With my school library blog on summer hiatus, I decided to start this blog on reading and writing at the request of a couple of my teacher friends who regularly follow my other blog.

I’ll be busy finishing off my courses for my certificate in library training this summer. However, when my teenage son is tired of “doing summer things” with me and I’m not studying or doing the looking after the house and garden thing, I plan on attempting to get through the entire stack of books I borrowed from my library to read over the summer.

You would think working in a library you would find some time to read, but, after going back to work full-time last September after running a free-lance writing and communications business from home for the last 14 years , well… enough complaining. We could all use more time to read.

Admittedly, most of the reason why I was so busy had nothing to do with my day job. In what seems like a crazy decision now, last September I decided to take all 8 of the library courses required for my certificate in one year instead of 8 years. Part of the reason for dedicating every weekend and evening to my on-line studies was the raise it will make in my salary which will nicely compensate for how much gas prices have gone up since I started.

The other reason I felt I needed to fast track my library education was, despite my love of books and reading, my education and experience up until now has been in using libraries, not running them. Now, almost 8 courses later and with plans to continue taking courses toward a library diploma (at a slower pace), I feel confident doing both. This isn’t to say that I don’t discover something new and interesting happening in the realm of running a library and in the field of working as a writer and research every day. I hope to highlight some of the more important discoveries in this blog from time to time.

But, I digress…

Back to the books….

For the first time since I read The Grapes of Wrath in Grade 12, I read a book entirely in one sitting today. Why on earth did I read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath all in one sitting? Well, I can’t really remember why I put off starting the book, but, procrastination has always been a bad habit with me. Anyway, I was fond of English class and of not getting in trouble for incomplete homework assignments, so, I read Steinbeck’s longest and thickest book in one long Sunday sitting.

I didn’t have to be in a rush to read the book I read in one sitting today – - so, either it was such a good book that I couldn’t put it down, or, I was simply taking advantage of the fact I have been lucky enough to have two lazy Sundays in my life so far to do nothing but read.

Today’s marathon read is called Kanada by Eva Wiseman, born in Hungary and now living in Winnipeg. You may know her books My Canary Yellow Star, selected for inclusion in the New York Public Library’s Best Books for teens and No One Must Know, winner of the Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award. I haven’t read either of those two books, so, I can’t tell you if this one measures up in comparison. This book did make me want to read Wiseman’s other work, however.

In her acknowledgements at the end of the book, Wiseman says, “I based most of the events in this book upon the experiences of my beloved father and my dear mother in Hungary before the war, in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, and in DP (displaced person) camps after the war ended.” She also expresses thanks to “four brave souls” who shared their stories with her.

Written from the perspective of 14-year-old Jutka, Kanada is the kind of book you would imagine Anne Frank writing if she had been able to keep her diary after being captured from the Secret Annex and shipped to the concentration camps. At the end of my copy of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl there is an afterword quoting passages of Anne Frank, A Portrait in Courage, German writer Ernst Schanble’s 1958 reconstruction of what happened to Anne after her family was discovered and taken from her place of hiding in Holland. In researching the book, Schnable spoke to many who had known of Anne’s experiences. One survivor recalled Anne being extremely saddened when being marched past the Hungarian children waiting their turn in front of the gas chambers, “Anne nudged me and said: ‘Look, look. Their eyes…’”.

Had she not lied about her age, the fictional Jutka’s story would have ended with her being one of the Hungarian children standing in line awaiting her fate. Instead the story details, often graphically, the experiences of a Hungarian girl forced to grow up as her family is first forced to give up her schooling and friends and live in a make-shift Jewish ghetto in her home town, and then transported in a harrowing journey by rail car to a concentration camp.

Underlying the book, as the name implies, is Jutka’s discovery of and fascination with “Kanada”, a country she learns about after a cousin she has never met offers her family refuge there. Accompanying the invitation is a book full of pictures and descriptions of the land of wide-open spaces, mounties, and snow. But, the offer, because of letters never delivered, comes too late.

The juxtapostion of the freedom offered in Canada and the atrocities described in the book make this a good follow-up read for Canadian teens already familiar with Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. One need only think of the based on-a-true story The Freedom Writers Diary , made into a movie last year, as recent proof of the powerful message delivered by Anne Frank’s story ever since it was first published in 1947.

Kanada takes the extra step of describing the atrocities that took place during the Holocaust. And, although when I first read Anne Frank’s diary the allusion to what happened to her was enough to make a lasting impact, perhaps the teens of today, more used to seeing violence regularly depicted on television, in movies and in video games, need a more graphic re-telling for the message to hit home.

My teenage son recently wondered aloud at how the Holocaust could have happened after watching my dad’s DVD copies of the wonderful Band of Brothers series last month. My answer included a promise to give him Anne Frank’s true account and Eva Wiseman’s based-on-truth explanations to read after finishing them myself this week.

A few months ago, one of the teachers at my school left the movie version of Anne Frank’s life for a substitute teacher to show his Grade 8 class. The next day, with the impact of the movie still fresh in their minds, he asked the students to produce posters and poems expressing their feelings about the Holocaust. The results, which I was able to see first hand as the students researched and worked on their projects in the library, were amazing. As a follow-up to their studies, the students also read the 1986 Pulitzer prize-winning book, “Night” by Elie Wiesel, billed on the official website for the book as “a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of (Elie’s )survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps”. Although the book too had a profound effect, the slim volume, was too quickly read by some of the students and left them wanting more. If they hadn’t already read the books in earlier grades, I directed these students to a number of novels in my library about children and teens influenced either directly or indirectly by the Holocaust including: Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, and Daniel’s Story, Lisa and Jesper by Carol Matas. I would now add Kanada to a list of suggested books on this important topic.

Despite its appeal for teens, I can recommend Kanada as a compelling novel for adult readers as well. It is a tale that no doubt Wiseman’s parents, “the four brave souls” who shared their stories and many others who survived the Holocaust have waited a long time to have told.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 11:59 am and is filed under Books teens & adults will like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.