Language Department Head Richard Simon and his wife Tanya Simon published their first picture book this past October. The book, Oskar and the Eight Blessings, has received the National Jewish Book Award for Children’s Literature and starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, and School Library Journal. In addition, the book has earned a customer rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars on Amazon.

Simon explained that he came up with the idea for writing this book when his 7-year old daughter began asking questions about family history and the Holocaust.

“We figured we would find a book that dealt with the Holocaust that was good for a child of that age but we looked around and could not find anything,” Simon recalled.

He explained that they had wanted to write “something that is not so specific and graphic that it terrifies a child, but rather that could at least convey the fear so that when a child gets older, he or she would be able to learn more.”

The book is about Oskar, a German-Jewish refugee and survivor of Kristallnacht. It takes place in 1938 on the seventh day of Hanukkah and Christmas Eve. He travels from Nazi Germany to New York City.  Once in New York, Oscar searches for an aunt he has never met. He has no way to contact her, only an address and a photograph.

Oskar walks from Battery Park to his aunt’s home uptown, seeing all of Manhattan. He encounters lots of New Yorkers and is touched by their kindness. Oskar experiences aspects of Christmas and Hanukkah.

The complex writing and publishing process of the picture book took Simon and his wife two years. Simon explained that he and his wife have worked on much of their writing together and in writing Oskar and the Eight Blessings they spent a long time trying to figure out what the story would be about. Since it is a picture book, Oskar and the Eight Blessings had a limit of 800 words and 32 pages.

“I know students sometimes say to themselves, ‘How am I supposed to write so much?’ When you have been writing for a long time, it is much harder to write a little. I can write 30 pages without working too hard but to write a whole story in 800 words is one of the hardest things I have done,” Simon said.

Amidst all the praise the book has received, “The best compliment we have gotten is when grown-ups come to us and say, ‘My child made me read your book every day for the last two weeks’ or ‘My child made me read your book four times a day.’ I think more than the good reviews and more than the awards, that just makes me so happy because that’s who we are really writing for,” Simon said.