Dybbuk: A Version - Hardcover

Barbara Rogasky’s Smoke and Ashes: The Story of the Holocaust was called "an outstanding resource" in a Booklist starred review. She lives in Vermont.

Leonard Everett Fisher is the author and illustrator of numerous books for children. His many awards include the National Jewish Book Award for Children’s Literature. He lives in Connecticut.

Grade 5 Up–This retelling of an early-20th-century play based on a Jewish legend is uneasily balanced between an evocation of European shtetl life and a ghost story. Leah and Konin were promised to one another by their fathers even before they were born. However, when Leah is old enough to be married, Sender, her father, wants her betrothed to a rich man. Konin, now a poor orphaned scholar, meets Leah and they fall instantly, irrevocably in love. Thwarted by Sender's greed, the young man studies the Kabbalah, searching for a way to obtain the necessary wealth. When he fails, he dies and comes back as a dybbuk–an unhappy spirit that possesses Leah's body and speaks through her lips. Though an exorcism is performed, she chooses to rejoin Konin and dies before she can marry the man her father has selected. Stories of the supernatural have undeniable appeal, but this one, with its archaic setting and strongly religious connections, seems too specialized for most collections. Rogasky's writing, which is full of inverted phrases (e.g., Pious and sincere they were or Old it is, centuries old), is distancing--even though she addresses readers directly at times (Forgive me, Dear Reader. I cannot explain the meaning of all that happened....). Fisher's dramatic black, white, and brown-toned illustrations add to the hard-edged, unyielding nature of the tragic tale.–Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Public Library, NY
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