With Eric Carle's spectacular Noah's dove on our cover, Cricket is privileged to feature in this special issue some of the famous authors and artists celebrated in Monsters and Miracles: A Journey Through Jewish Picture Book Art, an exhibition sponsored by The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and the Skirball Cultural Center.

In this issue you'll read about a young boy, Menelik, who is Beta Israel, an Ethiopian Jew, whose family attempts to escape the famine in their home country by embarking on a dangerous journey to the refugee camps in Chad, hoping eventually to reach Israel. Author Daniel Pinkwater remembers a touching and hilarious incident when he and his father reneacted a tradition of their forbears. Uri Shulevitz recalls fleeing the falling bombs of Warsaw in 1939 to settle in poverty in Turkestan, and how his father surprised and puzzled everyone when he spent their little bit of money on a map of the world instead of bread. Lisa Brown retells in the style of a graphic novel an unusual Yiddish folk tale her familty told when she was growing up. Ilan Stavans updates the Jewish tradition of a golem--a monstrous man brought temporarily to life, like Frankenstein's monster--with Golemito, a machete-wielding Aztec poet-warrior who, like all golems, proves difficult to control. There's a story of friendship, love, and imagination by Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was on the Cricket Editorial Board for many years; an interview with Eric Carle, explaining step-by-step how he creates his artwork; an article in which Maurice Sendak talks about the creation of some of his famous wild things and other monsters; and a true story about how a poor boy who saw humor in any situation, grew up to be world-renown author Sholom Aleichem. All this—as well as your letters and a new art contest--in Cricket this month.