Illustrator Tirtsa Peleg reflects on bringing children's stories to life

Perhaps Tirtsa Peleg’s most distinguishing feature is her eyes – friendly, but bright and intense. Sitting in the studio of her neat and quiet Ramat Beit Shemesh home, she reflects on her 40-year career illustrating ultra-Orthodox children’s books. 

“A book has two languages,” says Peleg, “There is the textual language and the visual language.” Peleg has proven equally apt in both, having illustrated more than 200 books, and authored a number of her own as well. 

Peleg is the oldest of eight, and together with her parents and siblings, arrived in Israel from France shortly before the Six Day War. Her father grew up in Shanghai and later studied at Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in New York and Gateshead Yeshiva in London. Her mother came from Tangier, Morocco. 

“Our home was very Orthodox,” she says, “but with a healthy orientation. My father is familiar with Shakespeare and speaks seven languages.” Peleg is fluent in Hebrew, English and French and still retains a trace of a French accent in her speech. As a child, she was an avid reader, reading seven or eight books each week translated into Hebrew, ranging from Jules Verne to Jack London, Mark Twain, Sterling North, Lucy Maud Montgomery and many others. 

Peleg did not have any formal training in art and illustration. 

“Drawing was just a minor hobby for me,” she says. “Even had I been interested in pursuing illustration formally, there was no appropriate framework at the time for a religious girl,” she says. Peleg had natural skills and was helped by tips she received from friends who had taken art classes. She says her cosmopolitan background and tolerant home played a role in her artistic development. 

“The background that I received in my home helped me a great deal. I grew up here, and we experienced everything. Not only did we make aliyah, but we traveled to visit our grandparents in France. There is something enriching in expanding one’s horizons,” she says. “You are not in a narrow world.” 

As a child, Peleg was more interested in literature and nature. She was a student in the Beit Yaakov Seminary in Jerusalem and recalls with a chuckle, “I would draw at school during breaks, and during the lessons, of course.” Her illustration career began when one of her teachers, who was writing a book, needed an illustrator for a project. Peleg’s fellow students, aware of her talent, recommended her, and she illustrated her teacher’s book. 

After she married, Peleg worked as an illustrator for Zarkor, a children’s magazine for the ultra-Orthodox community. 

“Until the late 1970s,” explains Peleg, “there was no such thing as children’s haredi literature. In those days, the Beit Yaakov library was full of Hebrew books that had been translated from English, or original Hebrew books that were censored.” When haredi children’s books became established, Peleg was the right person in the right place. 

“I was very fortunate at that time, and I became the primary illustrator, not because I was more talented, but because there was no one else at the time,” she says modestly.

Peleg, whose training was in education, initially taught English and science. 

“Growing up, I had a large collection of insects, scorpions and snakes. When I got married, my mother said I had to take them all with me, and my husband didn’t want them either, so I had to give them away.”

At first, Peleg taught part-time and spent the rest of her time drawing. She and her husband spent two years in France and then returned to Israel. She left the world of education and began to illustrate books on a full-time basis. From the point of view of child-raising, she says, it was relatively easy. 

“I sent the children to school in the morning with sandwiches. When they came home, I gave them a hot meal. ‘Ima’ was there for them.” Peleg’s children did not think it unusual that their mother was an illustrator. She laughs and recalls her then four-year-old daughter saying, “When I grow up, I’ll become an artist.” Peleg enjoyed the creative feeling that illustrating gave her. 

“I had a lot of satisfaction from my work. It wasn’t like data entry,” she recalls. 

PELEG BEGAN to attract more and more clients, including authors and publishers. She illustrated a number of books written by Ginendal Krohn, a well-known author of haredi children’s books, and has illustrated books for major publishers in Israel such as Feldheim, companies in the United States, France and Russia as well as privately for individual authors. Krohn’s first book was titled Who is the Builder? adapted from the Midrash, and told the story of young Abraham the Patriarch, in his search to discover the builder of the world in which we live. She has continued to illustrate books for Krohn over the years. 

Haredi children’s literature, explains Peleg, is different from other children’s books in several ways. First, she says, “One needs to understand the haredi world. They have no TV or movies. The only visual thing that they experience is a book.” 

Since books are their only medium, says Peleg, the artwork needs to be multi-layered and multifaceted to allow the stories to be told differently each time, with different details. When Peleg illustrates a book, she will frequently add additional visual information that is not in the story, which will allow the parent reading it to present more details to the child, thus enriching the reading experience. 

Second, haredi children’s books, she says, place a great emphasis on values and traditions – not just in the religious sense. 

“We want to emphasize what we have seen or what we want children to see. We don’t want to be different, or strange, or present aliens.” 

Third, haredi books do not present unpleasant images that overstimulate. Contemporary culture frequently shows images that are unpleasant to the eye, says Peleg. 

“Haredim are looking in the direction of values,” she explains. “When parents buy a book, they want to know how the child can be elevated through it, and what the child will gain from it.” 

That is not to say that the children whom Peleg draws in her work are without marks or blemishes. Peleg frequently adds freckles and dimples to children’s faces. She reports hearing from several mothers whose children were unhappy with their freckles that they were calmed when they saw characters with similar features. Another book that Peleg illustrated, Ruthie Builds a Palace (Ruti Bonah Armon), is about a girl who deals with celiac disease. The book is intended to help children and adults deal with physical difficulties. 

Though a computer is perched at the side of her desk, Peleg painstakingly draws all of her illustrations by hand with watercolors and brushes. In the early days of haredi children’s books, she recalls, all of her drawings, with the exception of the cover art, appeared in black and white. Today, such books are fully illustrated in color.

Sometimes, says Peleg, authors and publishers will tell her exactly what to draw. 

“If the author speaks in his language and forces the artist to draw in his language as well, you will get the one thing in this one language.” As an artist, Peleg prefers having the freedom to interpret the text creatively.

“If the author provides the illustrator with more freedom, the illustrator can sometimes add a subtext, and a story within a story, which can enrich the book.”

The books that Peleg has illustrated are widely read both in Israel and abroad, as many of them have been translated into English, Yiddish, French and Spanish. She has adapted her books for specific audiences to match the religious requirements of different groups. Chabad, for example, prohibits the display of images of non-kosher animals, so Peleg changed the types of animals that appear in their books. Books that were published for other hassidic groups required her to add sidelocks (peyot) to images of haredi boys. Peleg’s books include images of girls and women, and she is opposed to the erasure of women and girls from photos. 

“It didn’t used to be that way,” she says. 

Peleg has 10 children ranging in age from 20 to 39, and she says that over the years, her ideas for illustration came from being around her children. 

“When you live with many children at home, you see what they like; you see their toys and their clothes.” Now that her children are grown, she orders children’s catalogues to ensure that her depictions are up to date. 

PELEG’S DAY begins at 8:30 each morning, and she works until the early afternoon. She resumes her illustrating in the evening and works until close to midnight. 

“I work a full-time job,” she smiles, “and on Fridays and Saturday nights as well.” These days, she says that she finds herself with less time.

“I work much harder now and get less done. When the children come for Shabbat, I need to start preparing on Wednesdays, and I need to clean up afterward.” That is not surprising, given that she has more than 40 grandchildren. 

Over the past few years, Peleg has begun to write books on her own and, naturally, illustrates them as well. She wrote the book The Big Surprise (Ha-hafta-ah Hagedolah), a lighthearted book about animals of the forest, for her grandchildren. It was published by Dani Books and is sold in mainstream bookstores. 

“I have a great love for nature, vegetation, and animals,” she says. 

On a more serious note, Peleg wrote and illustrated a Holocaust book for children published by Yad Vashem. Peleg notes that it was challenging to present a picture of the Holocaust in color to children, since the images of the Holocaust are most often depicted in black and white. To solve the problem, she used khaki, gray and other “cold” colors. 

“I am a perfectionist, and I try to be accurate in historical detail,” she says. 

Peleg says that the nature of haredi children’s books has changed since she began 40 years ago. 

“Today, everyone is making comic books,” she laments. As a result, she says, children read less, and their reading skills have declined. Peleg refers to one of her favorite writers, Sterling North, who denounced the popularity of comic books in the US in the 1950s, calling them “a poisonous mushroom growth.” 

“I don’t allow my grandchildren to read these comics,” she adds.

Though much of her work is for haredi publishers, Peleg does not like to be labeled. When asked if she considers herself a haredi woman, she replies evenly, “I try to observe and follow the Torah and the mitzvot as much as I possibly can.” 

Peleg’s children are not artists, though she says some of her grandchildren are quite talented. 

“My children never drew much,” she says. “When one’s mother is an illustrator, it’s embarrassing to even try. At least that’s what they told me.” 

Peleg continues to work day after day, writing and illustrating. She recalls waking up many mornings, sleepy with fatigue, forcing herself to get up because, as she says, “The drawings that I had to create that day would jump in front of my eyes, jostling for position to be drawn first. In those moments, I was filled with strength and freshness, threw off the blanket, and got up eagerly for a new day.”

Peleg continues her soliloquy and adds, “Twenty years ago, I went through a difficult period. I was very ill and hospitalized for close to five months. Even after I returned home, it was another six months before I returned to work. Every day I would roll the wheelchair toward my study, go inside, take a deep breath, inhaling the smell of paint, paper, books and the whole atmosphere, and become filled with energy.”

The worlds that Tirtsa Peleg has created through her illustrations and imagination help her recreate her own childhood and add meaning to her life. 

“Art and illustration introduce us to the magical world of little children,” she says, “and to our own childhood world, thereby adding vitality, joy and hope to our being.” 

How much longer will she continue? “As long as I have the strength, a steady hand, and a good eye,” she concludes, her eyes friendly, bright, and intense.