Jewish Sci-Fi Stories for Kids [Paperback]

Yaacov Peterseil (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1999

Meet an interplanetary rabbi whom must destroy a leavened monster by Passover...A dybbuk who wishes he was dead....A fetus who fights his Guardian Angel...Fantasy and science fiction stories that bend the limits of the imagination.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Gr 8 Up-These are not science-fiction stories, but rather stories based on readers' presumed familiarity with and acceptance of Jewish mysticism. The underlying premises of some of the selections border on the ridiculous and seem to be told in a voice reminiscent of borscht-belt comedians. In one, a demon spirit is possessed by an obnoxious child, resulting in a need for exorcism. In another, a young genius creates a clone of himself to take his bar mitzvah lessons. The oppression and prejudice faced by Jews are present in two of the tales, one that takes place in Czechoslovakia and one in which a Jew magically heals a wounded Nazi. In "Lip Service," readers are told that fetuses learn the Torah in utero and then forget it at birth as an angel touches the upper lip, creating the standard indentation. The angel confides that one of them got away, a troublemaker who reinterpreted established beliefs and was ultimately responsible for a new religion that caused trouble for the Jews. Mediocre writing and lack of appeal to young people render these stories unnecessary for most collection.-Renee Steinberg, Fieldstone Middle School, Montvale, NJ

Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 13 and up
  
• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Simcha Media Group (NJ) (September 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0943706742
• ISBN-13: 978-0943706740
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,766,951 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More fantasy than SF, but good for some laughs at Purim time, February 2, 2005

By 

Rabbi Yonassan Gershom (Minnesota, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Jewish Sci-Fi Stories for Kids (Paperback)

Euwell Gibbons once said of the Jerusalem artichoke: "It's not an artichoke and it's not from Jerusalem, but otherwise it is well-named." We could say the same for this anthology. Most of these stories are not SF, they are fantasy tales based on themes from Jewish mysticism. (I am using as my criteria the usual expectation that science fiction has some element of SCIENCE in it.)

"My Clone and I" would qualify as SF. So would "The Night of the Leavened Bread" which, although it is about a golem, also features Baruch Rogers, Space Rabbi. The rest are about kabbalah magic, demons, dybbuks, golems, and angels. (This seems to be a problem with Jewish SF in general. Jack Dann's "Wandering Stars" anthologies also contain more fantasy stories than SF. I look forward to the day when Jewish characters can pilot spaceships and build robots without being plagued by hackneyed dybbuks and golems. )

Next question: are these really stories for children? Well.... They are definitely stories ABOUT children, in that the main characters are kids. But they strike me more as high-school level parodies, patterned on the Yiddish stetl tales of Sholem Aleichem. "A Dybbuk in North Tonawanda" even retains Aleichem's dialect style. It could just as easily be taking place in Kasrilevke as in the USA. However, this style requires a familiarity with Yiddish (or at least Yinglish) to get a lot of the humor.

To get the jokes in "The Night of the Leavened Bread," you need to recognize things like "221B Bakery Street" as a play on Sherlock Holmes' address. Ditto for some "yeshivish" themes and puns that would go over the heads of the average kid outside the Orthodox Jewish community. (For that matter, "Baruch Rogers," a take-off on Buck Rogers, is more a joke for the over-50 grandparents who might be reading this out loud.)

"Lip Service" is a piece of in-group theological humor that is more like hermeneutics than a story. It tells of a fetus that did not forget all the Torah it had learned in the womb at the moment of birth (like it was supposed to do) retained an imperfect understanding and "caused a lot of trouble for the Jewish people" by making up its own religion 2000 years ago. (Yes, it's probably a reference to Jesus, but all is fair in parody and satire.)

Now, having done all this nitpicking, I can still say I liked the book. Once you get past the misleading cover title, there is quite a bit of good Purim Torah here. It's creative, it's funny -- it's just not science fiction.