The Passover seder is famous for its four questions, but our unnamed hero in this delightful picture book has countless more. He visits the many generations of his family who live on different floors in the same apartment building as each prepares a dish for the first seder. He seeks to discover why his mother cuts off the ends of the pot roast she cooks for the Passover family meal. Mom does not know. He dashes to ask Grandma Shirley, then Great-Grandma Lee, who tells him that the custom originated with a pan too small for the meat. En route he receives silly answers from a relative in a nearby room.
Dynamic, joyful illustrations support the protagonist’s determined search to ask until he finds the right answer. Passover is not our hero’s only source of curiosity; he has many secular questions to ask each relative as well. Readers gain knowledge of who invented spoons and who lived at the top of the Eiffel tower as they seek clues along with the young narrator of this lighthearted story.
The advice from Great-Grandma Lee is that people who do not ask questions get boring and stuck. The young hero notes that the important seder query: “what makes this night different” means that on seder night we work together and pray together to stay connected: family is the answer!
Ellen G. Cole, a retired librarian of the Levine Library of Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles, is a past judge of the Sydney Taylor Book Awards and a past chairperson of that committee. She is a co-author of the AJL guide, Excellence in Jewish Children’s Literature. Ellen is the recipient of two major awards for contribution to Judaic Librarianship, the Fanny Goldstein Merit Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries and the Dorothy Schroeder Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries of Southern California. She is on the board of AJLSC.
