Out of the Books

With her fertile imagination and brilliant sense of humor, Ami Gedalia shows her young readers how important it is to read and listen to stories. Gal loves stories more than anything else in the world, even though she has difficulty reading. She devours the stories her father, a book illustrator, tells her, and the stories her grandfather reads to her.

Grandpa was born in Germany and worked for Erich Kastner, the writer he adored, at Kastner’s newspaper. But after losing his family in the war, he decided to come to Israel. Here he tells his granddaughter stories from world literature, and Gal, his eager listener, is deeply impressed. But she cannot always separate the story world from reality. When her grandfather tells her D’Amici’s story, The Little Scribe from Florence, Gal decides to help her family.

She gets up at night and colors the illustrations her father has left on his desk. She prepares pancakes she learned to make from Pippi Longstocking and almost destroys the kitchen; and she ties up the carpenter who fell asleep on the couch, like the Lilliputians did to Gulliver. And that is not all. Gal dreams of meeting a real author and just has to make this wish come true. So after reading Leah Goldberg’s classic story, My Friends from Arnon Street, she decides with her friend Orr to go to Tel Aviv and visit Leah Goldberg. They just don’t take into account that the author is long dead and lived in that street over fifty years ago… These are just a few of the comic situations caused by a little girl with a vast imagination.