Jen­ny Kroik is a renowned illus­tra­tor whose work has appeared in lit­er­ary jour­nals such as The New York­er and The Paris Review, news out­lets includ­ing The Wash­ing­ton Post and The LA Times, stream­ing ser­vices and broad­casts like HBO and PBS, and many more. Kroik has also illus­trat­ed short sto­ries pub­lished in JBC’s lit­er­ary jour­nal, Paper Brigade—most recent­ly ​“The Roman Palms” by Barak Kassar. 

In con­ver­sa­tion with Paper Brigade​’s edi­to­r­i­al direc­tor, Kroik dis­cuss­es her cre­ative process, the ways in which her per­son­al expe­ri­ences and fam­i­ly his­to­ry inform her work, and the child­hood encounter with Torah that first sparked her inter­est in illustration.

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Thanks to Jen­ny Kroik’s gen­eros­i­ty, JBC is host­ing a spe­cial give­away for Short Sto­ry Month: every pur­chase of Paper Brigade dur­ing May, 2025 counts as an entry to win a signed print of the illus­tra­tion for ​“The Roman Palms”! Pur­chase your copy here.

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Bec­ca Kan­tor: Jen­ny, your port­fo­lio is incred­i­bly wide-rang­ing. I would love to hear about your cre­ative process. Is there a dif­fer­ence between how you approach illus­trat­ing a piece of fic­tion and cre­at­ing oth­er types of artwork? 

Jen­ny Kroik: I usu­al­ly start a project by research­ing all I can about it. First, I read the piece and get an ini­tial impres­sion. I’ll doo­dle on the sides of the paper (if it’s a sto­ry or a brief, I print it out. I think bet­ter when it’s in ​“ana­log” form!). Often, these doo­dles end up evolv­ing into the final idea. I also nor­mal­ly look up the author, and also look at oth­er exam­ples from that pub­li­ca­tion, to get an idea of the vibe I should aim for. 

I don’t know if there’s a big dif­fer­ence in how I illus­trate dif­fer­ent pieces. My work is most­ly nar­ra­tive, so I try to think of how I’m telling a sto­ry, even if it’s a paint­ing of a plate of food or of a group of people. 

BK: We are thrilled to be fea­tur­ing your illus­tra­tion for Barak Kassar’s short sto­ry ​“The Roman Palms” in the 2025 issue of Paper Brigade. It’s visu­al­ly stun­ning and encom­pass­es so many of the story’s themes. What was your inspi­ra­tion for it? 

JK: I real­ly loved Barak’s sto­ry. It trans­port­ed me to the dif­fer­ent places in the sto­ry, espe­cial­ly the build­ing that the main char­ac­ter lives in. I could real­ly pic­ture it, the tex­tures and the smells. I thought of times in the past when I vis­it­ed that area of the coun­try and how it felt, how the light looked, etc. Infus­ing some per­son­al mem­o­ries and feel­ings into an art­work some­times helps to make it a bit more ​“real” for the viewer. 

BK: You also illus­trat­ed two sto­ries in our 2024 issue. One of the many aspects that struck us about your illus­tra­tion for ​“Noble” by Scott Nadel­son is that it both cap­tures the protagonist’s small shtetl world and hints at the broad­er strokes of his­to­ry that threat­en to erase it. How did you go about depict­ing this? 

JK: This piece was also real­ly great. I loved the sto­ry, and, as with Barak’s sto­ry, there were a lot of per­son­al thoughts and feel­ings that I could infuse into the art. It remind­ed me of sto­ries that my grand­ma told me about her child­hood in Rus­sia, and the way I react­ed to them as a kid. 

For that illus­tra­tion, I looked at pho­tographs and tried to get the cloth­ing and envi­ron­ment right. I also looked at paint­ings by artists who depict­ed Jew­ish life in the shtetl. Cha­gall, for exam­ple. Even though his style is so dif­fer­ent from mine, I get inspired by look­ing at work that trans­mits the music and emo­tion of Jew­ish life. 

BK: I was delight­ed to learn that your hus­band was the mod­el for your paint­ings of the pro­tag­o­nists of both ​“Noble” and ​“The Roman Palms.” For you, what is the impor­tance of hav­ing a per­son­al con­nec­tion to the writ­ing you illus­trate? In what ways do you find or cre­ate this connection? 

JK: My illus­tra­tion work uses a lot of fig­ures, and I tend to use some form of ref­er­ence for fig­ures, espe­cial­ly if they’re doing some­thing that is hard­er to draw from mem­o­ry (fig­ures seen from above, for exam­ple, or in run­ning pos­es, etc.) My poor hus­band acts as an unpaid mod­el for a lot of my projects, haha! I gen­er­al­ly find men tougher to paint, and I feel lucky when my hus­band is the right mod­el for a sto­ry I’m work­ing on. I do tend to ​“cast” peo­ple for dif­fer­ent roles for my illus­tra­tions. I felt that he worked well for both of them, but obvi­ous­ly I changed his appear­ance some­what and gave him dif­fer­ent cloth­ing and hair. 

BK: Final­ly, what is one Jew­ish book that inspired you at some point in your life? How did it influ­ence your work? 

JK: There are too many to choose from. I am going to give a weird answer and say the Torah! I remem­ber that in ele­men­tary school we were giv­en an assign­ment to make a dec­o­ra­tive bor­der to one page of a chap­ter in the Torah that we were read­ing in school. This assign­ment real­ly inspired me: I remem­ber spend­ing a lot of time find­ing visu­al inspi­ra­tion in the text and think­ing about how to choose the col­ors. It was the first, and most stress­ful illus­tra­tion assign­ment I ever worked on, because the client was real­ly impor­tant — you don’t want to make God unhap­py, for sure! My mom and I also went to see an illus­trat­ed man­u­script exhib­it at the Israel Muse­um of Art around that time. The exhib­it had some stun­ning illus­tra­tions of the Bible by dif­fer­ent artists, and they also had Alice in Won­der­land play­ing cards, children’s books, Cha­galls (always Cha­galls), and oth­er illus­trat­ed lit­er­ary works. I think that might have clinched it for me: I real­ized that I real­ly love illus­trat­ing texts!