Jane Yolen, Jewish author of 450 books, including “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” died in her Massachusetts home on June 11. She was 87 years old.
She graduated from Smith College in 1960 and earned a master’s degree in education from the University of Massachusetts in 1978.
In 1961, at 22 years old, she published her first book, Pirates in Petticoats, a nonfiction children’s book about women pirates, and in 1967, she published her first work of fiction, a picture book titled The Emperor and the Kite, which earned her a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.
Her popular Jewish middle-grade novel, The Devil’s Arithmetic, which was published in 1988, received a starred review from Kirkus Book Reviews. It also won a Sydney Taylor gold medal and a National Jewish Book Award.
Upon accepting the Sydney Taylor honor, she noted that it was her first book that dealt explicitly with Jewish themes. That novel was later adapted to film.
Yolen and her first husband, David W. Stemple, who died in 2006, had three children: Adam Stemple, Jason Stemple, and Heidi Stemple.
In 2019, the author reconnected with and married her college boyfriend, Peter Tacy. Together, they co-authored the children’s picture book, Gracie Feeds the Birds.
“We are two sad-sack widowed people,” Yolen wrote of her marriage to Tacy. “We found each other again because of a New Yorker article about my Holocaust novels.”
Yolen’s Jewish books include Miriam at the River, Rebecca’s Prayer for President Lincoln and Too Many Golems.
In 2023, she published Schlemiel Comes to America, based on the classic Jewish tales of Chelm, a town in southeastern Poland near the Ukrainian border.
Her daughter is also a children’s book author. She co-wrote a Chanukah book with her mother in 2024 called We Celebrate the Light, and has said Yellen “had one of the most brilliant creative minds of our time.”
Yolen’s 450th and final book, Monsters of Fife: Terror Birds, is set to be released on July 14.
