Over at his Jewish Comics blog, S&S’s own Steve Bergson interviews Barry Deutsch on his latest installment of the Hereville series as well as the recent honor of once again winning the Sydney Taylor Award. The Hereville graphic novels feature, as quoted on the latest cover, “yet another 11-year-old time-traveling Orthodox Jewish babysitter” Mirka Hirschberg.

In their third interview together, Bergson asks Deutsch about his inspiration for Hereville: How Mika Caught a Fish:

When I first started writing this story, the villain was originally a magic chicken. But then I was inspired to use a magical fish character by a 2003 news story in New York, in which some Hasidic Jews reported hearing a carp in a fish market yell in Hebrew. This eventually got mixed up with the old fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife,” about a wish-granting Fish – the Brothers Grimm collected that fairy tale, among others.

More on this last of the 11-year-old Mirka books (not to rule out a 12-year-old Mirka’s set of adventures) and its link to Menachem Luchins in the interview!