The tale of Barcelona's secret shofar may have arrived in America via a rabbi's listserv, speculates Wayland author Jacqueline Dembar Greene. However it came, the legend of Don Fernando Aguilar, the conductor of the Royal Symphony of Barcelona, has spread from congregation to congregation.
As the story goes, Don Fernando lived in the time of the Spanish Inquisition--when he and other Jews had to hide their faith or face death. So determined was Don Fernando to bring the shofar to the secret Jews, that he worked it into a symphony performance on the eve of Rosh Hashanah--even as the enforcers of the Inquisition sat in attendance.
Greene has weaved the old yarn into a children's book, "The Secret Shofar of Barcelona." It is the seventh book she has had published this year; the others are about a fictional Russian Jewish immigrant featured in the American Girl series.
Raised during the '50s in Bloomfield, Conn., Greene attended a large Sephardic congregation that included many members of her mother's extended family. She's not quite sure where they all were born. Sometimes her grandmother would say she was from Greece, other times she said Turkey--it all depended on the story she was telling. The elders spoke Ladino, an amalgamation of Spanish and Hebrew, with Arabic, Turkish, French and Greek tossed in.
Her imagination enlivened by her family's laissez-faire attitude toward their history and her facility for language nurtured by their myriad dialects, Greene majored in French literature in college.
She's not quite sure what launched her writing career. It may have been her search for a children's Hanukah book that she could read aloud to her son's classroom without feeling as if she were preaching the story of the Maccabees.
Unable to find one, she wrote her own and published it herself in 1980. It is about a boy named Nathan who swallowed a tooth on Hanukah. Nathan lamented his lost tooth-fairy opportunity until his grandfather told him about the tradition of Hanukah gelt--which turned out to be far more lucrative than a visit from a fairy.
Alternatively, Greene says, she may owe her career to the children's literature professor at the University of Connecticut. Intrigued by the old Yankee folk tale of Tom Cooke, New England's own Robin Hood, Greene wrote a short story and sent it back to her alma mater in hopes of receiving some useful feedback. She got some.
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"She told me, 'I'm going to tell you something you don't want to hear. You're wasting your time. This story should be a novel, and you are just afraid to do it.' She told me I needed to stop everything and write. So I did," said Greene.
"The Leveler," in young adult novel format, went on to become a Pick of the List for Booklist, the American Library Association's review journal.
Real people don't live in Greene's stories, but they do drop by--such as the way "The Hanukah Tooth" was inspired by one of her two sons. "What His Father Did" grew out of a joke her father told her. Refused a meal by an innkeeper, a vagabond warns: "I hope I won't have to do what my father did." In response, the innkeeper scrambles to prepare a meal. When Greene first read the book to a room full of kindergartners, she arrived at the punchline--about what the man's hungry father was forced to do--and looked out at a sea of deadpan faces. She thought the joke had fallen flat. But then the room erupted into a fit of giggles the likes of which only a horde of 5-year-olds can produce: floor slapping, rolling around, full-on hysterics. That book, published in 1992, has been translated into five languages. The version on Greene's shelf is in Swahili.
The American Girl Company, owned by Mattel, showcases a line of dolls based on girls at different points in American history. Each doll is the focus of a six-book series. An editor who had fallen in love with Greene's other historical works asked her to write the books about Rebecca Rubin. After landing at Ellis Island at the start of World War I, Rebecca's family lives in a tenement on Manhattan's Lower East side.
Greene said Rebecca is already getting fan mail. "It's exciting for me to read these letters and find that young readers are engaged and thinking about the issues that Rebecca faces and about how they might respond if they were in her shoes," Greene said.
Writing the Rebecca series connected Greene with her father's heritage. He was the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants who at times had to scrape by. His childhood recollections of the Jewish holidays weren't about the ceremonies but the food: the latkes, the chicken, the family gathered around the table. Greene said his memories made their way into one of the Rebecca books.
To prepare her books, Greene immerses herself in library and Internet research. She tries to visit the locations where her stories are set. She explored the Lower East Side for the Rebecca series and visited a struggling synagogue in Barcelona for "The Secret Shofar." She didn't find anyone who knew the story of Don Fernando, nor any evidence that the Royal Symphony Orchestra ever existed. But she loved the idea of a book that would spotlight Spain's Jewish heritage, which was all but erased by the Inquisition.
Greene has published 25 books and several short stories for children and young adults, most of them rooted in Jewish history. She said she writes with the hope that people of all ages will take something away from her stories. With the "Shofar," for example, a young child may grasp just the plot; an older child may ask why the Spanish Jews had to conceal their faith; and an adult may admire the courage it took to blow the shofar.
For more on Jacqueline Dembar Greene, visit www.jdgbooks.com.
By Dawn A. Swann
Special to the Advocate
RELATED ARTICLE: From the 'Secret Shofar'.
Rafael had an idea. "Since it is Rosh Hashanah, you could add the call of the shofar to the native instruments."
Don Fernando's shoulders slumped. "So many of Barcelona's Jews have longed to hear it. But who would take such a risk?"
"I will," Rafael said. "If you are brave enough to conduct a Rosh Hashanah concert in front of the Duke and the Inquisition, then I will play the shofar." He gave his father a sly smile. "Maybe it's safest to hide the shofar in plain sight."
REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF KAR-BEN PUBLISHING, A DIVISION OF LERNER PUBLISHING GROUP.
