"Brave Girls"

Brave Girls

‘The Girl With a Brave Heart’ and ‘The Longest Night’

From "The Girl With a Brave Heart"

By PAMELA PAUL

Published: March 6, 2013

Books about girl power are easy to find in March, National Women’s History Month, though not all of them feel timeless or universal. Two new picture books, both with origins in Israel, tell stories about young girls whose bravery and endurance reap great rewards, in ways that transcend the specific circumstance of a people and place.

THE GIRL WITH A BRAVE HEART

A Tale From Tehran

By Rita Jahanforuz

Illustrated by Vali Mintzi

40 pp. Barefoot Books. Cloth, $16.99. Paper, $7.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 10)

THE LONGEST NIGHT

A Passover Story

By Laurel Snyder

Illustrated by Catia Chien

40 pp. Schwartz & Wade Books. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)

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From "The Longest Night"

“The Girl With a Brave Heart,” by Rita Jahanforuz, an Iranian-born popular singer raised in Israel, tells the story of a young motherless girl, Shiraz. When her father dies, Shiraz is left Cinderella-like in the clutches of an inconstant stepmother. “Without your father bringing home money every week, we cannot afford a maid,” the stepmother informs little Shiraz — and we all know what that means.

The book, originally published in Hebrew, tells a story that feels as if it’s been told forever. When a ball of her wool blows away and lands in a neighbor’s courtyard, Shiraz sets off to retrieve it. She encounters the garden’s owner, an old, mysterious woman. Wildly disheveled, the woman proceeds to give Shiraz a set of counterintuitive tasks: “I want you to smash all the dishes, and the draining board and the sink,” she instructs the child, who ignores her demands. Instead the girl cleans the kitchen and is rewarded for her disobedience with the gift of beauty.

When Shiraz returns home with her story, the stepmother insists that her own child follow Shiraz’s footsteps and be duly recognized. Of course, nothing of the sort happens, and readers learn that responding to another person sometimes requires psychological acuity and charitable interpretation. The old woman rewards Shiraz’s stepsister, who acts on command and out of self-interest, obeying the old woman’s commands to the letter, in kind. The second child returns home unrecognizably ugly.

If this all sounds familiar, there’s a reason. “The Girl With a Brave Heart” is really a psychologically driven tweak on the old Grimms’ fairy tale, “Mother Holle.” In the old German version, the good girl is rewarded for her humility and industry with a treasure of gold, while the lazy, ungracious child is sent back to her mother covered in pitch. According to Jahanforuz, her own book was inspired by a story her mother told her when she was growing up in Tehran; the two stories’ origins in the oral tradition certainly seem to overlap.

“The Girl With a Brave Heart” is strikingly enhanced by Vali Mintzi’s exquisite naïf illustrations, which seem a happy meeting of Gauguin and mid-career Matisse. Even during its darker moments, the figures shimmer in a sunny, spicy landscape of tangerine, cinnamon and teal. Taken altogether, the book is a heartwarming vindication of good-heartedness, something that doesn’t always get celebrated in a girlhood culture of snark.

It’s another era, another forced laborer  —  in this instance, an actual slave — and yet “The Longest Night,” a captivating Passover story by Laurel Snyder (“Bigger Than a Breadbox,” “Penny Dreadful”), also centers on the themes of just rewards and just deserts. In poetic couplets, a Jewish girl narrates her experience in ancient Egypt. “In the heat and blowing sand,/Each gray dawn my work began.” A wistful, dreamy child, she’d like to fly away like a dove or be visited by the moon.

What follows is a child’s-eye view of the 10 plagues portion of the Passover Seder story, culminating in the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. Not all the images are pleasant, thanks to the subject matter (a wolf with bared teeth, Egyptians covered in boils and blisters), and some may scare the younger ones (who would otherwise be playing with parsley and salt water by now). But for curious children searching for context and immediacy, the story – full of tense action that gains momentum as the pages turn — is pitched just right. Catia Chien’s forceful, textured paintings beautifully evoke the dusty sandscape and drench the final happy homecoming in rich, hopeful sunlight.