MATZAH CRAZE

Noa shares her Passover matzah.

Everyone usually shares at school lunch, but one day, the redheaded White girl insists on eating her own lunch. In very simple rhyming couplets, Noa quickly tells her tablemates the reason for eating matzah during Passover. During the Jews’ escape from Egypt, Noa, says, matzah was first created, because “with no time for bread to rise, / it came out flat, about this size.” (The size of the Israelites’ unleavened flatbread is not mentioned in Exodus, a misleading detail evidently added for the sake of the rhyme.) The illustration style sets these pages aside from the modern-day story and renders the Jews and Pharaoh with the same brown skin. Noa brings extra matzah for the rest of the weeklong holiday so that her friends can taste it in different ways: “chocolate matzah, matzah brei… / then a matzah pizza pie!” The book assumes the audience’s familiarity with Passover if not Noa’s racially and ethnically diverse classmates’; there is no glossary and only a limited holiday endnote. At the end, “Noa says, ‘Now you can see / what my matzah means to me. / Sharing it with you this way / makes it a perfect holiday.’ ” This sentiment is, sadly, undercut by Noa’s omission of the traditional welcoming of the Prophet Elijah to the seder. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9.8-by-19.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 27.1% of actual size.)

Of potential use in settings that have other resources on or background knowledge of Passover.