If you’re not querying or have never queried, you might ask what is a dead manuscript? If you are or have, you know. Dead manuscripts are manuscripts that never found a home or never found an ending or never found a plot or never found a voice. While Stephen King advises writers to “kill their darlings”, he’s been at this a lot longer than me and is wildly successful. I can’t quite afford to kill them so I instead lock them away (kind of like in Misery). I cut sections from manuscripts or say goodbye to whole manuscripts all the time. I don’t kill them or murder them or obliterate them, I file them. I might need that plot one day or that character description or that award winning first line.

Even when they are filed away, I dream about them from time to time. And the ones that I loved the most, I’ve decided to paint. Will they ever be read to anyone besides my cat? Perhaps not, but she agrees they’re too precious to go. And while they might not ever have a cover or contract, I will now be able to revisit them, my turtles and tortoises, ants and gladiators, pigs and astronauts, in full color, whenever I wish.

I was so excited for On a Chariot of Fire. I originally drafted a middle grade short story version of the Bene Israel origin story. Maybe I’ll add that to my website soon too.

Enjoy!

Click here to download the On A Chariot of Fire word boggle.

Click here to download the On a Chariot of Fire guided reading questions.

Click here to download the road to Elijah’s Rock maze.

Click here to download the On a Chariot of Fire word search.

Special thanks to HarperKids for putting these Mixed-Up Mooncakes recipe pages together! See my Mixed-Up Mooncakes Activity Sheets fun too!

I have created worksheets for most of my books: Alone Together on Dan Street, Zhen Yu and the Snake, Counting on Naamah, Saliman and the Memory Stone, and On a Chariot of Fire. Check out Crafting with Saliman and Crafting with Zhen Yu too!

Click here to download the Mixed-Up Mooncake word search. Click here to download the maze and to help Ruby find the rabbit lantern.

Click here to download the worksheet and to help Ruby make as many words as she can.

Click here to download the guided reading questions for Mixed-Up Mooncakes.

or

Click here for the entire set of PDFs.

Volumes and volumes of Jewish folktales line my shelves. I imagine my great-grandparents, who I never knew, chanting them in foreign tongues. In my imagination, they add details, constructed from memory, that make me believe their stories are true, but also that they were somehow created just for me.

I, however, was raised on a singular folktale. 

In the beginning, there was a beautiful angel who rose from the waters in flowing robes with a magnificent crown. She held an eternal light that reached to the clouds. 

But in order to see her the people first had to shed their shtetl skins. So they cast them away into the river, like sins. 

The angel then devoured names, story, syntax, and syllables until all that remained was the language that they did not yet know. 

They crawled onto the shore, skinless, wobbly legged, and wordless. They tried on names and customs, settling on ones that never seemed to fit. 

Then as they gazed upwards towards the heavens, she appeared before them. They promised her that this was the story they would tell their children and their children’s children.

My father’s parents saw this angel with their own eyes or so he told me, but they were buried before I was old enough to ask questions. My mother’s parents saw her too and talked about her often. 

My grandmother was Persian, but she barely remembered that. She only recalled that she didn’t know the Yiddish that sometimes slipped out of my grandfather’s mouth when he was angry. 

“Really, tell me what language you spoke before.” I pleaded. 

“None.”

“Where were you born?”

“Ellis Island,” they would reply.

I protested until I was finally forced to accept this to be true. 

“Fine, but then tell me, where were your parents born?”

“Ellis Island, too.” 

And I grew to understand that it wasn’t a lie because, to them, it was the beginning of everything and this was the story that would save them and their children and their children’s children. 

“You really want the whole story?” asked my grandfather born Yitzhak later named Issac then Isadore then Edward and finally just plain Ed. 

“Long, long ago the Jewish people were chased from the Promised Land. But we’re the lucky ones. We found our way to a new promised land on a distant shore,” he said. 

So it wasn’t that they didn’t believe in anything. They, of course, believed in the angel and they believed in a promised land. They lauded the public school system and its ability to teach English while continuing to insist that they knew no other language before. They believed that in America anything was possible even for Jews so long as long as we waved our flags and made ourselves look and sound like ‘real Americans’. They believed that this is what would keep them safe. 

It was a bargain that they happily accepted long ago. Mostly. They hedged their bets. 

They kept a version of Passover from the Holy book, the Maxwell House Haggadah, and they also still gave us Hebrew names. These names were separate from who we were, souvenirs from a forgotten world. 

Esther, my name, both Jewish and Persian, felt akin to the name Elana that my Spanish teacher assigned to me in the seventh grade. Because what’s a name detached from meaning or story? 

My name, Erica though that came from a daytime soap opera and you don’t get more American than that. I knew my origin story.  

But then my cousin became ill. From the whispers around me, I knew that it was unlikely that he would survive. And because we were a family sewn together by secrets, it only accidentally slipped out that my father and uncle had gone to synagogue to have my cousin’s name changed. 

“Change the name, the true name, the Hebrew name, of the gravely ill and the Angel of Death can perhaps be deceived. When the Angel comes to collect their soul, the person by that name will be but a memory. Then the Angel of Death may be fooled into failing to reap his reward.”

“Old World mishegas. Meaningless,” my father said later.

And even though it didn’t work and my cousin passed away, I knew my father was wrong. 

It wasn’t meaningless. It was proof that worlds of stories were once written for me. And even though they believed that the angel in the New York Harbor demanded that they throw them overboard, they were already imprinted on their souls and maybe faintly on mine too. 

So I bring my children to the Statue of Liberty. 

“Your great-grandparents were born here,” I tell them as I gaze up at Lady Liberty. “Floating around us are all the stories of you and of me.” 

I look back and whisper to my ancestors and pray that the angel’s mouth will open and their lost tales will spill out. Perhaps next time. 

Until then I borrow folktales and origin stories: Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Talmudic, Tanakhic. I collect them. I rewrite them. And I continue to hope that one day I will find the story that will make me remember. 

*Published in the Jewish Literary Journal, September 2025 

Choosing that first book to feature was no small task. I can’t wait to share it!

I’m currently working on setting up a schedule for upcoming months. I’m looking for picture books, middle grade, and YA books with Jewish content. And while there are so many great Jewish kidlit books out there, I’m primarily focusing on new books (from September 2023 onwards). I aim to include a fair balance of titles from mainstream and Jewish publishers.

I would also like books that either explicitly or thematically cover Jewish holidays to feature in the weeks preceding holidays.

And my daughter’s bat mitzvah is in February so I also NEED a bat mitzvah book! 

Please send me your books or recommendations. The Jewish kidlit world (and the kidlit world generally) has been so good to me so I’m eager to give back.

This was meant to be a big week for me.

On the day the bodies of Hersh, Carmel, Eden, Ori, Almog, and Alex were found (1/9), just days after their execution, my article, Feeding Our Folktales to the Sea, was published in the Jewish Literary Journal.

Today (2/9), on the day of the funerals, my interview about On a Chariot of Fire will be published in Paper Brigade Daily (PB Daily).

And tomorrow (3/9), during shiva, On a Chariot of Fire is released.

In one week (10/9), when aninut ends for the families, Mixed-Up Mooncakes is out.

What really matters is that we all allow ourselves to feel this tremendous loss and that we never forget. We are mourning for people we never met, but got to know through their families.

There are families grieving. Our nation is grieving. We are grieving. They were part of all of us.

Words are not enough.

I recently sent revisions of my middle grade novel back to my agent. While waiting is associated with the initial query process, in finding an agent, it’s actually a part of the entire publishing process. Agented writers wait to hear from their agents on revisions and then they wait to hear from publishers. So here I am waiting though now I’m waiting for publishing news and for hostage news too.

Waiting for news

The manuscript I just sent back to my agent is a very different one from the one I started revising last summer. How could it not be? I’m very different.

My manuscript, historical fiction with magical realism, begins September 1945 and ends in October 1946. I wanted to write a hero’s journey with a twelve-year-old girl (Frayda) as the hero, but I initially planned on glossing over Frayda’s personal trauma and the Jewish community’s collective trauma. That was setting and not the story that I wanted to tell. I didn’t want the focus on Frayda and her incredible journey and her wants and desires to be shifted to focus on the trauma of history. Perhaps that was naive or misguided. She’s a product of the history she lived.

October 7 forced me to reexamine my manuscript just as it forced me to reexamine my relationships and my worldview.

In my new draft, I lean into my character’s trauma and directly spell out the antisemitism responsible for it. The characters now comment on the state of the world in 1945 in language that speaks directly to the situation today.

It’s as if they tried to warn us. It’s as if history is pounding on the door of today.

As writers, we can write about a past that we can only imagine or we can imagine an entirely new world, but the truths remain the same. We can only see history through the lens we know.

Now that I’m supposedly on my way to a career in this, I’ve had to think about what my benchmarks are. There was a time, in 2020, when my goal was to see my name on print on a front cover. It seemed theoretically attainable, but impossible at the same time. And then in 2022 it happened with the publication of Alone Together on Dan Street.

On Twitter, I started to see announcements of awards. Was that my new benchmark? What do awards measure? Shiny stickers are great, but they’re also not something within a writer’s control. I’m tremendously proud of my awards, but there’s no formula to replicate what I did to be awarded one (see my post on awards). I can only continue to improve my craft and grow.

So, what is a worthwhile benchmark? Being selected by PJ Library? A certain number of published books? Earning out? A starred review?

I got my first starred review just last week from Kirkus for Mixed-Up Mooncakes, along with co-author and friend Christin Matula and illustrator Tracy Subisak, and I was over the moon (excuse the cliche and mixed metaphor). But stars are like awards, there isn’t anything that I can do to get one.

My new benchmark, the thing that I’m striving for, is getting a publishing contract for a novel (middle grade). This is the goal I started with. I just printed my MG manuscript out for about the 6th time and I’m on a holiday. I’ve already sent my agent two very messy drafts. I’m not clear what the standard is. Did I send it too early? What stage of development is the correct one to send?

I had a new kidlit friend tell me that I’m doing well and I should just stick with picture books. Maybe that’s sound advice, but I know that I’m not done with novels yet. It’s what started my dream and I have to at least see this one through. I already know the dedication that I’ll include. I wrote the dedication after just one draft.

The truth is benchmarks will always move. What’s important is not to lose sight of real goal to write for that child that needs your next book. That’s reason enough to keep on writing.