By day, sisters Molly and Clara appear to be modern-day New Yorkers, living in an indie cinema that was once home to a Yiddish theater. At night, they transform into estries — owl-like women vampires who prey on men.
Molly and Clara — whose alter egos are based on figures from Jewish lore — are the heroines of “Night Owls,” A.R. Vishny’s time-travel debut novel, one of a trio of books that took top prizes at the Sydney Taylor Book Awards for Jewish children’s books.
The awards were announced Monday by the Association of Jewish Libraries at the American Library Association’s LibLearnX conference in Phoenix.
“Night Owls” won the gold medal for young adult fiction. “An Etrog from Across the Sea” by Deborah Bodin Cohen and Kerry Olitzky, illustrated by Stacey Dressen McQueen, took the gold medal in the picture book category, and “The Girl Who Sang: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope and Survival,” by Estelle Nadel and Bethany Strought, with illustrations by Sammy Savos, won top prize in the middle-grade category.
'An Etrog from Across the Sea'
Set in the early 18th century, the lavishly illustrated “An Etrog from Across the Sea” tells the story of a Sephardic Jewish family living in Colonial-era New York. A young girl named Rachel is worried when her father, a tradesman, doesn’t return home from Corsica in time for Sukkot. It’s based on the life of Luis Moises Gomez, a real-life British merchant who settled in New York.
Co-author Olitzky is a former pulpit rabbi and former executive director of Big Tent Judaism, an outreach institution.
'The Girl Who Sang'
“The Girl Who Sang” is based on the life of the Polish-born Nadel, who survived the Holocaust as a child hiding from the Nazis. The novel’s protagonist’s passion for singing becomes her source of strength, through the tragic loss of her family, her arduous post-war escape and a complicated life as a young refugee in the U.S.
In other awards, Hanna R. Neier won the Sydney Taylor manuscript award for “When You Write Back,” time-travel novel layered in mystery. The award honors unpublished manuscripts of Jewish fiction targeting ages 8-13.
Winners will receive their awards at the AJL’s annual conference in June.
Writing about 'Night Owls'
Writing about “Night Owls,” Vishny said that estries can be traced to Sefer Hasidism. The medieval text describes estries as witch-like creatures called who suck the blood of their victims.
Vishny lays the blame for their obscurity, along with most other Jewish magical creatures, on the systematic, antisemitic destruction of European Jewish culture, Vishny wrote.
“We’re a tiny people whose culture our enemies have long sought to destroy,” she wrote.
The gold medal for “Night Owls” was its second major award this month. Earlier it won a National Jewish Book Award in the young adult category. Other Jewish children’s books to win National Jewish Book Awards, a progam of the Jewish Book Council, were “Sharing Shalom” by Danielle Sharkan, illustrated by Selina Alko, in the picture book category and “Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop” by Joshua S. Levy for midde-grade readers.
Named in memory of Sydney Taylor, the author of the “All-of-a-Kind-Family” series of young adult books, the Association of Jewish Libraries awards honor works that “exemplify high literary standards, while authentically portraying the Jewish experience,” Aviva Rosenberg, chair of the Sydney Taylor awards committee, said at the ceremony.