From: Ginny Moore Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 14:21:48 -0600

Please continue responding to the book "Secret Letters from 0- to 10," if you've had a chance to read it and have something to share with us.

Thank you, once again, Jill Davis, the U.S. editor at Viking who gave us so much background information about her personal discovery years ago of Susie Morgenstern, the creator of memorable characters in a fresh, fully original, over-the-top story developing themes concerning friendship and family. This book deserves more than a few days' attention.

Meanwhile, we have only a few days to look at the 1999 Batchelder Award book published in English in the U.S.A. by Dial Books for Young Readers in 1998. The book is "Thanks to My Mother" written by Schoschana Rabinovici in German and translated by James Skofield, and it, too, also deserves more attention than we can give it between now and March 22. But here goes!.

To acquaint everyone who hasn't yet had a chance to read "Thanks to My Mother," here's most of what Megan Schliesman wrote for "CCBC Choices 1998" -

"On June 22, 1941, I say my father for the last time." These stark, striking words begin an amazing story of strength and survival in this Holocaust memoir. Soschana Rabinovici was born Susanne Weksler in 1932. In 1941, the Germans invaded her Lithuanian homeland. At first Susie and her mother and other relatives move into her grandparents' house, where they hear frightening stories of Jews around Vilna [today: Vilnius] being rounded up and taken away. But it's not long before they are forced into the Vilna ghetto with thousands of other Jews, where the days are marked by mounting fear and growing horror despite the heoric efforts of the Jewish resistance. In 1943, the ghetto was liquidated, and Susie, her mother and her older sister are placed on a transport heading to the camps. Over the next three years, Susie's mother saves her daughter over and over again through her remarkable ingenuity and fearlessness. They are moved from one cruel camp to another, and then are forced on a brutal death march in the winter of 1945. In the end, Susie saves her mother, too, by infusing her with the will to live even after they are liberated, but when - at the same time - her mother's sick body and weary mind seem unable to endure one more struggle. The vivid imagery of this memoir is intense and striking - there is such immediacy in the writing that one feels the panic of suffocation in the cattle cars, the hopeless resignation of those who no longer had the will to fight. Some of these individuals surrendered to certain death by the simple act of refusing to stand up or move, fully aware of what they were doing as the guards took aim. Susi's stepsister is one of those she witnesses committing this traumatic but understandable form of escape. Beneath it all there is aching pain, and the fierce determination of Susie's mother to keep her daughter alive. (Age 13 and older)

Let's hear from anyone else who has already read "Thanks to My Mother." How do you compare its unique qualities with those of other Holocaust memoirs published with adolescent readers in mind?

Thanks to Susan Hawk at Penguin Putnam, we'll be hearing directly from U.S. editor "Thanks to My Mother." This editor is Cindy Kane, who will write to us all from Dial Books for Young Readers. Stay tuned. ... Ginny
*************************************** Ginny Moore Kruse (gmkruse at ccbc.soemadison.wisc.edu) Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) A Library of the School of Education (www.soemadison.wisc.edu/ccbc/) University of Wisconsin - Madison where Peter Sis will speak on Monday, 3/22 _at_ 7:00pm, and Carmen Lomas Garza will be our guest on Thursday, 3/25 _at_ 5:30pm (see website above for details)
Received on Thu 18 Mar 1999 02:21:48 PM CST