TDSB faces another challenge

I am far, far too angry to comment about this: A news story surfaced this weekend about The Shepherd’s Granddaughter, by Anne Laurel Carter, being challenged in the Toronto area after appearing on the OLA's Forest of Reading list. Apparently, the book “has clear potential to incite hatred and violence against Jewish and Israeli students,” says the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, as quoted in the Star. There are calls for the book to be removed from Ontario classrooms.

This is the book that won (see press release) the 2009 CLA Book of the Year for Children Award, a prize that I judge.

If I start writing, I will rant, and I have had a long day at work already (P.S. It was my first day back at Rideau Branch! I unpacked my 8 boxes, visited a local French school to present at a staff meeting, covered the evening desk shift, and caught up with a few staff members. More formal meetings tomorrow...). I will simply remind you that I had the pleasure of being present when Anne won our award, and I was deeply moved by her speech. I will refer you to my post about it. To engage with this type of book challenge would be to give it more weight, but I am tempted to remind the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, or B'nai B'rith, that Anne went kibbutzing twice, and that her views about the Mideast conflict were changed by talking to actual Palestinian families, and by working with the Institute for Community and Organizational Development, Rabbis for Human Rights, and the Tamar Institute. We would all do well to spend more time learning about others, rather than fearing them and inciting hatred. But then, I thought that was obvious, and I'm consistently surprised.

The lovely Patsy Aldana of Groundwood says it best, in a press release reprinted on Quillblog:
"In fact there are a number of very sympathetic Jewish and Israeli characters in the book, but they represent a point of view more commonly found in Israel than at B’nai B’rith — concern for Palestinians whose houses and villages are torn down to make way for the settlements that are considered illegal by most countries in the world. No less a figure than James Loney, who was held hostage in Iraq by extremists and who works for Christian Peacemaker Teams, has praised the book for its balance. The librarians of Ontario who selected this book for the Forest of Reading program and the librarians of the Canadian Library Association (not the same people) who gave it the award for the best children’s book of the year can hardly be characterized as people who are enemies of Israel."

Ya, I know, I was all "I'm not talking about it," but I'm totally talking about it.

Farewell, Mary

I was very sad to read this morning of Mary Travers' death. I grew up singing Puff, the magic dragon at camp (um, that may have been the only thing I willfully retained from camp). One of the first CDs my husband and I bought and really "shared" was this, which we played full volume while driving around Montreal furnishing our first condo. I fell in love again with songs like 500 miles, If I had a hammer, This land is your land, Early mornin' rain, Follow me, and Don't laugh at me, and the brilliant songwriting of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Peter Yarrow (no relation, but one can hope, right? Oddly, he signs his name much like my father and I) and Noel (Paul) Stookey.

Over the years, every time I listen to the political songs, I think I really must somehow shape these songs into a class booktalk about the 60s and political and social activism. Wouldn't it make a great unit for even grade 6+?

You could incorporate books like the picture book, One by Kathryn Otoshi, Stealing home (set before the 60s but captures the breeding ground for ideas of the 60s), The Loud Silence of Francine Green, Canadian Meg Tilly's Porcupine, The Breadwinner, Three Wishes, and even Stargirl or Schooled, and you could talk about poetry as dissent, and look at the lyrics of PPM songs. I need to get going on that.


I would also include the recollections of my Facebook buddy Stephen Yarrow, who once had the privilege of meeting (and learning the guitar from) Noel Stookey in Australia (Stephen is no relation to me or Peter - are you confused yet? We Yarrows do stick together). Stephen met Noel on his solo Christian tour of Australia in the early 70s and somehow got to take him to and from his hotel. Stephen wrote me that "Being a child of the 60s wasn't all that wonderful at the time - not for me and most people I knew, anyway - so don't feel resentful for missing it. There was far more anger and fear than love and peace. The cold war was in full flight, everyone was scared of nuclear war, all the young men were being conscripted against their wishes to go and fight the Vietnam War and many never came home, and parents were still very controlling and ultra conservative. The music, fashions etc. of the 60s were very much a respite from all the negativity of the time, and the music was more wishful thinking for better days that actually being so wonderful. [...] That [being] said, it was an interesting time of change, particularly watching a new form of music grow from infancy (1950s), to maturity (1970s) and eventually stagnating to become a lifeless shadow of its former self (1990s)."

Incidentally, there is a great, great picture book version of both Puff (with Peter singing with his daughter on an accompanying CD) and Don't laugh at me. The illustrations in both are utterly brilliant, and in Puff, propose an alternate ending.



For now, I leave you with this:

CLA Annual Conference Day 2 (evening): CLA Book Awards Reception

As you likely already know, the book awards went as follows:

• Book of the Year for Children Award: The Shepherd’s Granddaughter, by Anne Laurel Carter, published by Groundwood Books.


• Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Illustrator's Award: Mattland, illustrated by Dusan Petricic and written by Hazel Hutchins and Gail Herbert, published by Annick Press.


• Young Adult Canadian Book Award: Chanda's Wars, by Allan Stratton, published by HarperCollins.

I spent a few anxious minutes looking around for BOYA's head judge, Helen Kubiw, who I have had lengthly phone conferences with over decision-making, but had never met in person. It's always embarrassing to wander around, asking at random if people are named Helen. I did finally find her, and also our fellow judge Donna, and it was a great pleasure to meet them both in person, and Donna and I clicked exactly as I knew we would.


Lovely speeches were given, of course, but even lovelier than I expected. Appalling photos were taken, as you can see at right and below. I have an old camera. Deal.

Tragically, it was difficult from the angle I was sitting at to hear all of Dusan Petricic's speech, but what I heard was inspiring and very moving. He struck me as a very kind and gentle soul. Anne Laurel Carter was a joy to listen to. She spoke about going kibbutzing twice, in 1971 and 1974, I believe, and how she later (after becoming a librarian in 1983) travelled to the West Bank in 2005. She had realised by then, when teaching about media awareness, that there were some stories that had not been told - there nothing on the bookshelves in the library where she worked to represent a Palestinian point of view to her Muslim students in Toronto. She decided that there was only one thing to do when she found herself ignorant about a certain group, and that was that she would have to go and meet them. She traveled to the West Bank in 2005, was welcomed by many Palestinian families, and met many people that we don't hear about in the media. One Palestinian man, grazing his sheep illegally on land that had been in his family for generations, told her that if the ICOD and other organisations (Christian groups, Rabbis for Human Rights) hadn't helped him, he wouldn't believe in God. Carter eventually decided that she would simply have to write something about these people herself, and she came to change some of her earlier views. She also mentioned working with the Tamar Institute, who recently won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (I noted it while blogging for Librarian Activist!), saying without them she would not have seen what she saw, and subsequently changed her views.

Whew. The emotional bar had been set pretty high, but Allan Stratton raised it again, talking about how "we all share the same human heart," and talking about the importance of emotional literacy, literature as a bridge across divides, and particularly about YA literature as coming at a point in people's lives in which the stakes are high and readers are vulnerable. He observed that "all of us in this room (writers, publishers, librarians) have devoted ourselves to a field as real as it gets."