In 1970, the picture book Tell Me a Mitzi was published, with text by Lore Segal and illustrations by Harriet Pincus. Segal’s voice – warm and funny but never intrusive – combines with Pincus’s droll, engaging drawings to tell us about Mitzi and Jacob, young children living in New York City. The collaboration of author and illustrator was suggested by Maurice Sendak, who knew both women, and that combination makes this book a popular one. It tells three stories: the children try to take a taxi to their grandparents’ house on their own; they catch a cold; and they see a parade that goes differently than planned.

Tell Me a Mitzi was Segal’s first of eight picture books. These books are wry, whimsical departures from her award-winning novels and short stories for adults – some of which draw on her personal story as a Holocaust refugee who came to the United States via England. Although Segal has had stories published in The New Yorker since the 1950s and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (for Shakespeare’s Kitchen in 2008), her picture books should never be overlooked as a deserving, cherished part of her canon.

My family somehow overlooked Mitzi when I was a child, but as a college student in the ’80s, I took the book to heart. At school, I became friends with a classmate named Jacob Segal—who happened to be Lore’s son—and subsequently discovered her work. Not entirely coincidentally, Jacob is also the name of Mitzi’s little brother.

Although Tell Me a Mitzi was out of print for a while, there is now some good news: The volume was reissued a little over a month ago by the New York Review of Books Kids. That’s good news for the many Jewish parents who read the volume to their children, and for the now-grown Jewish “children” to whom it was read. As I spoke to some of those people now, I wondered what attracted them most to the book — and why, even though it mentions nothing about religion, Mitzi seems unmistakably Jewish. (The publisher acknowledges this, writing, “This popular, colorful picture book contains three stories about a little girl with a certain chutzpah.”)

Novelist Tova Mirvis, 52, remembers her mother reading “Tell Me a Mitzi” to her. “After all these years,” she says, “I remember the book so well. The portrayal of a little girl traveling alone and having adventures in New York City fascinated me. It was so different from Memphis, where I grew up, where we carpooled everywhere. The phrase ‘Tell Me a Mitzi’ became a refrain among the kids in my family when we wanted to hear a story.”

Years later, Segal was one of Mirvis’ writing teachers at Columbia. “I don’t think I had any idea as a child who the author of ‘Mitzi’ was,” Mirvis recalls. “It was exciting to learn from this author, from someone we Despite it quoted in my family, and reading her other works.”

“I really, really loved that book,” recalls Rabbi Rebecca Einstein Schorr, 53, who read “Mitzi” as a girl. “I’m from California, but my grandparents, of blessed memory, were from Brooklyn. I remember the feeling of wanting to get in a taxi as a child to go to my own grandparents’ house. I don’t remember anyone saying the characters were Jewish, but to me they were Jewish. The language, the illustrations, they seemed so coded.” After a very challenging week in her adult life, Einstein Schorr has an idea during our conversation. “I’m going to visit Mitzi and her little brother Jacob again,” she says. “I think the warm nostalgia will wrap around me – like a cozy blanket.”

Tell Me a Mitzi brought the feeling of a Jewish community to places where there was none. “When I was a child, I lived in a part of town where there were very few Jews,” explains 50-year-old author and elementary school teacher Stacy Mozer, “and my family was very secular. In elementary school, many of the projects and activities revolved around Christian holidays. Tell Me a Mitzi was one of my favorite books because even though the author never identifies the characters as Jewish — something I’m only realizing now — something about the stories and the names Mitzi and Jacob spoke to me.”

That’s true for me too. The stories are grounded in realism but then freely deviate from it (in one, Jacob tells a presidential motorcade to turn around and drive by him again – and it does); and that structure reminds me of my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant who made up stories to tell his nine grandchildren. He would start with “Once upon a time in the land of cotton, where the old days are not forgotten, and the tomatoes and potatoes grow ripe and rotten: To make a long story even longer and more monotonous…” before breaking into fantastical tales.

And Segal’s ironic formulations really do seem Jewish. Just today I had to laugh when I read a passage from the second story in the book, “Mitzi sneezes.” The two children and their mother have a cold. Then their father comes home.

“I have a terrible cold,” he said.
“I have a cold too,” said Mitzi’s mother.
“I said it first,” said Mitzi’s father.
“I was hit the hardest,” said Mitzi’s mother.

It’s the rhyme, right? That funny rhyme – it’s so Jewish.

SJ Schwaidelson, 72, a blogger and novelist, read “Tell Me a Mitzi” to other people’s children and then to her own. “I first encountered ‘Mitzi’ when I babysat for a friend in college,” she says. “I loved reading the book to her girls. Then I had boys! We live in Minnesota, but I’m a New Yorker, and we spent every August on Long Island. I took my boys on (Mitzi-like) adventures around the city. They loved the book.” Like Mirvis and her siblings, Schwaidelson’s boys began asking for “a Mitzi” when they wanted a story told.

When asked if the book seemed “Jewish” to her, Schwaidelson replies, “Indeed. The language – and the relationships between the parents and the children.” (Indeed. Mitzi and Jacob’s parents end up doting when they really want to discipline, and sometimes it’s the other way around.) It was also a way to connect her St. Paul-based offspring to her childhood: “The stories reflected a reality I grew up with. Sharing them was a connection to my past.”

As I texted my cousin Amy to ask her to review the introduction to our grandfather’s story, I thought about how Tell Me a Mitzi taps into so many precious childhood memories. And now, at 54 years old, it’s new again – ready to charm the next generation.