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Making children's literature extraordinary By Maya Sela In Nurit Zarchi's children's story "Tanina Mitragelet L'regol" ("Tanina gets used to being ordinary"), Tanina the magician witch asks: "Why do I have to be on the side of the minority, the witches, and not on the side of the majority, the ordinary ones?" Kurkevan, her cat, tells her: "From shrinking at home, you don't catch the secret of the ordinary people. What needs to be done is to make others ordinary." And the two of them go out of the house to make people ordinary. Now that the Tanina stories are being republished, additional generations are likely to learn how to be ordinary. Tanina first appeared in a children's program on the radio at the end of the 1970s. Those in charge were somewhat wary, since they were not sure to what extent the story was educational. The book "Tanina" was published by Massada Press in 1978; in 1986 Keter published "Mi Yatsil et Tanina?" ("Who will save Tanina?"), which included stories about Tanina as well as other stories, and a sequel, "Tanina Metsitsa Betzalahot shel Aherim" ("Tanina Sticks Her Nose into Other People's Plates") was put out by Dvir Publishing House in 1993. Yaara Shehori, who edits Keter's classical series, wanted to see the Tanina books in print and decided to do something about it. In honor of the reprinting, Zarchi added some new stories. The book "Mi Makir et Tanina?" ("Who Knows Tanina?"), accompanied by the beautiful illustrations of Odelia Lifshitz, is expected to arrive in the bookshops on Thursday. Advertisement The stories by Zarchi - who writes for both children and adults, and is also a poet - are always characterized by an atmosphere of mystery and the unusual, an atmosphere of supposedly defective logic that actually turns out to be logical. Zarchi does not lower her standards when she writes for children or belittle the importance of her young audience - for whom so many books have been written on subjects such as how to get rid of the pacifier, how to brush teeth, and how to part from Mommy at preschool in the morning. Though many authors seem to view children's books as a means of getting across a practical message to the young, Zarchi insists that children are at least as interested in philosophical subjects as adults are. "What distinguishes between children and adults is not the level," Zarchi says. "Not from the language point of view and not from the point of view of thinking about life. A new person comes here and doesn't know anything; he is a tourist. Things interest him on the most practical level - what life is, what it is to be alone or together, what parents are, what death is, what an end is and what a beginning is, what must be done and what must not be done. Living is hard. Children find this out for the first time, and every year they think that next year, when I'm 10 years old and big, it will be better - and this doesn't happen. That is expressly where the discussion about the substance of life is most pertinent." Zarchi, 67, was born in Jerusalem but grew up on Kibbutz Geva, where she moved after her father died when she was 5. She has written more than 100 books, has won literary prizes including the Prime Minister's Prize for Literature (twice), the Bialik Prize, the Ze'ev Prize (five times) and the Yehuda Amichai poetry prize. She has received four citations of merit from the Hans Christian Andersen award committee of UNESCO and has won the Education Ministry's prize for life achievement. Zarchi uses rich, colorful and mischievous language, and her subject matter is deep - making it occasionally unclear which of her works are meant for children and which for adults. She says the grown-ups are too busy to deal with the big questions. "For children it's critical, but the adults have already found the stones in the river and they are in a hurry to cross over on them, but they don't watch where they are going," says Zarchi. "Perhaps they don't have the time or the strength." As for whether her books are targeted to children who are not ordinary in some way, Zarchi says: "What is ordinary and what is not ordinary? I worked with children for many years - I gave workshops. Once I asked the children who feels that he is not ordinary, and all the children put up their hands. Twenty children were out of the ordinary. People, since they feel themselves from inside and others from the outside, are extraordinary from their own point of view, whatever the case may be. Anyway, everyone is always different from the others." The Tanina stories, says Zarchi, are not politically correct, "but they are certainly political. They deal with the politically correct and say that being politically correct is a stigma and that it should be very seriously examined." For instance, in the story "Tanina and the Nativitim" (a military acronym in Hebrew for "those lacking self confidence"), Tanina says her cat lacks self-confidence and takes him to the National Security College (both security and confidence are expressed in the Hebrew word "bitahon"). Kurkevan refuses to go, saying he's afraid of the soldiers because they have guns and that means they want to shoot. The commander of the college says that is libel, adding: "They don't want to shoot. They think that if by chance someone who wants to shoot them comes by, he will see their guns and refrain from doing so." Tanina responds: "It's a fact that they are not carrying strawberries. Because if someone by chance went by with a gun and saw people with strawberries, he would shoot them and not be hesitant because of the strawberries, so the fact that they are walking around with guns means that they refuse to even imagine that someone could go by here with strawberries, and that is a sign that they don't have national bitahon and that they are actually 'nativitim.'" The commander threatens Tanina with a hearing in a military tribunal when she explains to him that "bitahon does not come from words, it comes from what is churned inside." Zarchi's logic and her flexible language, which is full of humor and charm, are evident in a conversation with her in which she merges concrete thoughts and fantasy in a natural way. Does this different view of reality find expression in her daily life as well? "It becomes clear to me sometimes when I'm teaching and I see that in the beginning they don't understand what I want, but afterwards they understand me and become part of the conversation. But in the beginning they don't understand what I'm saying. From that I understand something, but I don't experience it." Perhaps it is connected to the way in which we don't understand our age? In our internal experience we still retain the image of the child we used to be. Parents are always talking about the "clever sayings" of their children, but at some stage those clever sayings end and life, career and fear begin. "I wrote in one of my poems that childhood is an island in the middle of life. It's always in the middle. For better or for worse, often for worse. The whole business of growing up is indeed a serious question. What does it mean to grow up? Is it to understand something? How much can one understand this thing that is called life? But in the end it catches you in the body. It hurts here and there. You too do not resemble the people who are around you. I am from a different land. From a different State of Israel." Has the world changed so much that you view it with wonder? "Not with wonder, but it is different. I am a person without fantasies, but I had one fantasy when I was a child - that they would come and tell us that what we had learned so far was completely wrong. That north was south and that two and two did not make four. That now they were canceling everything. That is something personal that belongs to home and the family. This personal experience is substantive and stems from the conditions of life, some kind of coping that is the only way in childhood, and then afterwards you become like that. It is tied up with many things about how your soul is formed." Zarchi still runs around teaching writing all over the country, because even someone who has written more than 100 books that have become classics has to earn a living. When she is asked whether she has to teach or whether she likes teaching, she answers frankly that she has to. "It is possible that I like it, but I also have to," she says. "All told, people do not earn a living from children's literature. In any case, I don't know how to arrange things so that I can earn a livelihood from it. A person who writes, in most cases, cannot be very involved in the financial side of writing. It is not worthwhile thinking at all about government support because that will not happen. They aren't able to get Gilad Shalit back, [but] they can pay writers? They can't do anything that's important." Bookmark to del.icio.us   A 'political' holocaust Palestinian youth orchestra disbanded after playing concert for Holocaust survivors. Mideast peace fantasy How can talks with Palestinians and Syria progress as if there were no Arab initiative?

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