Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Dial (1999), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 40 pages
Description
Based on a memoir written in the early twentieth century, tells the story of a young girl and her life in Russia, her travels to America, and her subsequent life in the United States.
Media reviews
The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, July/August 1999 (Vol. 52, No. 11
According to the author’s note, this unusual picture book is based on The Promised Land (1912), a memoir by Mary (born Masha) Antin, who emigrated from Russia to America in 1894 at age twelve. Brief quotations from Antin’s account of her life accompany each page of Wells’ “shortened and
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simplified” first-person narration, which details the oppression of Jews in Russia, where “our fathers were told what kind of work they could do,” “our brothers were stolen by the Czar’s army when they were still little boys,” “only short-nosed Jewish boys could attend school,” and “Jewish girls are not allowed” to attend school at all. Once Masha gets to America, the narration focuses in a conventional way on the educational opportunities she found there. Wells also transmits what was presumably Antin’s unquestioning acceptance of the need for assimilation when her first-person narrator tells us without comment that “my name was changed to an American name, Mary, so that I would fit in with everyone else.” However, the story does not gloss over the squalor of the Antins’ Boston home, where she has to beware of the “thieves and dope addicts” in the alleys. The interesting textures and perspectives of the warm, realistic full-page oil paintings facing each page of text evoke the old and the new country with appropriate nostalgia but without clichés. Illustrations in the sections of the book set in Russia emphasize the closeness of Masha and her father while Mary’s growing independence is emphasized in the latter section. Paintings and a map of their journey by land and by sea provide a transition between these sections and visually convey the vastness of the distance from Russia to America. (Reviewed from galleys) Review Code: R -- Recommended. (c) Copyright 1999, The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1999, Dial, 40p, $16.99. Grades 3-6. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Sydney Taylor Book Award (Mass Import -- Pending Differentiation)
National Jewish Book Award (Finalist — Children's Picture Book — 1999)
Language
User reviews
LibraryThing member raizel
Based on Mary Antin's memoir, The Promised Land, Rosemary Wells tells the story of a young Russian Jewish girl: growing up in Russia, traveling with her mother and brother to join her father in Boston, and writing a 35-stanza poem soon after learning English in school. The poem was good enough to
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be published in the Boston Herald. Sidebars have quotes from Antin's The Promised Land. The pictures are detailed and give a good sense of the time and places. Show Less
ISBN
0803721498 / 9780803721494