Chil­dren’s

Alef is for Abba/​Alef is for Ima

Rebec­ca Kafka
  • Review
By – October 31, 2014

Beau­ti­ful­ly and col­or­ful­ly illus­trat­ed, this book has both an Ima (moth­er) sec­tion and an Abba (father) one. This is achieved by flip­ping the book upside down, achiev­ing an inter­est­ing and unex­pect­ed effect. Each page has an illus­tra­tion, a vocab­u­lary word in Hebrew, in translit­er­a­tion, and in Eng­lish trans­la­tion. The theme cen­ters around a family’s dai­ly activ­i­ties with each vocab­u­lary word begin­ning with the Hebrew let­ter aleph. How­ev­er, hav­ing the same begin­ning let­ter for each Hebrew word makes the word selec­tion in Eng­lish rather dis­con­nect­ed. Includ­ing a song or match­ing game would help lit­tle ones remem­ber the words and would be a nice addi­tion. Rec­om­mend­ed for ages 2 to 6.

Marge Kaplan is a retired Eng­lish as a Sec­ond Lan­guage teacher. She is a con­sul­tant for the children’s lit­er­a­ture group for the Roseville, MN school sys­tem and is a sto­ry­teller of Jew­ish tales.

Discussion Questions