Kinder Book Club: Across the Ally
This week, with a house full of coughing and achy people, we picked up Across the Alley, by Richard Michelson. I found it on the Doing Good Together Books and Websites page, listed as a good tool for teaching kids ages 4 to 8 about human rights.
If you pick up this book, be sure to read it yourself before you begin reading it aloud. There are some very big ideas in this book, and they proved to be a bit too big for our 5.5 and 3.5 year old kids.
The book itself is beautifully illustrated and written. The story is poetic and quite moving. Two boys live across the alley from one another. One is African American, one is Jewish, and they live in a time when children so different were not allowed to play together.
They strike up a secret friendship through their windows. One boy teaches the other to play the violin like his grandfather. The other boy teaches the first to play baseball like his father.
When their friendship is found out, both the father and grandfather support them unconditionally, taking the African American boy to a violin concert and the Jewish boy to pitch in a negro league baseball game.
It’s a beautiful story of acceptance. Unfortunately, explaining the evolution and ultimate rejection of the word negro and the shameful history of slavery was only the beginning of a difficult conversation. Nazis and a violinist who had all of his fingers broken in one of the camps were simply too big and too painful for Miss Kindergarten to digest or to forget about.
After we read it through once, she wanted to hear it over and over again, simply to wrap her head around broken fingers and why in the world those two boys couldn’t play together outside. I wound up sneaking it back to the library the next day rather than savoring it for a couple of weeks like usual.
This was definitely a learning opportunity, but a difficult one. I would probably save it for an eight year old rather than a 5 year old.
Tags: Big Ideas, Children's Books
