When I meet Shoham Smith, she is knee-deep in small children. She is nearing the end of a day of classroom visits at Eden Primary School and marvelling at the pupils’ courteous behaviour, taking their occasional wanderings in her stride. But when, as an established writer for adults, she was first asked to write for children, she was not quite so at ease.
She did not yet have children of her own. “I thought – what have children’s books got to do with me?” she says. “For a moment, I forgot that I myself was a child once. I even forgot that in high school I wrote and illustrated a children’s book. Now when people ask me what you need to write for children, my answer is just to remember what it was like to be a child.”
Today, Smith has three children with her partner Amnon Katz — Noor, 22; Yannai, 19 and Sarai, 12. When Sarai was a newborn, Smith was writing tales of Greek mythological monsters, to accompany illustrations by British artist Sara Fanelli. “I wrote them with a baby on my chest — I hope it made the monsters more cute than scary.”
Smith’s books have won a clutch of prizes and been translated into languages including English, French, German and Portuguese. A favourite available in English is An After Bedtime Story (translator, Annette Appel), in which young Nina rampages through her parents’ dinner party, bathing her doll in the punch bowl and inveigling the guests in her antics.
Smith herself is also a translator (usually working with Katz) and has turned many an English-language classic into Ivrit, including Oliver Twist, The Railway Children, Julia [Gruffalo] Donaldson’s books and Francesca Simon’s Horrid Henry. When in need of a break, she jogs along Tel Aviv’s beaches, climbs trees — or does laundry.
In her own childhood, Smith’s favourite books included Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. “My mother translated it for us because it was not in Hebrew. She read us the things she liked to read. I felt her passion— if the child feels passion of the parent, they will like the book.”
The value of reading is at the heart of Smith’s Signs in the Well, newly translated into English. It tells the story of 40-year-old (not-yet-Rabbi) Akiva. An illiterate goat-herd, he longs to learn to read, but feels too old to start, until he sees the scratches inside a well and realises even gentle water can erode stone, given time. Smith suggested the etching technique used by illustrator Vali Mintzi to complement the story.
Adapting Jewish legends for children is an important part of Smith’s work. “For me, chazal [the Sages] are the ancient masters of the short story,” she says “and I also have an ideological motivation. It is a call to secular Jews not to give up ownership of the cultural and spiritual treasures of the Jewish people, treasures which religious Jews feel they own. This age-old mine belongs to everyone, and everybody – including non-Jews – has the right to use them, to re-tell and re-interpret them.”
Signs in the Well (translated by Annette Appel) is published by Green Bean Books
