JAWC Hosts Jewish Children’s Book Author Dina Rosenfeld

This is the full version of the article I'm writing for the Raleigh/Cary Jewish Federation's paper. The paper's version will be much shorter.

It was a cold and snowy day, the first day of winter vacation, yet the Jewish Academy of Wake County was warm and full of happy children. Dina Rosenfeld, author of many Jewish Children’s books, was sitting in a little green chair, teaching an enwrapped audience of twenty children and many adults how to write a children’s book.
She used as an example her book “Peanut Butter and Jelly for Shabbos”. It started on a sheet of yellow lined paper that is covered with sentences and paragraphs all written in different directions, generated through brainstorming. One sentence was circled, the idea behind “Peanut Butter and Jelly for Shabbos.” She then showed the editing process, where the story is refined from a handwritten pages with many corrections to a typed pages with corrections to a finished story that is then put into an envelope and sent to the illustrator. Rosenfeld says “In a picture book, if you talk about something you have to show it.” She showed the illustrator’s process from pencil drawings to full color images and the changes they made along the way to clarify the message of the illustrations. She showed the finished book in its hard cardboard binding.
Next she showed two books in their original form that she had illustrated herself, and how professional illustrators and book designers had continued her work. In one example, the illustrator did something completely different than what she had originally drawn. She said that it’s interesting how two people can interpret a story in two completely different ways. She then showed an original layout of a book where she had created collages of colored paper for the illustrations. In that example the illustrator had used her illustrations as the inspiration for his paintings.
Mrs. Rosenfeld also held up the book “A Kind Hearted Rivka”, translated into many languages, and read the title in all of the different languages. She showed them the same book in Braille, and explained how the Jewish Heritage for the Blind prints books in Braille so that blind adults can read stories to the children in their lives.
The final message of the story “Peanut Butter for Shabbos” is “You’ll only succeed if you’re willing to try.” The children at JAWC had made their own books during the last few weeks, each one fully illustrated with a cover and a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The childen were very proud to share their books with Dina Rosenfeld who said “Everyone can be an artist and make up stories.”