Author-illus­tra­tor Alan Sil­ber­berg has offered young read­ers a tour of the Jew­ish hol­i­days in a series of pic­ture books that are both hilar­i­ous and mean­ing­ful. Hanukkah, Passover, and Purim have tak­en on new mean­ing in his sto­ries, pop­u­lat­ed by anthro­po­mor­phic foods with zany per­son­al­i­ties and an abil­i­ty to dis­cuss these com­plex sub­jects in a way that chil­dren can under­stand. His lat­est high­ly rec­om­mend­ed for­ay into culi­nary cul­ture is The Bagel Who Want­ed Every­thing. What bet­ter food could rep­re­sent both the uni­ver­sal yearn­ing to find an iden­ti­ty and the essence of being Jew­ish as this one deli­cious piece of boiled dough?

Plain bagels may lack the nov­el­ty that most oth­er kinds of bagels pos­sess. One par­tic­u­lar plain bagel has begun to ques­tion his iden­ti­ty; even though his lov­ing par­ents are depict­ed hold­ing hands, and he has always received the mes­sage that being plain is per­fect, he won­ders if he should be some­thing more. True, he has a crusty grand­ma begin­ning to show spots of green mold, and she deliv­ers the same wis­dom about self-accep­tance, but with less patience: ​“Bagels have always been just one thing. Be hap­py with the one thing you are.” This advice pro­vokes the young bagel, who is just begin­ning to ques­tion its inevitabil­i­ty. Sud­den­ly, the sesame, salt, and gar­lic bagels who boast about their unique qual­i­ties seem to be special.

Sil­ber­berg uses exag­ger­a­tion paired with sim­ple themes to imbue his char­ac­ters. With a strange­ly believ­able human­i­ty. Grand­ma wears spark­ly cat’s eye glass­es and sits on an over­stuffed arm­chair. A pop­py bagel loaded with seeds rais­es his wiry arms while claim­ing his super­pow­er. The trou­bled young plain bagel tries out dif­fer­ent meth­ods for enhanc­ing his smooth sur­face, includ­ing rolling in col­or­ful flow­ers and float­ing in sea­weed, which results in mock­ery from his friends at his assort­ment of gar­ish toppings.

Just when read­ers are won­der­ing if the bagel has final­ly made peace with his plain­ness, an act of poet­ic jus­tice occurs. All that rau­cous teas­ing and laugh­ter have caused the crew of fan­cy bagels to shed their seeds, salt, and onion, which land on the plain bagel. He has been sud­den­ly trans­formed from noth­ing to everything.

With his char­ac­ter­is­tic push­ing of lim­its, Sil­ber­berg depicts a range of iden­ti­ties for every bagel, from cin­na­mon raisin, to blue­ber­ry, and even a bagel coat­ed in bright red toma­to sauce and meat­balls tan­gled in strands of spaghet­ti. The bagel has con­clud­ed that self-accep­tance and change are not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. In a smil­ing group por­trait, even Grand­ma seems to have changed her mind.