Esphyr Slobodkina
By Hannah Brown
April 15, 2023
April 15, 2023
“Can I smell it?” Oren asks as I start reading to him from the book, Caps for Sale, which starts off his long and carefully organized – you might say, curated – list of Saturday morning books. Books are treasured objects for Oren, who is 24 and has autism, and, yes, their smell is important as well as their look. Coffee stains and folds and tears all make them what they are for him, connections to a beautiful, soothing world that is endlessly absorbing.
I have been reading Caps for Sale to him for two decades now, but every time I open it, his eyes light up. Caps for Sale has to be the first book on Saturday morning. Nothing happens without Caps for Sale. And I have to read it to him, even though he can read it himself and there isn’t a word, a line or a comma that he doesn’t know by heart.
Nothing can be omitted, not the title, not the fact that it is a “Reading Rainbow Book,” which refers to a television program neither of us knows anything about, not that subtitle, “A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business,” and certainly not the name of the author:
Esphyr Slobodkina.
I looked her up and discovered she wrote follow-ups to Caps, which I promptly bought. They arrived to a great deal of anticipation, but were not hits. Caps for Sale is simply perfect and nothing can compare to it. However, I learned on Wikipedia that Esphyr, or Ms. Slobodkina, was an avant-garde Russian artist who emigrated to the United States, which may explain how timeless and effortlessly hip the book is. Wikipedia features a photo of her sitting in a chair, cool, imposing and beautiful, under one of her Kandinsky-esque paintings. Light years removed from the mess that is my apartment, I can’t help thinking. Next to the futon where I read to Oren is a pile of books I am hoping to get around to reading myself, or at least starting to read, this weekend, but will I pick up any of them? The house needs to be cleaned top-to-bottom, papers need to be organized, laundry needs to be done. . .
“Eema, you’re reading,” Oren says. I was spacing out for longer than I realized. I never love him more than when we read Caps for Sale, although I have read it so many times that I often don’t take in a word. He puts his face close to mine, our heads nearly touching, our hair almost the same color, his skin paler than mine. But we have the same angular faces, the same long noses and almond-shaped eyes.
I read the dedication: “To Rosalind and Emmy Jean, and to their grandfather, who loved to read to them.” Who were Rosalind and Emmy Jean? According to Wikipedia, she had no children. She married when she was young, to another Russian artist, with whom she started the American Abstract Artists Group, and then they got divorced. She continued with her abstract paintings, but got into illustrating children’s books through Margaret Wise Brown, another favorite of Oren’s. Brown drew the pictures for Goodnight, Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both of which he loves, of course. Later, Esphyr married again, to an American, who passed away after just three years. It took her a while to recover from her grief. She died at 93 in 2002, in Glen Head, N.Y.
“Eema, you’ll read.”
Caps for Sale was published in 1940, one of those four-color books for kids, where only the red is really bright. The dapper, mustachioed peddler starts off calling, “Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!” and carrying all the caps on his head. But nobody wants any that day, not even a red one so the peddler has no money for lunch and heads into the country. I like Esphyr’s refusal to sugarcoat the cruelty of it. No one buys a cap, no money for lunch, you starve. Capitalism at its starkest, no preachy messages about self-esteem here. And then he falls asleep under a tree.
It seems to me that we have always had this book. It must have been one of the first books I bought for him. Just after his autism was diagnosed when he was three and he went to a therapeutic preschool, his teachers, Kim and Laura, of whom he still speaks with great affection literally every day, had one of the most brilliant ideas in the decades of special-education teaching I have observed: to make this book into a play. The kids took turns so that everyone got to be the peddler. It was lovely. I remember every kid in that class and not only because he still talks about them: Leo, Sam, John, Ryan, Antonio, Alex and Roy. They were such a sweet bunch of kids and very much on the ball. It turned out that only one other kid, maybe two, were actually on the autism spectrum. Sam was the one Oren liked best and he definitely seemed autistic back then. He was speech delayed, hyperactive and liked to stare at sand and sift it through his fingers, which he would do for hours if no one stopped him. I kept in touch with Sam’s mother after we moved to Israel – Oren’s father is Israeli and wanted to be near his family – and when we were in New York on a visit, we went to see Sam. Oren couldn’t have been more eager, he talked about Sam all the time. When we arrived, I immediately saw that – Sam had turned into a regular kid! He spoke like a regular kid, he acted like a regular kid in every way, and his mom, who was friendly as always, told me he was in a mainstream school but took medication for the hyperactivity, which was the only thing that was still an issue. This had always been my dream, my best-case scenario for Oren, that he would turn out to be just hyperactive and quirky. Sam rolled his eyes when Oren still wanted to play with the cars and trains that he remembered from their play dates and raced around the beloved living room, so Upper West Side with the wooden furniture, high ceilings, moldings, one hour a day of sunlight from 3:30-4:30 and a view of the river if you stood on tiptoe and looked out one corner of one window.
As I remembered their playdates, the most harmonious and reciprocal Oren ever had, when they had seemed so evenly matched, so similar, Sam whispered to his mother, “Is he always like this?”
I have fond memories of Oren playing the peddler in that preschool. How did I never take a picture of it? They acted out the book a few times a week.
Thinking about Sam, I’ve read all the way to the most exciting part of Caps for Sale without noticing, when the peddler wakes up from his nap.
“When he woke up, he felt refreshed and rested,” I say. Oren gives a contented sigh, his special sound effect. He used to say, “When he woke up, he felt French,” but now he knows the real words.
The peddler feels for his caps, but they are not there. “All he felt was his own checked cap.” We both look around us, as the peddler looks around. Then we look up at my bookshelf, the one that holds half autism books and half my all-time favorite books. The Catcher in the Rye and Harriet the Spy and Brideshead Revisited and Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe. The books that got me through school and college and Oren’s diagnosis, and then his father leaving after we moved to Israel. We’re still there, we’re still close to Oren’s dad’s family, only they’re not my family anymore. The books are my family.
Just before he took out Caps for Sale this morning, we were listening to Beatles music on YouTube, another Saturday tradition. An ad came up for a Master Class with Joyce Carol Oates who, with her I-don’t-give-a-damn-how-I-look hair, faces the camera and says, “The great enemy of writing isn’t your own lack of talent. It’s being interrupted by other people. Constant interruption is the destruction of the imagination.”
This replays in my head – I get this ad a lot on YouTube because I once actually bought the Master Class with Aaron Sorkin – and I recall Oates’ guileless expression as the peddler looks up and sees that the monkeys are sitting in the tree above his head, each wearing a cap. We act out the whole sequence as the peddler shakes his hands at them, then stamps his feet, saying, “You monkeys, you! You give me back my caps.” The monkeys do whatever he does.
“What are the monkeys doing?” I ask.
“They’re imitating him.”
I was so proud of myself when I realized I could use this story to teach Oren the concept of imitation – and the word for it. I thought back then, approximately 10,000 readings ago, that I would find so many ways to teach him all kinds of words and concepts. But the truth is, I can only intermittently think of things I can teach him. It’s a pity, too, because he learns so quickly and so well when you explain it just right.
Spoiler alert: Finally, the peddler takes off his own cap, throws it down and starts to walk away and they throw down their caps, too. “And all the grey caps and all the brown caps and all the blue caps and all the red caps came flying down out of the tree.”
There are still times when I feel as if I’m waiting for some monkeys to throw their caps back down to me and end the constant interruptions that have been my life with Oren. What could be more of an interruption than autism? I doubt there have been 10 nights in the past 20 years when I haven’t either been awakened by Oren or found myself awake, worrying about him. There can’t have been even five times when I’ve slept through the night.
The year after he was diagnosed, I stopped writing fiction totally and could barely even read. If a character in a novel had a healthy child, I would put the book down in disgust and envy. Then I found Kenzaburo Oe, who writes about his brain-damaged son, and gradually started finding my way back.
Eventually, the peddler picks up the caps and puts them back on his head.
We read the last part together. “And slowly, slowly he walked back to town calling, ‘Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!’”
“The end,” says Oren.
I envy Esphyr Slobodkina. I envy Joyce Carol Oates. They were and are so true to themselves and have achieved what I always wanted. But I look at Oren, who is already getting out the next book and I can’t honestly say that being his mother has destroyed my imagination. He hands the book to me. It’s about five big cats on a secret, magic island. Oren and I both smell it before I start reading.
I have been reading Caps for Sale to him for two decades now, but every time I open it, his eyes light up. Caps for Sale has to be the first book on Saturday morning. Nothing happens without Caps for Sale. And I have to read it to him, even though he can read it himself and there isn’t a word, a line or a comma that he doesn’t know by heart.
Nothing can be omitted, not the title, not the fact that it is a “Reading Rainbow Book,” which refers to a television program neither of us knows anything about, not that subtitle, “A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business,” and certainly not the name of the author:
Esphyr Slobodkina.
I looked her up and discovered she wrote follow-ups to Caps, which I promptly bought. They arrived to a great deal of anticipation, but were not hits. Caps for Sale is simply perfect and nothing can compare to it. However, I learned on Wikipedia that Esphyr, or Ms. Slobodkina, was an avant-garde Russian artist who emigrated to the United States, which may explain how timeless and effortlessly hip the book is. Wikipedia features a photo of her sitting in a chair, cool, imposing and beautiful, under one of her Kandinsky-esque paintings. Light years removed from the mess that is my apartment, I can’t help thinking. Next to the futon where I read to Oren is a pile of books I am hoping to get around to reading myself, or at least starting to read, this weekend, but will I pick up any of them? The house needs to be cleaned top-to-bottom, papers need to be organized, laundry needs to be done. . .
“Eema, you’re reading,” Oren says. I was spacing out for longer than I realized. I never love him more than when we read Caps for Sale, although I have read it so many times that I often don’t take in a word. He puts his face close to mine, our heads nearly touching, our hair almost the same color, his skin paler than mine. But we have the same angular faces, the same long noses and almond-shaped eyes.
I read the dedication: “To Rosalind and Emmy Jean, and to their grandfather, who loved to read to them.” Who were Rosalind and Emmy Jean? According to Wikipedia, she had no children. She married when she was young, to another Russian artist, with whom she started the American Abstract Artists Group, and then they got divorced. She continued with her abstract paintings, but got into illustrating children’s books through Margaret Wise Brown, another favorite of Oren’s. Brown drew the pictures for Goodnight, Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both of which he loves, of course. Later, Esphyr married again, to an American, who passed away after just three years. It took her a while to recover from her grief. She died at 93 in 2002, in Glen Head, N.Y.
“Eema, you’ll read.”
Caps for Sale was published in 1940, one of those four-color books for kids, where only the red is really bright. The dapper, mustachioed peddler starts off calling, “Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!” and carrying all the caps on his head. But nobody wants any that day, not even a red one so the peddler has no money for lunch and heads into the country. I like Esphyr’s refusal to sugarcoat the cruelty of it. No one buys a cap, no money for lunch, you starve. Capitalism at its starkest, no preachy messages about self-esteem here. And then he falls asleep under a tree.
It seems to me that we have always had this book. It must have been one of the first books I bought for him. Just after his autism was diagnosed when he was three and he went to a therapeutic preschool, his teachers, Kim and Laura, of whom he still speaks with great affection literally every day, had one of the most brilliant ideas in the decades of special-education teaching I have observed: to make this book into a play. The kids took turns so that everyone got to be the peddler. It was lovely. I remember every kid in that class and not only because he still talks about them: Leo, Sam, John, Ryan, Antonio, Alex and Roy. They were such a sweet bunch of kids and very much on the ball. It turned out that only one other kid, maybe two, were actually on the autism spectrum. Sam was the one Oren liked best and he definitely seemed autistic back then. He was speech delayed, hyperactive and liked to stare at sand and sift it through his fingers, which he would do for hours if no one stopped him. I kept in touch with Sam’s mother after we moved to Israel – Oren’s father is Israeli and wanted to be near his family – and when we were in New York on a visit, we went to see Sam. Oren couldn’t have been more eager, he talked about Sam all the time. When we arrived, I immediately saw that – Sam had turned into a regular kid! He spoke like a regular kid, he acted like a regular kid in every way, and his mom, who was friendly as always, told me he was in a mainstream school but took medication for the hyperactivity, which was the only thing that was still an issue. This had always been my dream, my best-case scenario for Oren, that he would turn out to be just hyperactive and quirky. Sam rolled his eyes when Oren still wanted to play with the cars and trains that he remembered from their play dates and raced around the beloved living room, so Upper West Side with the wooden furniture, high ceilings, moldings, one hour a day of sunlight from 3:30-4:30 and a view of the river if you stood on tiptoe and looked out one corner of one window.
As I remembered their playdates, the most harmonious and reciprocal Oren ever had, when they had seemed so evenly matched, so similar, Sam whispered to his mother, “Is he always like this?”
I have fond memories of Oren playing the peddler in that preschool. How did I never take a picture of it? They acted out the book a few times a week.
Thinking about Sam, I’ve read all the way to the most exciting part of Caps for Sale without noticing, when the peddler wakes up from his nap.
“When he woke up, he felt refreshed and rested,” I say. Oren gives a contented sigh, his special sound effect. He used to say, “When he woke up, he felt French,” but now he knows the real words.
The peddler feels for his caps, but they are not there. “All he felt was his own checked cap.” We both look around us, as the peddler looks around. Then we look up at my bookshelf, the one that holds half autism books and half my all-time favorite books. The Catcher in the Rye and Harriet the Spy and Brideshead Revisited and Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe. The books that got me through school and college and Oren’s diagnosis, and then his father leaving after we moved to Israel. We’re still there, we’re still close to Oren’s dad’s family, only they’re not my family anymore. The books are my family.
Just before he took out Caps for Sale this morning, we were listening to Beatles music on YouTube, another Saturday tradition. An ad came up for a Master Class with Joyce Carol Oates who, with her I-don’t-give-a-damn-how-I-look hair, faces the camera and says, “The great enemy of writing isn’t your own lack of talent. It’s being interrupted by other people. Constant interruption is the destruction of the imagination.”
This replays in my head – I get this ad a lot on YouTube because I once actually bought the Master Class with Aaron Sorkin – and I recall Oates’ guileless expression as the peddler looks up and sees that the monkeys are sitting in the tree above his head, each wearing a cap. We act out the whole sequence as the peddler shakes his hands at them, then stamps his feet, saying, “You monkeys, you! You give me back my caps.” The monkeys do whatever he does.
“What are the monkeys doing?” I ask.
“They’re imitating him.”
I was so proud of myself when I realized I could use this story to teach Oren the concept of imitation – and the word for it. I thought back then, approximately 10,000 readings ago, that I would find so many ways to teach him all kinds of words and concepts. But the truth is, I can only intermittently think of things I can teach him. It’s a pity, too, because he learns so quickly and so well when you explain it just right.
Spoiler alert: Finally, the peddler takes off his own cap, throws it down and starts to walk away and they throw down their caps, too. “And all the grey caps and all the brown caps and all the blue caps and all the red caps came flying down out of the tree.”
There are still times when I feel as if I’m waiting for some monkeys to throw their caps back down to me and end the constant interruptions that have been my life with Oren. What could be more of an interruption than autism? I doubt there have been 10 nights in the past 20 years when I haven’t either been awakened by Oren or found myself awake, worrying about him. There can’t have been even five times when I’ve slept through the night.
The year after he was diagnosed, I stopped writing fiction totally and could barely even read. If a character in a novel had a healthy child, I would put the book down in disgust and envy. Then I found Kenzaburo Oe, who writes about his brain-damaged son, and gradually started finding my way back.
Eventually, the peddler picks up the caps and puts them back on his head.
We read the last part together. “And slowly, slowly he walked back to town calling, ‘Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!’”
“The end,” says Oren.
I envy Esphyr Slobodkina. I envy Joyce Carol Oates. They were and are so true to themselves and have achieved what I always wanted. But I look at Oren, who is already getting out the next book and I can’t honestly say that being his mother has destroyed my imagination. He hands the book to me. It’s about five big cats on a secret, magic island. Oren and I both smell it before I start reading.
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Hannah Brown’s short story, “Esphyr Slobodkina,” is part of an upcoming novel in linked short stories called A Hard Day’s Life. Other stories from the collection have appeared in Lilith, JMWW, JewishFiction.Net, Jewish Quarterly, the Jerusalem Post and several anthologies published by Ang-Lit. Press, a Tel Aviv-based publisher. Brown has also published stories in Short Story Quarterly and Commentary Magazine. Her first novel, If I Could Tell You, tells the stories of several families raising children on the autism spectrum. The New York Times published a related Modern Love column she wrote about dating when you have an autistic child when the novel was first published.
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Photo credit: Iris Nesher
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She currently reviews movies for the Jerusalem Post and she used to be a movie critic for the New York Post. She has written for Newsweek, the Tel Aviv Review of Books, New York Magazine, the Tel Aviv Cinematheque magazine, The Daily Beast and many other publications. She also works as a script editor, most recently on Eytan Fox’s movie, Sublet.