Pepita Meets Bebita: How This Mother/Son Picture Book Came to Be by Ruth Behar and Gabriel Frye-Behar

April 05

  We started writing the first draft of Pepita Meets Bebita just three weeks after Gabriel’s first daughter and Ruth’s first granddaughter, Mila, was born in New York on the last day of Hanukkah in 2020. With our family gathered to celebrate (and help with the new baby!), we noticed how Eloise, who had been the “baby,” or the “bebita,” of […]

»»

Gently Passing on a Heritage by Ruth Behar

January 25

When I sat down to write Tía Fortuna’s New Home, I thought it would be easy to write a picture book about my Sephardic cultural heritage. But it turned out to be incredibly difficult. There are many layers of drama and displacement in Sephardic history that I wanted to put in the story without overwhelming […]

»»

Inspiration for Letters from Cuba by Ruth Behar

February 12

Though my new middle-grade novel takes place in the Cuban countryside in the late 1930s, Letters from Cuba is my heart’s response to the current news of deportations, immigrant travel bans, and international refugee crises. How, I wondered, could I talk back to the cruel anti-immigrant climate of our era? It occurred to me that […]

»»

Cover Reveal of Lucky Broken Girl by Ruth Behar

July 29

I was delighted when I saw the stunning cover art that Penelope Dullaghan created for Lucky Broken Girl. Rather than depicting my protagonist—a young girl who is temporarily confined to her bed—the cover portrays the lush beauty of her imaginative world. Dreams and hopes literally burst forth from the apartment in which Ruthie is confined […]

»»