Jennifer Stempel never saw her Cuban-Jewish heritage reflected in any of the books she grew up reading. Her mother, who had been born on the Cuban island of Santiago de Cuba, emigrated with her family to the US as a teenager and married an Askenazi Jew. Stempel – a respected recipe developer and former food blogger – grew up in Los Angeles and feasted on books about American children and Jewish children but never about Jewish children from Cuba.
So she decided to change that with her debut children’s book, With a Needle and Thread: A Jewish Folktale from Cuba, which is set in the small Cuban Jewish community her mother came from and where her grandparents still live.
“It’s sort of a mishmash of my own experience growing up in a Cuban-Jewish home as well as my personal travels to Cuba to visit family,” she says.
An outgrown dress becomes a blanket, which becomes a prayer tallit, which, in its final incarnation becomes a wedding chupah
With A Needle and Thread is the story of a young girl and her grandmother who use their creativity to transform a beloved dress into treasured items of traditional significance. An outgrown dress becomes a blanket, which becomes a prayer tallit, which, in its final incarnation becomes a wedding chupah – a symbolic item that sits at the heart of the community’s Jewish celebrations.
It’s a clever inversion of the Jewish folk tale Something From Nothing, in which a loving grandfather cleverly repurposes his grandson’s tattered blanket into various items as the boy grows up, smaller and smaller each time, until one day the remaining bit of the blanket – now fashioned into a button – rolls away. In Stempel’s version, the blanket isn’t “shrinking and shrinking to become nothing, it’s growing and growing as the community grows”.
This resourcefulness, embodied in the book’s repeated use of the colloquial Cuban phrase “lo que sea” or “whatever it is that I have”, is a characteristic Stempel sees in both Jewish and Cuban culture.
“It’s this ability to sort of ‘MacGyver’ life,” she explains, referring to the 1980s fictional US secret agent who relies on his ingenuity rather than physical force.
“Cuba’s Jewish community is still keeping up with traditions and finding joy, even when they have very little, just by using what they have.”
Stempel is sitting outside in her family succah in St Louis on a sunny morning when we connect over Zoom. Her book gives powerful voice to this lesser-known Jewish community – all that remains of the country’s once 15,000-strong Jewish population, most of whom emigrated during the Cuban Revolution in 1959. This small but stalwart community now carry forward Jewish traditions with a blend of Cuban culture.
As indeed does Stempel, who as a food writer has always blended Jewish and Cuban influences. It was via her former food blog, The Cuban Reuben, that Stempel first came to the attention of the Jewish publisher Kalaniot Books, and her children’s book includes a special recipe for the classic Cuban dish ropa vieja (stewed beef in tomato sauce) as a nod to readers who discover it through her cooking.
Similarly she is keen to include Cuban Jewish readers, not just English speakers, and With A Needle and Thread is also available in a limited Spanish language edition, much to Stempel’s delight, who claims it makes the story read “even more poetically”.
But her main intention was to highlight the diverse nature of the Jewish world, especially because its target audience is young children.
“My kids [she has two] asked me when I was writing the book, ‘Who are you writing this for?’ And my answer was ‘you’ – because I wanted them to be able to pick up a book and see themselves on every page,” she says. “I wanted to show that we come in lots of different colours and languages and cultures and traditions. In that way the book is for everybody.”
With a Needle and Thread:
A Jewish Folktale from Cuba
By Jennifer Stempel
Kalaniot Books
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