By Larry Kaufman
For my ninth birthday, my Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Morris gave me a book hot off the presses, written by their friend Libbie Braverman, who was the principal of the Hebrew school at the Euclid Avenue Temple in Cleveland. The book was called Children of the Emek, and had emerged from Libbie's recent trip to Palestine, very shortly before trans-Atlantic travel was halted by World War II.

Children of the Emek told the story of life in Palestine under the British mandate, through the eyes of a young brother and sister who lived in Nahalal, in the Jezreel Valley (the Emek of the title).

I remember their life on the moshav, their visits to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and to a kibbutz, and especially their friendship with Elsa, a girl their age who had just come to Palestine as a refugee from Nazi Germany through the auspices of Youth Aliyah.

By the time I was a senior in high school, Libbie had been promoted at the Euclid Avenue Temple and had become education director - and her successor as head of Hebrew, Sara Palay, hired me to teach Hebrew to second graders. Thus I got a chance to get to know Libbie in a context other than as my aunt's friend and as the author of what had been one of my favorite books.

Although as a bookish kid in a Zionist household, I read and re-read Children of the Emek, I didn't properly appreciate it until some 35 years after I first encountered it, when I realized during my first trip to Israel how much of what I knew about the country could be traced to this book I had read as a youngster.

With the benefit of hindsight, I suppose the book was intended as a Sunday school textbook - both of the Reform temples in Cleveland were led by rabbis who were ardent Zionists at a time when Zionism was far from the mainstream of the Reform movement. My supposition about the book's presumed textbook origin was corroborated many years later, when I stumbled on a copy at a used book sale. This turned out to be a 1954 update, in which the characters and the setting remained intact, but the story had been brought up to date to portray the early years of the state rather than the pre-war, pre-state era. Frankly, I didn't feel that the modernization worked - but then, I was no longer nine years old. However, a Google search today reveals that you can still buy copies!

At this season of cheshbon hanefesh, the accounting of our souls, it's appropriate to look back at our mistakes and our regrets. I realize now with regret that when I came back from that first trip to Israel, I should have called Libbie and told her about the lasting impact her book had had on a nine-year old kid - and also on the impact her providing a teaching opportunity had had on a seventeen-year old kid. She would have been in her seventies by then, and I've been told that she lived to a ripe old age, in full possession of her faculties and of her reputation as a peerless educator. I offer this public tribute to a great lady as a substitute for the private message I should have delivered.

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