In Our Teeny Tiny Matzah House

Told from the perspective of the house cat Kitzel, Bill and Claire Wurtzel’s In Our Teeny Tiny Matzah House is about a family who lives in a crowded teeny tiny matzah house and needs to prepare for Passover and the seder. The illustrations use photographs of ordinary foods (such as oranges, cottage cheese, celery, peppers, cantaloupe, avocado, strawberries, bananas, carrots and more) in extraordinary ways giving rise to expressions on the characters' faces that are simply remarkable. Favorites of this reviewer included the Statue of Liberty with broccoli torch, Souperman with a matzah ball…

The story mentions many elements of Passover and the seder including ridding the house of bread (watch that donut with wafer hair walk away!), asking the Four Questions, listing the ten plagues, searching for the afikomen, singing Dayeinu, and of course, having guests to celebrate it all with, whether in person or remotely. But in addition to being a fun-to-read book, the magic of the storyline is brought out through the uniqueness of the food art illustrations. As such, readers may enjoy this book long after Passover has ended by trying to replicate the many characters within and coming up…

Cre­ative­ly imag­ined and artis­ti­cal­ly ren­dered, this pic­ture book tells the sim­ple sto­ry of a fam­i­ly of whole, sliced, and seg­ment­ed fruits and veg­eta­bles who lives in a very small house con­struct­ed of matzah. Kitzel the cat, who nar­rates the sto­ry, is made entire­ly out of an orange. His head and body are each half an orange, while his mouth and feet are orange seg­ments. The moth­er is a ver­i­ta­ble sal­ad of parts: her head is an onion with onion-skin hair; her mouth and body are vivid red pep­pers; and her arms and legs are car­rots. Two pieces of pars­ley serve as…