New Year at the Pier: A Rosh Hashanah Story by April Halprin Wayland, illustrated by Stéphane Jorich (Dial Books for Young Readers). This is my pick for the best Jewish picture book of the year. It’s about Tashlich. It’s funny; it’s moving; it’s lyrical; there’s good dialogue. Best of all, it shows how hard apologizing can be, and how cathartic. The protagonist, Izzy, is a credible little kid—he apologizes to his sister for drawing on her forehead while she’s asleep. I like the fun , vaguely French watercolor illustrations, with lots of yummy detail in the kids’ clothes—Stéphane Jorisch has a way, in particular, with shoes. (And I like that Cantor Livia and her guitar-playing accompanist, with their flowy Berkeley-vibed clothing, look like a specific and familiar breed of middle-aged bobo Jewess.) This book is superb. (Grades K-3)

When I First Held You: A Lullaby from Israel by Mirik Snir, illustrated by Eleyor Snir (Kar-Ben). “Rain tapped a song/ Rocks rolled along/ The sea waved with glee/ When I held you close to me.” The words are simple but sweet; for me, the folk art-y, naïve paintings are what really make the book. (Mirik Snir should be shepping serious nachas from her artist daughter.) Brightly colored, curvy images of lots of animal parents and babies cuddling make a soothing yet unboring (blessedly pastel-free) read for little ones. There’s a quote in Hebrew and English at the end, from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: “The day you were born is the day God decided that the world could not exist without you.” And there’s a place at the back to place your child’s photo and birthdate. What kid wouldn’t feel safe and special when this book was read to him? (Infant to Grade 1)

The Yankee at the Seder by Elka Weber, illustrated by Adam Gustavson (Tricycle). This book is based on the true story of a Civil War-era Southern Jewish family that invited a passing Northern Jewish soldier to Passover dinner, only a day after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender. Uh-oh. The family’s 10-year-old son, Jacob, is horrified to have a “Yankee Jew” in attendance. He’s grieving the end of the war and the loss of his dreams: “I was never going to be a Rebel general. I’d never capture a whole unit of Yankees single-handed.” The tensions at the seder table are both uncomfortable and exciting. Jacob’s father pointedly tells the soldier that the message of the haggadah is that “no man needs to submit to the tyranny of an evil government;” the soldier, Myer Levy, says that the Passover story is about “how no man wants to be a slave and about how wonderful it is to be free.” Differences are put aside for the meal, but no one hugs it out at the end. “Well, that was something, wasn’t it?” is all the mom can come up with afterward. The book is illustrated with luscious, dark-toned oil paintings. There’s a historical note and photos at the end, but the book doesn’t feel at all like boring school stuff. (Grades 2-4)

The Champion of Children: The Story of Janusz Korczak by Tomek Bogacki (FSG/Foster). This is another book that sounds like a noble, virtuous, narcolepsy-inducing history lesson—the spinach of Jewish juvenilia. Yet of all the books on this list, this one is by far my daughter Josie’s favorite. (She’s eight.) Korczak grows up in Warsaw, encounters anti-Semitism, pledges to fight for children’s rights, goes to medical school, starts an orphanage for Jewish children in which the kids help govern themselves and create a just society. Josie loved that last part. The book is beautifully illustrated, with acrylic paintings that have a slightly skewed, just-barely-cartoonish perspective. Some paintings stand alone while others are tiny spot illustrations integrated into the text. There’s so much to look at. And at the end, when Korczak’s children are marched from the Warsaw ghetto to the train that will take them to their deaths in Treblinka, there’s so much to mourn. I still think Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars is a better introduction to the idea of the Holocaust, but this is a gorgeous, gently-told book that every Jewish kid should eventually read. (Grades 2-4, and for adults, too)

Faith by Maya Ajmera, Magda Nakasis, and Cynthia Pon (Charlesbridge). This photography book illustrates how different cultures around the world pray, read sacred books, eat, visit holy places, celebrate festivals, and mark lifecycle events. Some kids love to look at photos of other kids, and this book will hypnotize them. There’s very little text. The images celebrate diversity without bludgeoning anyone over the head with it. We see a Jewish girl making challah with her zayde, a young Buddhist novice meditating, Nigerian children praying together, a bar-mitzvah boy chanting the Torah, a Muslim family breaking the daily fast during Ramadan, a Guatemalan kid with missing front teeth grinning broadly in an Easter mask. Charming. (Pre-K to Grade 4)

You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?! By Jonah Winter, illustrated by André Carrilho. (Schwartz & Wade, $17.99) Many years ago, as a tiny Jew, I got sick of hearing about Sandy Koufax. Whenever a kid would say there aren’t any great Jewish athletes, some grownup would trot out the story of a guy a million years ago who sat out a World Series game because it fell on Yom Kippur. To which we tiny Jews said (in our tiny heads): big whoop. Our unasked question: how much did that guy’s teammates and all the fans want to kill him? It sure didn’t sound Good for the Jews, refusing to play in the World Series. Will today’s tiny Jews also be resistant to hearing about how Sandy Koufax was awesomely Jewish and noble (there’s that word again)? Not if this book can help it. It’s enticing even without the nobility angle. There’s a crazy moving 3-D holographic cover image of Koufax mid-pitch. The illustrations are cool and distorted and freaky—and there’s a lot of brilliant gold leaf in them. Koufax is all arcing-curving-curve-ball-throwing giant arms, plus a set of bushy eyebrows. He’s pure power. He’s an enigma. The unnamed teammate who narrates this book (in a folksy voice that could possibly be deemed annoying) doesn’t really understand him, and we don’t either. But the fact that the main character feels elusive is OK. We respect his hard work, the way he faces anti-Semitism, the way no one can figure out what motivates him when he suddenly quits baseball at his peak. We end up just admiring the guy’s individuality; that’s better and truer than hagiography. Sometimes questions are richer than answers.(Grades 1-4)

When I Wore My Sailor Suit by Uri Shulevitz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This book, for very young kids, is a little snippet of one of Shulevitz’s childhood memories. Little Uri visits the Mintzes’ apartment and plays with a model ship on a dresser, imagining himself on a daring voyage where he meets a pirate and finds a treasure map. But he’s pulled out of his fantasy by a painting in the room: a portrait with creepy eyes that seem to follow him. At first Uri is too freaked out to continue his imaginary play, but eventually he finds a way to defeat the picture’s scariness and go back to his world-sailing fantasy. Shulevitz is a heavy hitter in children’s books—he won a Caldecott Medal in 1969, for The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, and has illustrated nearly 40 books (including Isaac Bashevis Singer’s astounding—and shockingly out of print—1982 retelling of The Golem). Last year’s How I Learned Geography is a more Serious, Important autobiographical book—that one, for slightly older children, addressed more directly Shulevitz’s childhood in World War II-era Warsaw (where his apartment was hit by a bomb in 1939, while he was home) and his family’s flight to Paris, Turkmenistan, and then Israel. Mid-journey, the father can’t afford food at a desert market, and instead comes home with a map, which turns out to offer its own kind of nourishment in terrible times. Both books are about the power of storytelling and imagination. The illustrations in When I Wore My Sailor Suit are warmer and more inviting than the ornate, sweeping vistas Shulevitz paints in How I Learned Geography. They’re cozy. And the story deals with addressing fear in an authentic, manageable way. Maxine, age five, adores it. (Pre-K to Grade 2)

Next week: the year’s best chapter books.

Given the remarkable successes of Elie Wiesel’s Night and The Diary of Anne Frank—the latter of which receives an exemplary close reading by Francine Prose in Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the After Life (HarperCollins, October), as discussed last week on Vox Tablet—publishers know that stories about the Nazis’ youngest, most vulnerable victims have the power to move contemporary readers like nothing else. And, sadly, there was no dearth of children and teens who suffered or died at the hands of the Third Reich, each of them with a story as heartbreaking as it is appalling.

Rita Lurie’s family paid a non-Jewish Pole to hide them in an attic on his farm during the war. Unlike Anne Frank, Rita managed to survive, though she saw her brother and mother die in hiding, and she watched as two other relatives were shot. Lurie and her daughter, Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, a former lawyer and television executive, describe her experiences, and the continuing fallout of those traumas decades later, in Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir (Harper, September).

Janusz Korczak dedicated his life to caring for abandoned Jewish children, long before the Nazis set their sights on Poland. He founded a revolutionary orphanage in Warsaw in 1912—a little ways up Krochmalna Street from the house in which Isaac Bashevis Singer grew up—in which children administrated their own government, legal system, and media. When the Nazis deported the orphanage’s children to Treblinka, Korczak insisted on staying with them to the end. Tomek Bogacki, a Polish-born artist and children’s book author, presents Korczak’s bravery for an audience around the same age as his charges, in The Champion of Children: The Story of Janusz Korczak (FSG, September, ages 9–12).

Hannelore Brenner’s The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Therensienstadt (Schocken, September) meanwhile focuses on a group of Jewish women who met in the Theresienstadt camp between 1942 and 1944, when they were teenagers. Living today in England, Israel, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the U.S., these survivors now gather once a year to reaffirm their fellowship, and they have contributed their diaries, drawings, and recollections to Brenner’s tribute volume.

The camp, near Prague, where Brenner’s subjects were imprisoned functioned both as a sort of Potemkin Village to appease the Red Cross and as a way station for Jews en route to their extermination. Further insights into the camp’s operation and atmosphere can be found in the diary kept by Philipp Manes, a Berlin furrier, during the two years he spent there before his murder in Auschwitz. As If It Were Life: A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto (Palgrave Macmillan, November), Manes’s diary, like Brenner’s book, depicts the cultural vibrancy that Jews heroically kept alive in Theresienstadt—among other things, inmates wrote and staged a “children’s opera,” Brundibar—as well as the bitterness of living at the whim of the Nazis in a showpiece ghetto.

Even after eluding the carnage of Hitler’s Europe, some Jewish adolescents found themselves jailed again, like the four orphaned protagonists of Anita Diamant’s novel Day After Night (Scribner, September). The novel takes place in 1945, and each of Diamant’s heroines has followed a different path through the Holocaust, dramatizing the variety of its horrors: one, like Rita Lurie, hid out in a barn, another survived the camps, a third battled with the partisans, and the fourth waited out the war turning tricks in a Parisian brothel. Drawn, like many of the women featured in Girls of Room 28, to the Land of Israel—whether through ideology or desperation—these girls wind up in Atlit, a camp for illegal immigrants established by the British rulers of Palestine.

Many of the young European Jews who escaped to the U.S. before the onset of the war found themselves in ideal positions to fight in the Allied military: fluent in German, familiar with strategic locations, they were, most importantly, extraordinarily motivated to risk their lives to defeat the Nazis. Two new popular histories—Patrick K. O’Donnell’s They Dared Return: An Epic Story of Jewish Refugees Who Escaped Nazi Germany, but Returned for Vengeance (Da Capo, October) and Steven Karras’s The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military in World War II (Zenith, October)—tell the tales of such soldiers. Karras’s book adapts material from his 1999 documentary, About Face, but the film that best explains why two volumes on this subject would be published almost simultaneously this fall is Quentin Tarantino’s Inlglourious Basterds, the world-wide earnings of which recently topped $230 million. At least until a Basterds tie-in book appears (apart from Tarantino’s screenplay, which has floated around the web for years, and has been available for purchase since August), Karras, O’Donnell, and their editors can hope to profit from a burgeoning market for military dramas of Jewish revenge.

On the subject of Hollywood tie-ins: as Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man fills movie theaters with the sound of Yiddish, fans of their remarkable oeuvre may be interested to discover the uses to which their films have been put in a couple of new books. Cultural studies scholars can turn anything into analytical fodder, so no one should be surprised by The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies (Indiana, November), edited by professors Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe. It contains essays titled “The Big Lebowski and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism,” “No Literal Connection: Mass Commodification, U.S. Militarism, and the Oil Industry in The Big Lebowski,” and “Abiding (as) Animal: Marmot, Pomeranian, Whale, Dude,” among others—and, yes, both the editors and authors seem well aware that what they’re doing is at least a little ridiculous. Less self-conscious is Cathleen Falsani’s The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers (Zondervan, October), which sets out “to uncover what the overarching spiritual messages of their films—their ‘gospel,’ if you will—might be.” Notwithstanding the “Foreword” Falsani has wrangled from a Montana rabbi who calls her, absurdly, “the Rashi to the Coens’ scripture,” not much insight into the filmmakers’ religion or ethnicity can be expected from The Dudes Abides. Falsani’s evangelical publisher aims primarily to “glorify Jesus Christ” (and includes in its catalog such literary gems as How Jewish Is Christianity, in which one thoughtful contributor worries that the spread of Messianic synagogues might undermine efforts of bona fide Christian churches to “reach out to the Jewish people in evangelism and discipleship”). Might evangelical Christians cull spiritual wisdom from Fargo and Barton Fink? The idea recalls a saying of that great Jewish sage, Walter Sobchak: “Donny, you’re out of your element.”