Podcast: Mendel the Mess-Up
Episode #308
I’ll admit it, I didn’t expect to like Mendel the Mess-Up. The word “mess-up” sounded negative and honestly, I was turned off by the shade of green on the jacket. But you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and I needed to read it before writing my “Completely Unofficial 2025 Sydney Taylor Book Award Shortlist” post, just in case. So I dove in… and ended up devouring it in one sitting.
I was joyfully surprised to learn that the story goes way beyond the goofy nature of its cover image. Yes, it’s very funny, but it also has a lot of heart and makes some really deep points about human nature. As comes up in the interview, it would make a great companion to the 2010 graphic novel Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword by Barry Deutsch, another humorous yet meaningful tall tale with a very Jewish setting (listen to my 2011 podcast about Hereville).
Beyond Mendel, Terry also talked about comics history, including Donald Duck’s influence on manga, which was news to me! Enjoy!
Love, Heidi
NEWS
Monday May 5 at 7:30pm ET, I’ll be on Instagram Live’s “#JAHM With Us” series, celebrating Jewish American Heritage Month. Tune in live or watch later!
I’ve been doing a "Jewish Joy" series of interviews on Multicultural Kid Blogs. The most recent entry features an interview with Emi Watanabe Cohen, author of Golemcrafters.
I collaborated with Little Justice Leaders on Instagram to curate a post about “Books to Celebrate Jewish Joy.”
CALL TO ACTION
Register for the Association of Jewish Libraries 2025 Digital Conference. It will be held entirely online June 23-26, 2025. You don’t have to be a librarian to participate! I’ll be there, presenting about recommended recent and forthcoming Jewish kidlit.
SHOW NOTES
Terry LaBan’s author website and graphic recording website
Terry’s Tikkun Olam suggestion: support HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
Terry’s reading recommendations:
o The Story of the Jews: A 4000 Year Adventure by Stan Mack
o A Minyan Yidn (A Bunch of Jews) by Trina Robbins
o Anything by Leela Korman
o Hereville series by Barry Deutsch
TRANSCRIPT
Note - If you are reading this in your email, you may need to click at the bottom where it says “[Message clipped] View entire message” to read the entire transcript.
Terry LaBan 0:00
[COLD OPEN] I noticed in my own experience of Jewish practice that you don't always get what you expect, that the act of practice, the act of study, can have unexpected results and be a conduit to something special or revelatory or meaningful.
Heidi Rabinowitz 0:17
[MUSIC, INTRO] This is the Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. Terry LaBan is an alternative cartoonist, a graphic recorder (we'll talk about what that means later), and now he's written his first graphic novel called Mendel the Mess-Up. I'm going to borrow the description from the starred review in Publishers Weekly. They said, "Put Fiddler on the Roof, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in a blender. Add a jigger or two of Seinfeld, and the result is this boisterous and affirming graphic novel." Doesn't that sound amazing? You'll find links to Terry's work, a transcript of our conversation, and more by subscribing to my newsletter at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com. [END MUSIC]
Heidi Rabinowitz 1:17
Terry LaBan, welcome to The Book of Life And Mazel Tov on having Mendel the Mess-Up named a National Jewish Book Award finalist!
Terry LaBan 1:25
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
Heidi Rabinowitz 1:28
So tell us about Mendel the Mess-Up. What is it about?
Terry LaBan 1:33
Mendel the Mess-Up is about a boy who can't do anything right, who ends up single handedly defending his village from a band of Cossacks. It's sort of a historical fantasy set in the shtetl world of old Eastern Europe, and it's a graphic novel.
Heidi Rabinowitz 1:52
What inspired this story?
Terry LaBan 1:55
I've wanted to do a kid's graphic novel for a long time. One day, a title actually popped into my head, and it was "How My Grandpa Whipped the Cossacks." I really liked the phrase, and I thought, "That should be a book. I want to make a book about that." Originally, the story was set in the 1970s when I was little, and it was about a more or less contemporary kid based on me, who hangs out with his grandpa, and his grandpa tells him this story, and then it has some kind of a association or implication for a problem he's facing in his own life. So I wrote that up, and I did some sample pages, and I showed my critique group, and they said: the framing story is boring. The grandpa story is the most interesting part. So I cut the framing story out, and what's left became Mendel. Of course, then I had to change the title, but that's probably all to the good. Kill Your Darlings, that's what they say.
Heidi Rabinowitz 2:56
So this is a shtetl based story. It takes place in the old country.
Terry LaBan 3:01
Yeah.
Heidi Rabinowitz 3:02
I guess an imaginary old country.
Terry LaBan 3:04
Yeah.
Heidi Rabinowitz 3:05
There are many children's books actually set in the shtetl, but what makes your depiction different?
Terry LaBan 3:12
I didn't look at other fictional depictions of shtetl so much. I did go to Sholem Aleichem books, and of course, I thought a lot about Fiddler on the Roof and things like that, but this whole story really is an exploration of the archetypes that are in my head. One of the questions that I had going into this is, what does that idea of the shtetl mean to me? Because I didn't grow up with relatives that told me about the shtetl. I had a great grandpa that was still alive when I was little, that had immigrated, but he never talked about anything like that. And so I don't have any family stories about that time, although I'm an Ashkenazi Jew, so my family definitely came from all parts of Eastern Europe, but my impression of the shtetl is formed more or less by pop culture. And I really wanted to explore that. As a cartoonist, I'm fascinated by archetypes, by the images we have in our head that signify these larger ideas. I spent some time going through photographs, sort of Roman Vishniac and people like that, looking at the pictures and thinking how much the people did or didn't resemble the people that I know from my own life and from shul and from Jewish organizations and my family, and just sort of transposing that, and thinking about that connection.
Heidi Rabinowitz 4:30
One of the archetypes maybe that you were exploring... it's the Cossacks. The Cossacks feature prominently in this story.
Terry LaBan 4:41
Yes, they do.
Heidi Rabinowitz 4:42
Can you explain exactly what were Cossacks?
Terry LaBan 4:45
Cossacks play a part in my Jewish shtetl fantasy. They're like this key component. Cossacks weren't exactly a tribe and they weren't exactly an ethnicity. They were rogue warriors on the fringes of the Russian Empire. A lot of them were Russian, a lot of them were what we call Ukrainian now, but they lived on the steppe. They were kind of outside the law. Eventually, they became incorporated into the Russian military system. But they were also raiders. They did a lot of raiding and harassment of the Polish population, and (this is my understanding, I'm not an expert on Cossacks), but through that, they began to persecute the Jewish population as well. They became one of the chief instruments of anti semitism, and in the 16th century, and then later in the 19th century, they were responsible for some of the most infamous pogroms in Jewish history.
Terry LaBan 4:45
I have really been fascinated by Cossacks for a long time. First of all, just the part they play in our imaginations, Cossacks embodying this kind of nameless dread that always seems to lurk on the edges of Jewish security. And they're far enough away also that they seem almost mythological in a way. But then there's also the way they look. I mean, they're quite colorful. There's this whole genre of 19th century romantic painting, that I used for reference, about Cossacks, and a lot of European painters would paint them riding across the steppe in their fur hats and cloaks, with their spears. So there's a sort of pirate thing that happens, like you, you wouldn't want to meet a pirate in real life, but they're really intriguing. You know, there's this aspect of pirates and Cossacks that's sort of about freedom and not having to obey the rules and being tough.
Terry LaBan 6:37
But then I also realized, as I wrote the book, that the Cossacks are a stand-in for bullies. We think of bullies as bad people or sometimes troubled people, but we don't really deal with the notion that sometimes bullies are attractive, like sometimes we wish that we were part of the bully crowd. I mean, I know that that was true for me, because a lot of times bullies are the cool people in the middle or high school social hierarchy. So I thought that that was kind of interesting and a thing that connects my story, this historical story with contemporary kids.
Heidi Rabinowitz 7:12
It's a really interesting balance that you're striking in the book, because they're very scary, but like you say, they're also kind of fun and entertaining. There's a section where you have them singing a song, and now that you're comparing them to pirates, it's really making me think of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney.
Terry LaBan 7:32
Yeah!
Heidi Rabinowitz 7:33
You know, where they're they're singing the "Yo, ho, ho bottle of rum" kind of stuff.
Terry LaBan 7:37
I didn't think of that when I wrote it, but I can see it! [LAUGHTER]
Heidi Rabinowitz 7:39
[TURNING PAGES] So here they're singing, "We are Cossacks free and wild. We spare neither man nor child. We love spicy, we hate mild. Hey, ho, Cossacks!" And I just wondered, like, do you have a tune in your head, that you can sing it?
Terry LaBan 7:54
It didn't have a tune. It had like, this rhythm, you know, like [BEATING OUT THE RHYTHM] "We are Cossacks free and wild. We spare neither man or child." It was really the rhythm of the thing that got me. I don't imagine a tune, but it would be awesome if somebody did put a tune to it. I'd love to see that, put some balalaika in there.
Heidi Rabinowitz 8:12
Okay, a challenge to any listeners with musical talent, come up with a tune!
Terry LaBan 8:16
Yes, please. That would be awesome!
Heidi Rabinowitz 8:18
...to go with this Cossack song. That would be great. So another major aspect of this story is learning and studying. So studying sacred texts is a major part of traditional Jewish culture, but it's not something we often see depicted in children's literature. Yet somehow you have managed to make learning how to study into an important plot point. So can you tell us more about this?
Terry LaBan 8:43
Maybe I'm a little embarrassed to say this, but originally, the book that they're studying was kind of a satire of the Talmud, and it could even have been taken a little negatively. It was a book of arcane rules that there was no reason for studying. And I had like, a funny title or whatever. And then the joke was, it saves Mendel's life in a physical way. And then that was, like, the irony of this book was, like, basically useless. When PJ Library was considering the book, they said, "Hey, you're like, insulting Talmud here. That is not cool." I have studied Talmud a bit so I knew what I got out of it and what its value was. And I realized that the key to the thing was to make the book a conduit to something else that could help Mendel and then that would bring this notion of spirituality into the story. When that clicked into place, I was really excited about it. It's one of the things that I think is really unique about the book. I noticed in my own experience of Jewish practice that you don't always get what you expect, that the act of practice, the act of study, anything you do, can have unexpected results and be a conduit to something special or revelatory or meaningful. That's the solution, really, that I found with the book in the story, the book of the Talmud.
Terry LaBan 9:21
I want to talk about the character of Starface Matja. So Starface Matja originally gave Mendel the evil eye.
Terry LaBan 10:19
Yeah.
Heidi Rabinowitz 10:20
That's why he's Mendel the Mess-Up. But she tells him, "the most effective curses are the ones we put on ourselves."
Terry LaBan 10:27
Yeah.
Heidi Rabinowitz 10:28
So tell us about the evil eye and curses, and then also talk about curses we put on ourselves.
Terry LaBan 10:36
Well, the evil eye is a huge thing in Eastern Europe, with all sorts of cultures. And as I understand it, it's basically the notion that if you look at somebody in a certain way, you can curse them. And certain people, especially older women, have the power to do this. It's really undefined as to how it works. But anybody who goes to Greece or Turkey today is probably familiar with these evil eye ornaments. You see them everywhere, these sort of round blue glass things that you can hang. And there's all kinds of charms and things to ward off the evil eye.
Terry LaBan 11:09
I'm still a little ambivalent as to whether Mendel was really cursed. My editor said "he was cursed. You have to make him cursed." But it's clear to me that psychology plays a big role in whether people think they're cursed or not. I do think that the way that we think about ourselves is the thing that determines most, how we're going to act or how we're going to think about things. Not necessarily what's going to happen to us. I mean, I don't, I don't buy this notion that we somehow create our own problems karmically. I mean, that's not what I'm saying at all, but I think the most effective curses are the ones we put on ourselves.
Heidi Rabinowitz 11:45
So the curses we put on ourselves are the bad stories we believe about ourselves?
Terry LaBan 11:51
Yeah, I think so.
Heidi Rabinowitz 11:54
There are several important themes in this book that readers are going to learn about, the history of the persecution of Jews by Cossacks, the value of study, the importance of your own perspective on your situation. Out of all of these threads, what do you most want readers to take away from this story?
Terry LaBan 12:14
Well, I want people to enjoy the story on its face, and any lessons that come out of it, they happen because the story worked, not because I sat down and said, I want to teach kids about self acceptance, I want to teach kids about Jewish history. And now that it's done, and I can say, oh, there's this and that and the other thing. So, I mean, I would like kids to be inspired by Mendel. I mean, he just keeps keeping on. He messes up, but he never loses the desire to do the right thing. He, Mendel really wants to contribute. Mendel really wants to help his family. Mendel wants to be a good, competent person. He wants to be a good student. He wants to be a productive member of society. And even when things happen to him, he doesn't brood on them. He always sort of sees the next opportunity and just goes for it. But then there comes this point where Mendel's friend says, "the thing you think is your biggest weakness may be your greatest strength." So the other part of that self acceptance is maybe thinking like, how does this thing that I've thought was a bad thing, how can it actually help me? How is it maybe even my superpower? And that's something that I think is important, that I would like people to take away.
Heidi Rabinowitz 13:34
You mentioned that when you started creating Mendel the Mess-Up, it was less Jewish than it ended up being, and now the book has been named as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
Terry LaBan 13:47
Yeah.
Heidi Rabinowitz 13:47
So it's an interesting evolution. What does it mean to you to get this particular award?
Terry LaBan 13:54
Well, I'm really honored, of course. I had maybe an unrealistic thought that I could somehow make a Jewish story where the Jewish stuff was kind of under the radar in a certain kind of way, and maybe that reflects a kind of personal ambivalence. I've been a Jewish artist, I've done a lot of Jewish stuff, but it's always a little scary, speaking for myself, to put myself out there as a Jew, it makes me feel vulnerable. I've experienced anti semitism and just, I have that general Jewish paranoia towards the world. I grew up in a very non Jewish place from sixth grade to when I graduated from high school, we moved from a community where there were a lot of Jews to a community where there were hardly any Jews. So I went from a place where being Jewish was a very common thing and not worthy of comment by anybody, to a place where people would talk about the fact that I was Jewish, like, a lot. If you've ever seen South Park, Kyle, the Jewish kid, you know, they're constantly mentioning the fact that he's Jewish, especially Cartman, he's always saying, you know, "you Jew, Jew this, Jew that." That was exactly my experience growing up.
Heidi Rabinowitz 14:56
Wow,
Terry LaBan 14:57
Exactly my experience growing up. I have very mixed feelings about it.
Heidi Rabinowitz 15:02
Yeah, I can see, I can see that. That story illustrates why.
Terry LaBan 15:07
Yeah, but, you know, here I am, like, I'm a big public Jew, and have been for a long time. I mean... [LAUGHTER]
Heidi Rabinowitz 15:16
You are known as an alternative or underground cartoonist. So can you tell us what that means and tell us about your work in that area?
Terry LaBan 15:25
Well, when I was a lad, many years ago, yes, I was part of the alternative comic scene of the early 90s. I always wanted to be a cartoonist, starting when I was six years old, but I didn't like superhero comics at all. It turned out to be a problem for me as I tried to work in the actual comics industry. But when I was a kid, I really liked Harvey comics and Archie Comics and Richie Rich and those kind of things. And then, of course, Mad Magazine was huge for me and most cartoonists of my generation. That was really the gold standard of cartooning. And then, of course, newspaper strips and things like that.
Terry LaBan 16:01
When I got into college, I discovered underground comics in the very early 80s. They really just blew me away, especially Robert Crumb's work. Underground cartoons really happened in the late 60s and early 70s, so it was basically over as a movement at that time. But there's this whole cohort of cartoonists, including me, that were just really excited by the possibilities that those comics opened up, and those people ended up creating this new movement in the late 80s and early 90s, based on an underground aesthetic. Underground comics were very closely tied to the counterculture. We were not... there was no counterculture in the late 80s and early 90s. So the work became much more personal, much more professional, and there was a much wider range of styles and people doing a lot of different kinds of stories. A lot of those comics were published by Fantagraphics Books, Drawn and Quarterly was another big publisher, Dark Horse Comics, and so I was part of that.
Terry LaBan 16:59
So I ended up doing two series for Fantagraphics that I created myself, and then one for Dark Horse Comics. It was really fun and it was really exciting. And then I went on to draw a comic strip called Edge City was about a Jewish family. I'd always done some Jewish things in my alternative comics a little bit, but Edge City was explicitly about a Jewish family. As far as anybody can tell, it's the first syndicated comic strip that featured a family celebrating Passover.
Heidi Rabinowitz 17:30
That's very cool.
Terry LaBan 17:31
Yeah, it is very cool. That became kind of our Great Pumpkin, so we did a Passover story every single year. It wasn't always about Jewish stuff, but we did do a number of Jewish stories over the years. The strip ran for 15 years, and we did a Bar Mitzvah story, we did Holocaust story once, we did an immigrant story. So yeah.
Heidi Rabinowitz 17:51
I haven't asked you about the actual art of creating these illustrations. Can you talk a little bit about your artistic technique and how your style became what it is?
Terry LaBan 18:04
I do everything on an iPad now. I was a traditional ink cartoonist for years and years and years. The only tattoos I have are these little black dots or blue dots I've gotten when I reach down and stab myself with pen and it would like put some ink under my hand. So I've got all these little ink tattoos all over my hands. But I stopped doing that in 2017, I decided to go digital. So I do everything on an iPad on an app called Procreate. I do all the drawing and coloring. Everything in the book, I did. I don't have assistants. I also use Photoshop. All the text is in my own font that I just created. There's sites that you can do this on the web, and you can make your own computer font.
Terry LaBan 18:45
I really like working this way. It's really easy to change things, and it's really much easier to edit things. I do a lot of rewriting all through the book. You know, I'm constantly rewriting text balloons to make them more concise, or it doesn't say what I wanted it to say, or... I really think about this stuff a lot. So in the old days, you know, had to use Wite-Out, or cut a piece of label and paste it on, and then if you want to change it again, you end up with, like, a lot of labels pasted on. So it's been really great. It's been really freeing, and I think it's led to a better quality of work. That's how I actually draw.
Terry LaBan 19:19
In terms of my style... Gosh, it took me a long time for my style to settle down. Underground cartoons was a huge inspiration, but it was a really bad influence. I wanted to draw like Robert Crumb, but not just him, there's Pat Oliphant, who really influenced me. And I loved little scratchy cross hatchy lines. And it turned out that didn't really fit. It was the strip that really turned my style around, because drawing that comic strip every day for 15 years, I really simplified my style, and I started to depend more on my line. By the time I was at the end of the strip, my drawing had really completely transformed into a much cleaner style that was more heavily reliant just on line and not little cross hatches all over everything, and now I'm pretty happy with my style.
Terry LaBan 20:12
It doesn't have much manga in it, which worries me a little. All cartoonists under the age of, say, 40 now are heavily influenced by Japanese cartoons of one type or another. You know, fashion plays a big role in comics. Comics are really a lot about style, and if you have an old fashioned style or a style that doesn't resonate or isn't cool, it could be a real detriment. But, you know, now I'm old, so it's like, I just, I draw how I draw. I have incorporated a little bit of Japanese things, and I've been really into a cartoonist called Osamu Tezuka, who was generally considered to be the person who invented manga. He was heavily influenced by a guy named Carl Barks who drew Donald Duck comics for Disney, and he's this hugely influential guy, a brilliant cartoonist. And as a matter of fact, I wrote Donald Duck comics...
Heidi Rabinowitz 21:06
Oh, wow!
Terry LaBan 21:07
...for 14 years. So I was really immersed in that world. I used to write 100 pages of Duck a year. It was a really good gig. So through that, I kind of discovered, like, I knew about Osamu Tezuka, because he did Astro Boy and Speed Racer, Kimba the White Lion, which were cartoons that they used to show on TV when I was a kid. But I didn't really understand his place in the cartoon universe, and I hadn't really read his comics until I was in my 40s. I looked at his stuff a lot when I was doing Mendel, the kind of story that I want to do that involves certain amount of action and movement, fast moving excitement. He was really, really good at that. He also did a lot of historical stuff. He did this eight book series about the life of the Buddha. He turned it into this action adventure thing. So there's all these characters he invented that aren't in this actual story of the Buddha.
Heidi Rabinowitz 22:00
That sounds amazing! I had no idea that Donald Duck had influenced manga.
Terry LaBan 22:05
Oh yeah. I mean, Osamu Tezuka completely based his style on Carl Bark's Donald Duck comics.
Heidi Rabinowitz 22:12
Besides your own graphic novel, are there any other Jewish graphic novels or comics that you would like to recommend to listeners?
Terry LaBan 22:22
I have some personal favorites. The Story of the Jews by Stan Mack. It's a really great book. He's such a great cartoonist, and somehow he found out how Jews dress at all different periods in this really specific way. So I've actually used it for reference quite a bit, especially the Talmudic period. It's this weird transitional time between ancient times and medieval times, and the costumes are kind of hard to find, but he does a really good job. Trina Robbins, who passed away last year, did a book about her father called A Minyan Yidn, A Group of Jews. I illustrated one of the stories in there. It's a really good comic and worth checking out. She was part of the original underground movement, and she was really a pioneer, especially in women's comics. And there's this woman, Leela Corman. Her stuff was published by Retrofit and Big Planet Comics. Really intense kind of passion. I love the way she draws. She has this, like, really Jewish drawing style. I don't know, she draws herself. I guess she comes from a family of survivors, so she deals with that, and it's just very angsty, passionate, expressionistic kind of stuff. Barry Deutsch is always worth checking out. Hereville is pretty interesting.
Heidi Rabinowitz 23:33
Yes, actually, Hereville won the Sydney Taylor Book Award way back, 10 years ago or more.
Terry LaBan 23:39
Oh, really?
Heidi Rabinowitz 23:40
Yeah, and I interviewed him for the podcast at that time.
Terry LaBan 23:43
Yeah. I met him in 1989, at one of my first comic conventions. He was like 15 or something, long before he did comics. So that's kind of funny that he ended up doing that. Those are really interesting books, because it's set in an Orthodox community, but the Orthodoxy is kind of taken for granted, and it's just really the background. I like that approach a lot.
Heidi Rabinowitz 24:07
Well, now that I think of it, Hereville and Mendel the Mess-Up would make a good pairing, because they both have that sort of assumption of, you know, here's Jewish life, that's just the way it is. But now on top of that, we're going to have some kind of fantasy adventure.
Terry LaBan 24:24
Yeah, I know, and I can see that. And I really, when I did the book, I really wanted it to be attractive and accessible to kids that weren't Jewish. I mean, PJ Library actually made it more Jewish than it was, even though it was set in an obviously Jewish world. Yeah, I'm glad to hear you say that.
Heidi Rabinowitz 24:40
Tell us about your work illustrating live events as a graphic recorder.
Terry LaBan 24:45
Oh, yeah. So after the strip, I was looking for like a new thing to do. What it is, is going to live events, conferences and meetings and presentations, and I make live sketch notes. Basically, I'm a living whiteboard video, on either a big piece of paper or a big piece of foam core. Usually it's foam core, with markers. So as people talk or as people discuss, I make notes of what they're saying, but it's a combination of words and pictures, and I do it on the spot. It's a thing. I'm not the only one that does it. There's actually an international organization of graphic recorders, the International Federation of Visual Practitioners. Shout out to them. That's been a good thing for me. People love it. One of the things about being an illustrator or a cartoonist is a lot of times you don't get much respect when you do something that a lot of people would do for free. It's really easy to get taken advantage of, because you're just so grateful to get any kind of work in publishing and traditional cartooning venues. A lot of times it just feels like you're the low end of the totem pole, and you don't get paid a ton, and it can be a bit dispiriting. With graphic recording, people are just so delighted that you're in the room doing this stuff, and they're so blown away by what you're doing. And they come up and they talk to you, and it's very directly gratifying, in a way that a lot of things I've done haven't been.
Heidi Rabinowitz 26:23
When you do the graphic recording, are you caricaturing the people who are there at the meeting, or are you making, like, abstract symbols of what they're saying, or, like, what are you actually putting on the page?
Terry LaBan 26:34
There's two kinds of images, generally, that I do: icons that are associated with things that they're talking about, you know, we value our partners, so draw like shaking hands or something like that. Or, you know, we're innovative, so maybe you draw like a light bulb. I have like a library of icons in my head that I can plug in. The second category of images, a lot of times, is based on things that people say, and I especially listen for visual metaphors. So for instance, you know, we're all like frogs in boiling water, and we don't notice till the water is too hot. So I draw that. So I listen to things that make a good image. I'm a public drawer. I have been for my whole life.
Heidi Rabinowitz 27:15
Very cool. Do you ever get stuck?
Terry LaBan 27:18
I won't tell you. [LAUGHTER] I always do something. Sometimes I catch myself standing there frozen. I don't love to record people's stories. Like personal anecdotes don't usually make good graphic recording, but sometimes you realize that the personal story IS the talk, usually about five minutes or 10 minutes in, you realize, like, Oh, they're not going to talk about anything else. And if I don't start drawing something, I'm just gonna end up with like, a blank board. You can decide like, oh, this talk isn't going anywhere, and I have to draw something really big. And then realize, Oh my gosh, they're gonna take a 20 minute question and answer thing, and I filled up the whole board. So now what do I do?
Heidi Rabinowitz 27:58
Or if you're in the middle of drawing an image, and then they start talking about something completely different, you have to catch up or...?
Terry LaBan 28:05
That's not bad. I worry about things like doing a third of the board. And then they stop talking. I want all my boards to look good. It's improv.
Heidi Rabinowitz 28:12
Right? It's improv.
Terry LaBan 28:13
So it's a yes and, yes and.
Heidi Rabinowitz 28:16
That's pretty neat. It's Tikkun Olam Time. What action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?
Terry LaBan 28:26
Well, gosh, I was thinking about this. I'm like, the obvious thing is, make a big contribution to HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. They help immigrants; as I understand it, they were originally founded to help Jewish immigrants, but now they help all kinds of immigrants. I think they're really important organization, and especially in these times.
Heidi Rabinowitz 28:45
Good suggestion! Where can listeners learn more about your work?
Terry LaBan 28:50
TerryLaBan.com. Right now, Mendel's my only book. So you can read about Mendel there. If you're interested in my graphic recording stuff, now that we've mentioned it, I have a website, Breakthrough Visuals is the name of my business, and you're welcome to check it out and see. I don't just do graphic recording, I do illustration and videos and infographics and comics. There's a Facebook Mendel page that we're just sort of starting to flesh out. It would be great if people went there and followed it, or, I don't know, whatever you do on Facebook. If you read the book and you like the book, leave me a review on Amazon. That would be awesome.
Heidi Rabinowitz 29:28
Terry LaBan, thank you so much for speaking with me!
Terry LaBan 29:32
Well, Heidi, thank you so much for having me. This has been great.
Lee Wind 29:35
[MUSIC, DEDICATION] This is Lee Wind, author of The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie. I'll be joining you soon on the Book of Life podcast, and I'd like to dedicate my episode in pretty much the same way I dedicated my book: for everyone reading this or listening to this, of every gender, you belong.
Heidi Rabinowitz 30:02
[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. Subscribe to my newsletter on Substack to join me in growing Jewish joy and shrinking antisemitic hate. Get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news, and occasional calls to action right in your inbox. Sign up for the newsletter at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com. You can also find The Book of Life on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. You can also help us out by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon or making a one time donation to our home library, the Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Learn more about AJL at JewishLibraries.org. Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading.
Sheryl Stahl 31:11
[MUSIC, PROMO] It's Passover! Time to slurp the soup, crunch the matzah, and make jokes about Moses never stopping to ask for directions. It is also a great time to speak with Maggie Anton about her latest book, The Midwives' Escape. Through the eyes of the Egyptian midwives, we see what life was like for the Israelites as they learned to transition from a people enslaved to a self supporting community. Join me for a great conversation at Jewishlibraries.org/NiceJewishBooks.