"NEW CHILDREN'S BOOK HAS TORONTO CONNECTION" BY FRANCES KRAFT

Cubby Marcus, the model for a young boy’s ancestor in the book “Avram’s Gift,” poses beside the portrait that plays a key role in the story. [Frances Kraft photo]

There’s something familiar about the illustrations in Margie Blumberg’s new children’s book, Avram’s Gift–and it’s not just the detailed, warmly rendered shtetl depictions that bring the past to life for the story’s modern-day protagonist.

While the pictures may strike a chord with Jews of eastern European origin, Torontonians —and members of Beth David B’nai Israel Beth Am Congregation in particular—are likely to recognize the north Toronto synagogue and its clergy, Rabbi Philip Scheim and Cantor Marshall Loomer, who serve as models for illustrator Laurie McGaw.

​Avram’s Gift (MB Publishing, 2003) is the story of eight-year-old Mark, who fears the picture of his stern-faced, bearded great-great-grandfather that his mother wants to hang in their new house. On Rosh Hashanah, over lunch, his Grandpa Morris helps him see his ancestor in a new light, through detailed and affectionate childhood recollections.

And in a plot thread that’s particularly appropriate at this time of year, Mark aspires to learn to blow the shofar that is a hallmark of High Holiday services. The threads are all woven together by the end of the story, which is followed by an afterword that includes information on shofar-blowing and ideas for exploring one’s own family roots.

Although Avram’s Gift is fictional, it was sparked by a true story about the author’s real-life great-great-grandfather Avram Hirschman, whose portrait hangs in her parents’ Chevy Chase, Md., home.

On Rosh Hashanah six years ago, Blumberg heard about her great-great-grandfather from her great-uncle Morris, then aged 94, who, like the fictional Grandpa Morris in her book, left the shtetl of Aroshka as a child, saying goodbye to his grandfather Avram Hirschman at the train station.

“He took the frame in his hands and brought the photograph very close to his face,” Blumberg recalled in a phone interview from her home in Bethesda, Md. “He said if you were to look up the word ‘love’ in the dictionary, you would find his grandpa’s picture there.

“We were all in tears,” she said. “He hadn’t seem Avram in 88 years.”

The next day, Blumberg came up with the idea of a book—as if a light bulb had gone off, she explained—and she subsequently interviewed her great-uncle more extensively.

A lawyer by training, Blumberg wrote and published a desk calendar with cartoons and recipes, Is There Life After Chocolate? and co-authored Shakespeare for Kids: His Life and Times. She is working on a third book, about grammar, for age 12 and up, and is reading manuscripts for MB Publishing, the company she established earlier this year.

“I was always read to as a child,” she said, and she has always wanted to write books. Renowned author Leon Uris, who died this summer, was a first cousin to her father. Although they lived in different cities, once Blumberg started writing, they began to be in contact and were starting to get to know each other better when he became ill.

Blumberg’s brother Mark, a professor at the University of Iowa, has also written a book recently. Body Heat (Harvard University Press) discusses temperature and life on earth for the lay reader, she said.

Finding the right illustrator for Avram’s Gift involved poring over “hundreds and hundreds” of books. When Blumberg saw McGaw’s illustrations in Polar the Titanic Bear, she knew her search had ended.

The award-winning artist, based in Shelburne, Ont., used real-life models for the characters in the book, fleshing out the shtetl scenes with details borrowed from historical photographs.
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She came to Beth David through Linda Kabot, the model for Mark’s grandmother and a Beth David member. Kabot became friendly with McGaw after learning about her own family history in the children’s book Journey to Ellis Island, written by Carol Bierman, a relative of Kabot’s whom she’d never met, and illustrated by McGaw.

Cubby Marcus, a clean-shaven, personable 68-year-old, was the model for the forbidding Avram. (McGaw added the beard when she did the illustrations.) Although he doesn’t look the part at first glance, he was very taken with the scenes for which he was asked to pose.
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“There’s a magical transcendence that goes on between grandchildren and grandparents,” he said at the book launch this summer. “It’s something that transcends time.”