Chil­dren’s

Dol­lars and Sense

Tehilla Deutsch; Glenn Zim­mer, illus.
  • Review
By – February 20, 2013
Have you ever done some­one a favor and been reward­ed with a tip”? What did you do with it? Save it? Spend it? Half and half? Did you think for even one sec­ond, about what you should do with it? It is yours. You earned it, but what then? If you are like me, you oper­ate on auto­mat­ic” most of the ti me, so per­haps this lit­tle book has come just in ti me to teach us to be mind­ful, rather than mind­less. Here’s the scoop.… 

When Mrs. Markowitz was away, young Eli Katz per­formed many favors for her. I don’t know how she would have gone away with­out his help; he fed her fish, brought in her mail, etc., so now she has tipped” him. She has giv­en him $5.00. Well brought up, Eli first gives tzeda­ka. Now he is home free, or is he? Obvi­ous­ly, the rest of the mon­ey is his. Like most of us, he indulges him­self and frit­ters the mon­ey away on drinks, snacks and toys. But soon, the drink is drunk, the snacks are con­sumed, the toys lose their nov­el­ty and the sat­is­fac­tion Eli feels for hav­ing helped an appre­cia­tive neigh­bor has dis­solved. Eli feels emp­ty. Not until an oppor­tu­ni­ty presents itself for Eli to do some­thing pos­i­tive with his remain­ing dol­lar does he feel hap­py. So what do we learn from this sto­ry (and I mean all of us, not just the chil­dren for whom the sto­ry was writ­ten, ages 3 – 6)? That’s for you to fig­ure out. It is per­haps, the secret to hap­pi­ness. The illus­tra­tions are ebul­lient and col­or­ful — just right for the intend­ed age group.
Mar­cia W. Pos­ner, Ph.D., of the Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al and Tol­er­ance Cen­ter of Nas­sau Coun­ty, is the library and pro­gram direc­tor. An author and play­wright her­self, she loves review­ing for JBW and read­ing all the oth­er reviews and arti­cles in this mar­velous periodical.

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