The Amazing Menorah of Mazeltown

Story by Joy Fate & Harold Dresner
Illustrations by Neil Shapiro

978-193317628-4

Hardcover, 10 by 11 inches, 32 pp.

$16.95

Mazeltown, in the Cry-Me-a-River valley, was a dreary village on the cold, dark days leading up to Hanukkah. Grown-ups schlepped though the streets by the inky river. Just as the holiday was to begin, Molly and Max stumbled on a most curious object in their father’s junkshop.

After they polished it, a most amazing menorah emerged, a menorah that day by day for eight days changed Mazeltown—brightening the streets, whitening the sheets, lofting the bagels, making the river glow with life and lighting up everyone’s heart.

I’d Bark But You Never Listen
An Illustrated Guide to the Jewish Dog

Written and Illustrated by Harold Kimmel

Hardcover

10 by 6 1/2 inches, 64 pp.,

32 illustr.

$11.99

The funniest book about Jewish dogs ever. And not only do they resemble their owners in looks, they also seem to exhibit the some of the same concerns and cultural attitudes.

A Jewish dog will always bury the bone the next day. The stone goes up within a year.

In My Father's Bakery
A Bronx Memoir

by Marvin Korman

Hardcover

$22


This beautifully written remembrance restores to life—in all its color, humor and magic—a vanished New York neighborhood of European Jews, Irish Catholics and others as it was during the Depression and through World War II.

The author unrolls before you prizefights in the Bronx Coliseum, baseball in the original Yankee Stadium and pinochle in the bakery backroom. Yet bread, the staff of life, is at the center of this work.

In an easygoing, novelistic style, Mr. Korman delivers such vivid portraits of bakery regulars that you, too, will feel you are in the bakery, eating devil's food cake and eavesdropping (while pretending to do homework) as scenes of crisis or celebration spill before them.

The author's powerful vignettes focus on individuals: among them the grocer, the baker and the local bookmaker. You will also meet a local politico, a lonely wartime wife, gypsy tinsmiths, and a magician—who is not the only closely observed character who pulls surprises out of his hat.

Marvin Korman was too keen a chronicler to serve up mere nostalgia along with the bakery's recipe for butter cookies, the one with the maraschino cherry in the middle, that mothers mailed to their boys in the service. Mr. Korman's stories are delivered fresh-baked and warm, with irony enough to assure a memorable bite.

"Marvin Korman takes his riotous, baseball-loving, savvy Bronx family and with enormous skill makes them universal. He is a Master Baker and writer."

---Patricia Volk, author of Stuffed.