Jewish Sci-Fi Stories for Kids

Rating:
Summary: More fantasy than SF, but good for some laughs at Purim time
Review: Euwell Gibbons once said of the Jerusalem artichoke: "It's not an artichoke and it's not from Jerusalem, but otherwise it is well-named." We could say the same for this anthology. Most of these stories are not SF, they are fantasy tales based on themes from Jewish mysticism. (I am using as my criteria the usual expectation that science fiction has some element of SCIENCE in it.)

"My Clone and I" would qualify as SF. So would "The Night of the Leavened Bread" which, although it is about a golem, also features Baruch Rogers, Space Rabbi. The rest are about kabbalah magic, demons, dybbuks, golems, and angels. (This seems to be a problem with Jewish SF in general. Jack Dann's "Wandering Stars" anthologies also contain more fantasy stories than SF. I look forward to the day when Jewish characters can pilot spaceships and build robots without being plagued by hackneyed dybbuks and golems. )

Next question: are these really stories for children? Well.... They are definitely stories ABOUT children, in that the main characters are kids. But they strike me more as high-school level parodies, patterned on the Yiddish stetl tales of Sholem Aleichem. "A Dybbuk in North Tonawanda" even retains Aleichem's dialect style. It could just as easily be taking place in Kasrilevke as in the USA. However, this style requires a familiarity with Yiddish (or at least Yinglish) to get a lot of the humor.

To get the jokes in "The Night of the Leavened Bread," you need to recognize things like "221B Bakery Street" as a play on Sherlock Holmes' address. Ditto for some "yeshivish" themes and puns that would go over the heads of the average kid outside the Orthodox Jewish community. (For that matter, "Baruch Rogers," a take-off on Buck Rogers, is more a joke for the over-50 grandparents who might be reading this out loud.)

"Lip Service" is a piece of in-group theological humor that is more like hermeneutics than a story. It tells of a fetus that did not forget all the Torah it had learned in the womb at the moment of birth (like it was supposed to do) retained an imperfect understanding and "caused a lot of trouble for the Jewish people" by making up its own religion 2000 years ago. (Yes, it's probably a reference to Jesus, but all is fair in parody and satire.)

Now, having done all this nitpicking, I can still say I liked the book. Once you get past the misleading cover title, there is quite a bit of good Purim Torah here. It's creative, it's funny -- it's just not science fiction.