For several years, I have been improving my teaching practice by making it more culturally responsive and making more room for students’ lived experiences to have a place in the classroom, not just in their work. I have added a variety of different texts to ensure that all of my students could see themselves in what they read, but I never really understood the feeling that the experience could evoke until I read Joanne Levy’s Fish Out of Water.
Joanne is someone that I have known for a long time. We were friends when we were in high school, and had some really memorable times including my first (but not my last) Rocky Horror theatre-viewing and interactive experience. Joanne and I were out of touch for many years, and we reconnected as adults. When she was first published, I bought my kids her book Small Medium at Large, and then her second, Crushing It. She loved them both. Joanne's writing has an honesty to it and feels like a conversation. This week, I bought her latest book, Fish Out of Water. I always want to support her, but I was also intrigued by the plot teaser.
It arrived at my door on Wednesday afternoon, and I devoured it. I laughed, I cried, and it felt like a part of me. I read my story. I didn’t, actually. It’s a lovely plot with so many messages about being true to yourself. It was original and also thought provoking, so I'm joyfully reading it with my almost 10 year-old. It was more than that, though. Reading this book was the feeling that I imagine other people get when they see themselves in a text.
The last time I read anything in fiction about being Jewish, it was Judy Blume’s Are Your There God, It’s Me Margaret. This coming of age story was a wonderful read, and it was especially memorable and distinctive from her other books because Maragret was half Jewish. Her search for her identity was compelling, but Fish Out of Water was not about that kind of search. Fishel knew who he was, and his Jewish life and the person he was becoming was woven into every aspect of the book. It felt so comforting to read a story like this. He has a bubby and zaida, the Yiddush word for grandparents, and the author mentions many familiar aspects of their life. Fishel was preparing for his bar mitzvah, and his family didn’t go shopping on Shabbat. It made me miss my bubby and the afghans she knit. It made me feel that I could breathe in the characters like I had met each one of them in Hebrew school. It was sweet to see shout outs from our life in plces liek the JCC and Shalom Village, which is the name of the home for the lederly in Hamilton where my father had led services for a decade. Reading a book that was set in a Jewish life was invigorating.
Joanne said she wrote this book in a unique fashion because it poured out of her more naturally and more easily than her other works. That feels synonymous with what it’s like to read a book like this. It pours into you like chicken soup with universal messages of warmth and comfort. The healing that comes from it can be shared, yet its distinct flavor is one of tradition and home. That is what it feels like to read a book that incorporates your social and personal sense of self. That is what every person deserves to feel when they read a book like this: inspiration and identity. That is alsowhy we must do better with the texts that we choose for our classrooms and our children. We need to see ourselves in the writing, at lealst once in a while. If we are lucky, we have moments like this when our whole selves are the conduit through which a beautiful story unfolds. I finally felt like a fish in water. Joanne, I am so grateful for this book.
