Thursday, June 21, 2018

The Carp in the Bathtub Paperback – August 1, 2016 by Barb Cohen (Author), Joan Halpern (Illustrator) (Kar-Ben Publishing / Lothrop, Lee & Shepard ) (IBRChildrensBooks)





































Would you like to eat gefilte fish if the fish were a friend of yours?"" Leah and little Harry, whose Mama buys her Passover carp early to insure a good selection and live to insure freshness, could never bring themselves to eat it. Particularly distressed the year Leah is nine, when an unusually playful and intelligent fish disports innocently in the bathtub, the children decide to rescue ""Joe"" by sneaking him downstairs to Mrs. Ginzburg's tub while they decide what to do next. Needless to say Papa and Mrs. Ginzburg get the fish back to Mama in time for Seder, and after a few days of tears the children are appeased with a new cat. Told in the first person about the days ""when I was a little girl"" in Flatbush, the story ends with the confession that the narrator, now a grandmother, still doesn't eat gefilte fish, though her daughters think it's because the kind they buy in the supermarket isn't as good as the kind her Mama made. Easy and unassuming, with lots of black and white pictures, and kosher in all sorts of small ways.

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