Laggie and Grillo: An unlikely friendship by Phyllis Schwartz, with illustrations by Siski Kalla; Catch a Leaf Publishing; © 2025; ISBN 9781068-612237; 36 pages; $12.95.
SAN DIEGO – This charming book by a local author teaches grade school students a multitude of lessons.
When Yoshi’s parents veto buying a pet dog, she doesn’t sulk. Playing in her back yard, she finds and adopts as pets a lizard she names “Laggie” (which is short for lagartijo, the Spanish word for little lizard) and a cricket named “Grillo” (The Spanish word for cricket.)
When her teacher asks her to write a poem incorporating words from different languages, Yoshi already has her subject matter, Laggie and Grillo. Yoshi is the child of a Jewish mother and a Japanese father, so she also throws a few words of Yiddish and Japanese into her composition to augment Spanish, which is spoken in nearby Mexico.
The poem teaches young readers rhyming and a bit of foreign language vocabulary.
Lizards normally like to eat crickets, but Yoshi built them separate little houses with instructions that they should befriend each other. The takeaway here is that humans should be kind to animals.
After Yoshi completed her poem—modeling the lesson that people should finish what they start –- her parents said while they didn’t favor a dog as a pet, Yoshi could have a cat.
The lesson here is that in life there are alternatives.
Yoshi named the cat “ketzeleh,” which is Yiddish for little cat.
Ketzeleh taught Grillo and Laggie how to use the backyard slide.
And Yoshi played with her girlfriends, each representing a different ethnicity.
Another lesson for children: friends (whether in the animal world or among humans) can come from different backgrounds.
*
Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.