Golden Threads

A beautifully illustrated tale of traditional crafts and communal power.

Rachelle is a young girl living in Fès, Morocco in 1920. Surrounded by a warm community of friends, family, and craftspeople--both Jewish and Muslim--Rachelle spends her days playing with other young girls in her neighborhood, trying on her grandmother’s amulets, playing jokes on a nosy photographer, and watching her parents as they spin delicate threads made of gold at their jewelry workshop each day. Life in Rachelle’s neighborhood, the mellah, is busy, nourishing, and filled with magic. But rumors of a machine (or is it a monster?) coming from across the sea threaten to change the mellah and the lives of its craftspeople forever. Banding together with her grandmother, her parents, and the other jewelry makers, Rachelle and four of her friends work together to put a stop to the machine’s arrival--but only time will tell if they can save the vibrant world of the mellah and its beautiful golden threads for good.

Golden Threads draws on a series of inspiring historical episodes in Fès, when Jewish and Muslim artisans organized together against the introduction of a new machine that threatened to replace their manual labor and compromise their cherished way of life. A book for both middle grade readers and for adults reading aloud to younger children, Golden Threads will take people of all ages on a journey into the multi-faith world of Morocco’s craftspeople, inspiring generative conversations about art, labor, community, and technology for years to come.

Haitham Haddad is a visual artist from Palestine whose work centers on historical and contemporary manifestations of myth and folklore, as well as political tensions between the individual and the collective. He works at the intersection between printmaking, illustration, video, and tattooing. Haddad is the founder and creative director of Studio Mnjnk, a multidisciplinary graphic design studio with a focus on experimental typography and Arab visual culture. His work has been exhibited and featured in numerous museums and cultural institutions, such as the A. M. Qattan Foundation (Palestine), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Netherlands), The Mosaic Rooms (UK), Vier Nul Vier (Belgium), ICD Brookfield Place (UAE), Qalandiya International (Palestine), Bard College (New York), and the Royal College of Art (UK). He currently lives and works in New York.