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Author Visit with Chana Stiefel: From Darkness to Light

Join us for a special children’s program in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month! We will be welcoming back award-winning Teaneck author Chana Stiefel to read, answer questions, and discuss her newest book, The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs. Best for ages 6+.

The Tower of Life written by Chana Stiefel, illustrated by Susan Gal and published by Scholastic Press, is a moving biography of Yaffa Eliach who, 35 years after Nazis destroyed her beloved shtetl of Eishyshok, Poland, recovered thousands of precious photographs perserved by relatives and survivors to recreate her community. These photos eventually became part of the Tower of Faces exhibit at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and the book includes some of the actual photos.

Chana Stiefel is the award-winning author of more than 30 books for children. Her picture book, The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs (Scholastic), won the 2023 Sydney Taylor Book Award, a Robert F. Sibert Honor, and the Margaret Wise Brown Prize for Children’s Literature. It was listed as a Best Book of the Year by School Library Journal, Booklist, the New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Tablet Magazine, and others. Chana’s other nonfiction titles include Let Liberty Rise: How America’s Schoolchildren Helped Save the Statue of Liberty and the upcoming Let’s Fly (Dial, 2024) co-written with Barrington Irving, who broke the record as the youngest person and first Black man to fly solo around the world. Chana lives in Teaneck with her husband and four children. Learn more at chanastiefel.com.

Related LibGuide: Jewish American Heritage Month by DUP Committee