Chana Stiefal’s 2022 picture book The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt her Town in Stories and Photographs is brave and ambitious. It tells the story of Yaffa Eliach, who lost her village and almost everyone she knew to the Nazis. It is an honest book, and a crucially important topic. Some of Susan Gal’s illustrations are vivid, catching and holding attention.
However…this book could be stronger. For a modern picture book, it is wordy, and it uses syntax above the apparent target audience. (For example, defining “shtetl” as “a small Jewish town that pulsed with “love, laughter, and light,” or saying the “histories and spirits were woven into the fabric of the town” seems overly complicated.) Some details go unexplained. The shtetl’s name is “Eishyshok,” and, while we get help with pronunciation, we don’t get a country. Readers are told Yaffa is Jewish, but not what that means. When the German tanks come, the Jewish people of Eishyshok are crammed into the “town’s synagogue”…but the term “synagogue” is not explained (and so some of the horror/desecration may sail past readers).
The account of Yaffa first surviving, then traveling extensively to gather memories and pictures of her destroyed home is genuinely heroic…but there are gaps here. Kids will read that after she “survived the Holocaust, Yaffa became a professor of history”… but that’s the extent of the definition of the Holocaust at that point in the book. Kids will be confused, as they will be when “the war” is referenced without a name or date. Parents and teachers will have a lot of blanks to fill. When to introduce tough topics to kids is a topic of genuine debate…but assuming kids of picture book age already have this knowledge is ill-advised.
Yaffa’s achievement is real, and I salute this book’s ambition…but it needed an editor.
