Chalk it up to a slice of life.
Betsy Rosenthal’s new children’s book “It’s Not Worth Making a Tzimmes Over!” was based on a true incident involving her preschool-age son and a challah recipe gone bad.
The book tells the story of little Sara and her grandmother baking a Shabbat loaf together, but accidentally adding in a glass of orange juice and 54 extra packets of yeast. The resulting giant blob of dough starts making its way down the street. But, says Sara’s implacable bubbe, “It’s not worth making a tsimmes over.” (Tsimmes is a Jewish stew that colloquially means “a fuss.”)
While Rosenthal’s son didn’t exactly create a monster with his O.J.-tainted dough, the incident at the synagogue Mommy and Me class gave her an idea.
“That got me to thinking,” she says. “What if some wrong ingredients were added to a challah dough? What would happen?”
That was six years ago. After that, the attorney, mother of three and one-time San Francisco resident got to work creating her Jewish-themed paean to flour power. The book came out in March.
“I wanted to write a good story,” says Rosenthal, who now lives in Los Angeles. “But because being Jewish is such an integral part of my life, it happens that what I wrote has a Jewish flavor.”
“It’s Not Worth Making a Tzimmes Over!” isn’t Rosenthal’s first published work. She previously wrote a children’s book of poetry titled “My House is Singing,” and has had essays run in outlets like the Los Angeles Times and California Monthly.
She likes to write about her family — husband David and their three kids, two of whom are teenagers (“I’m thinking of deep freezing them,” she says). Together they are active members of a Santa Monica synagogue, and keep a culturally rich Jewish household.
Which is not all that different from Rosenthal’s own family growing up. She was born in Baltimore, but as a child she and her family moved to Los Angeles, where they kept a kosher home. They later relocated to the Peninsula, where Rosenthal attended Burlingame High School. (Her parents still live in Hillsborough, and her brother Michael, a producer of Channel 4’s “Bay Area Backroads,” lives in Fairfax.)
After a year in Israel, she earned a law degree and accepted a job as Western States Counsel for the Anti-Defamation League. “It was a fascinating job,” she says, “right up my alley. It was a way of giving back to the Jewish community, of fighting anti-Semitism, and I got to use my law degree helping with discrimination lawsuits.”
In 1986 she was introduced to her husband-to-be, David. “When I first met him, he said I had a nice last name. Turned out his last name was also Rosenthal. So I had to marry him.”
These days, writing and parenting keep Rosenthal busy enough to put her legal career in cold storage. But she has no regrets, and is already looking forward to publishing her next book, a novel about her mother’s Baltimore childhood growing up with 11 siblings. What’s the hook? The novel is written entirely in verse.
“In contrast to my former job as a lawyer, I have this side of me that likes to see the lighter side of things,” she says. “So an innocent mistake sets my imagination wild.”
A mistake like, say, her son throwing orange juice into the challah dough? Not to worry. Good mom that she is, Rosenthal did what she could to make sure her boy didn’t feel bad about it.
“At the end of the book,” she says, “there’s a recipe for challah à l’orange.”
“It’s Not Worth Making a Tzimmes Over!” by Betsy R. Rosenthal, illustrated by Ruth Rivers (32 pages, Albert Whitman & Company, $15.95).