sara has “learned a lesson.”

“I don’t think so. She doesn’t learn that Hanukah is a fabulous holiday.” Rather, Kushner reflected, the lesson is not to take yourself too seriously.

“She’s had a great adventure and learned to lighten up a little,” Kushner said.

While the book is a good yarn, with no intended lesson plan, Kushner does draw on Jewish historical figures and lore. There are no demons in the Bible, but there are demons in Jewish literature, Kushner said, referring to Middle Eastern and Persian culture, as well as Eastern European writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer.

“Jewish demons are not pure evil, like Christian or Muslim devils,” she elaborated. “Some of them are even goofy, or tricksters.”

The magical character of The Fool is based on the Yiddish Badchen, the wedding jester whose role was to make everyone laugh.

In crafting the books' riddles, Kushner, who grew up in Cleveland, relied on her fond childhood memories of her New York relatives, who she described as exotic.

“They were funny. They had wisecracks and great jokes,” she recalled.