Sky-High Sukkah, a new Apples & Honey Press picture book, tells a heartwarming story about friendship and community. Author Rachel Ornstein Packer shares the real-life inspiration behind her book.
Ricardo, my childhood next-door neighbor, was an immigrant from Haiti. He and his wife were the first people my family met when we moved into our house in Queens.
Standing in his backyard, Ricardo watched curiously as my father struggled to build our first sukkah. "Are you building a new porch, Shelly?" Ricardo asked.
"No, not really," my father answered hesitantly. He wasn’t quite sure how to answer. “You wouldn’t understand,” my father muttered.
Ricardo looked a bit surprised. “Oh I don’t know about that,” he said as he lit up his cigarette.
“I’m building a sukkah," said my father.
"A suk what?” stammered Ricardo. My father described the structure: three walls and an open roof. He told Ricardo it represented the temporary dwellings of the Israelites as they wandered in the desert, and that it was symbolic of life’s fragility. I am sure he could have told Ricardo much more, but that was probably enough information.
Ricardo gently took the tape measure out of my father’s hand and began to measure the porch. “I know exactly what you need,” said Ricardo confidently. My father was too stunned to even ask how he knew. He just… trusted him. Ricardo purchased the wood, and skillfully designed a sukkah to fit our porch. After hours of painting, hammering, and nailing, he and my father put up the sukkah
The sukkah Ricardo built was just what my father had in mind. Stunned, he asked Ricardo how he'd known what to do. "Ah, well, growing up in Haiti, we built similar structures called pergolas to shade us from the sun in the summertime," he said. "Your sukkah is not that much different from what I remember building as a boy."
Ricardo died a few years later. Our 35-year-old sukkah is now cracked and weathered, but we still use it every year, a symbol of the friendship between a Jewish boy from the Bronx and a man from Haiti. At our Sukkot ushpizin, a custom where we spiritually invite people from Jewish history to a meal in the sukkah, we always invite Abraham, Isaac, Jacob - and Ricardo.
Sky-High Sukkah, by Rachel Ornstein Packer, has just been released and is available for purchase.
