By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, TAIWAN — When Rabbi Israel Zoberman of Virgnia Beach, Virginia was invited to the annual Chanukah Party at the Obama White House in early December, he brought my 1985 Jewish children’s picture book as a gift. I had no idea this would
happen, and the very notion that Bubbie and Zadie Come to My House would someday end up at the White House took me by complete surprise. Who knew?
It turns out the entire thing was not really planned, either — it just happened. Susan Anderson, a member of Rabbi Zoberman’s congregation in Virginia, has been a fan of the Bubbie and Zadie story since first hearing an audiotape of the book in the 1980s, and when a new edition of the picture book was published in 2007, she recommended the story to her rabbi. He ordered a few
copies for the temple gift shop, and in 2010, one of those copies, neatly gift-wrapped, became the Chanukah present he gave to President Obama last year.
When I heard the news, as relayed to me by Ms. Anderson, I almost fell off my chair. Not in my wildest dreams…
In mid-January, the Washington Jewish Week ran a brief news item about the rabbi’s visit to the White House and a new project that has grown out of the White House Chanukah Party gift.
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Debra Rubin, editor of the weekly, wrote:
“Danny Bloom, author of Bubbie and Zadie Come to My House, last week announced the creation of Bubbie and Zadie Go to the White House Letter Writing Program. The program asks children to write letters, e-mailed to bubbie.zadie@gmail.com, about America’s present andfuture, with the best letters to be forwarded to President Barack Obama. Letters…should suggest ways the president
and his staff can fix America ‘in terms of making it a more fair, just, equal, happy, joyful, healthy, confident country.
Oh, and other ideas are OK, too.”
To conclude her write-up, Rubin noted that while her newspaper had contacted the White House to try to find out what has happened to
“the Bubbie and Zadie book that Rabbi Israel Zoberman dropped off,” she added this punchline:
“We’re hoping Bo didn’t chew on it.”
Rubin was referring to President Obama’s dog named Bo, of course.
Meanwhile, Phil Fink of Shalom America radio show in Cleveland, Ohio did a short ten-minute also in mid-January phone interview with me about the Obama story and read one of the letters from a little girl named Zippy, aged 11, who wrote to the
President via my Bubbie and Zadie address:
“Dear President Obama
My name is Zippy, or you can call me Zipporah. I am 11 years old, which in dog years is really old but I am not a dog. I am just a human being. I hope you can fix America to be a good place to grow up in because we need all the help we can get. I would suggest you fix the banks first, and then the schools and then the army, and then you give us kids a long summer vacation some day so we can go to other
countries and help them out, too. If you do all this, I promise I will vote for you when I turn 18.”
She sign her name: “Yours sincerely, Zipporah Quest, 11, Brooklyn.”
And then a letter in Bubbie and Zadie’s inbox, written by a Seattle teacher named Fay Shimada, who has been using my little book in her
classes for years. Hearing about the new opportuity wrote letters to President Obama via the Bubbie and Zadie project, Shimada said she asked her second-grade class to write to the president and that the letters were on the way to the White House now.
She added: “A few years ago, my class wrote to President Bush and he sent us a signed photograph, so who knows this time?”
http://bubbieandzadiefiles.blogspot.com
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Bloom is a freelance writer based in Taiwan