Cara Judea Alhadeff
Zazu Dreams is a tale about the adventures of a Sephardic boy and his imaginary friend, a malamute husky, as they traverse the globe on a humpback whale across time and space, experiencing the marvels and mayhem of the relationship between humans and their environments (human ecologies). Crossing temporal dimensions and international borders, past, present, and future overlap through phantasmagorical encounters with historical figures like Jacques Cousteau, Spinoza, Rachel Carson, and ibn Sina. For cross generational audiences, Zazu Dreams includes lush illustrations and detailed endnotes, The 21st Century Arcades Project. Together, the narrative, images, and Arcades unravel the intersections between the sciences and humanities global ecological extinction and cultural extinction of ethnic minorities. Zazu Dreams explores migration and transformation from waste to useful by-product including toxic sludge to critical compost, desertification to oasis, cusp of extinction to restoration, body-phobia to biophilia. Symbiotic relationships from the natural world coincide with the histories of diasporic peoples from Iberia, North Africa, and the Middle East. The authors integrate two seemingly unrelated topics: Jewish and Arabic philosophies with consumer-convenience petro culture. This cautionary fable incites transgenerational audiences to question the vast implications of the vital yet precarious concept of sustainability.
