Philly Writers Love Getting Into Their PJs

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A First-Time Author’s Picture of Summer Camp

Though she neither attended camp nor had experience writing children’s books, Tamar Fox landed the honor of showing the joys of the quintessential Jewish summer camp experience to PJ Library readers. Her No Baths at Camp, illustrated by Natalia Vasquez, was sent out for the first time last summer and again this June.

Fox, 30, of Center City, holds an MFA in fiction writing from Vanderbilt University. She is a communications consultant for haggadot.com and other websites, both Jewish and non-Jewish.  

Why did you write this book?
When I went to the University of Iowa, I became friends with Laurel Snyder, who has written several books for PJ Library, including Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted to Be Kosher. She called me one day and said, “They’re really looking for books about Jewish summer camps. You should write one and send it to them.” So I was like, “Sure.” I did not have a child at the time, so I was not up to date on children’s literature. I went to a bookstore one day and read a bunch of children’s books. Then I went home and wrote No Baths at Camp.

How was it to write a camp book without that personal experience?
My family was very involved in camp. I just wasn’t personally. I was not really a camp person, but I saw the value of it. The book is about getting dirty at camp because that was definitely the thing that was most spoken about during the school year. There were endless discussions of how dirty people got and how much fun it was. Clearly, that has a big impact on people!

Is your Jewish background reflected in the camp atmosphere you depict?
I grew up in an observant, nondenominational house and went to Conservative and Orthodox day schools. Now I mostly go to independent minyanim. I took relatively great pains not to make it any one kind of Jewish camp. The end of the book is them celebrating Shabbat. It’s not clear how observant their Shabbat practice is, but there is a woman who is the camp director. It was important to me that it wasn’t just men in charge.

What was your experience working with PJ Library?
I had a kind of lengthy back and forth about what activities they wanted mentioned or not. At the same time, they accepted the book and shepherded it through the publication process. They bought it in 2010, so the whole process took years. But there’s nothing else I know where you can know your book will sell a certain number of copies.

Have you gotten feedback from families who received it already?
I assume that if people didn’t like it, they wouldn’t tell me! I have gotten generally very positive reviews and, crucially, my 6-year-old stepdaughter is a big fan. It would have been rough if she were not into it. When she got her copy in the mail this June, she was like, “Uh, we already have this.”

What do you hope families will gain from No Baths At Camp?
The book is really a teaser for Jewish camp, showing younger kids who aren’t yet old enough to go away some of the super fun things you can do and the independence. I hope it will seed the idea of camp in families who might not have thought about it otherwise.

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When Chickens Came Home to Roost: Local Educator Specializes in Historical Fiction

Sharon Baker acknowledges that most people don’t imagine chicken farmers when they think about Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. However, while getting to know her neighbors in West Hartford, Conn., where she used to live, Baker was surprised to learn that most of the Jewish families from the region had their roots in chicken farming.

Baker, 51, now a Lower Merion resident and the director of admissions and communications at Kohelet Yeshiva High School, envisioned a children’s book set in that farming community. In May, more than a decade after her first encounter with the history of the Connecticut chicken farmers, Amazon released her book, All Kinds of Strong, illustrated by Kris Wilt­se. While it’s currently available online, the real exposure will come this fall when PJ Library mails it out to 6-year-olds across the country.

Chris Barash, chair of PJ Library’s book selection committee, said the action-filled story with themes of kindness and community, and Jewish values woven throughout, made it an ideal pick.

“The story will be empowering to children,” who, like its main character, Sadie Rose, “feel different but come to realize they can contribute in important ways,” Barash said.

This is Baker’s second work of historical fiction for children. Her first, A Nickel, A Trolley, A Treasure House, is based on her grandfather, Lionel Reiss, an artist who traveled widely to track down subjects and also designed commercial images, including MGM’s roaring lion.

What motivated you to write this book?
This was a community I ­didn’t know anything about. I started listening, hearing stories about farm life and talking to families. I got interested in their histories and their stories of immigration.

At that point, I was working on a lot of other writing projects, but this one kept tickling my brain. So one day, I just got in my car and drove out to eastern Connecticut and throughout those communities of Colchester and Lebanon, imagining what it had been like for, essentially, Jewish pioneer families to be settling that area and creating a new life for themselves in an area that was so unfamiliar.

As I became familiar with the names of the families, I started imagining actual lives of actual people, and the story just sort of developed in my head as I was doing the research.

How has your own background impacted your work?
I taught for many years in Jewish schools and other independent schools. I also did a lot of writing both while I was teaching and afterwards when I was home with my three kids. I have been involved in one way or another with Jewish communal work either from the lay side or professional side for most of my adult life.

I would say that all of my work — the communal work, the teaching, the writing, all of it — comes from passion and curiosity about Jewish life and Jewish experience. And because I’ve lived in so many different places, I became very interested in how Jewish life has developed in different communities and under different conditions.

How did All Kinds of Strong get the attention of PJ Library?
It’s an interesting time to try to write anything because the industry is changing so much. When I moved here six years ago, I had a pretty good draft. I worked on it a little more with a woman who was really a giant in the children’s publishing world, an editor named Deborah Brodie. Deborah had a lot of great suggestions about the manuscript and ultimately a suggestion that helped me to get a publishing deal, which was to submit the manuscript to PJ Library.

What do you hope families will gain from having this book in their homes?
Enjoyment, of course! But I also hope children of all religions will see that a person can make a difference to someone else or to a community in many ways. Compassion, resourcefulness and persistence matter in the world and none of those qualities depend on age, size, strength or other physical abilities. I also hope readers will see a model for intergenerational relationships. That’s something that is less common these days than in the time this story was set.

For Jewish families in particular, I hope the chicken-farm setting will expand their idea of what our Jewish past looked like in America.