Small Press & Self-Published Books about WWII

ALAN Review, Fall 2004 by Broz, Bill

We now want to shift gears a bit to praise our NCTE conference programs and to urge readers to keep their eyes out for special WWII sessions there. When we see a session in the NCTE conference program that mentions WWII at least one of us always tries to go to it. In 2003 in San Francisco it was the session on the book, The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen. A young woman, Lisa Jura, was sent out of Vienna alone, on the famous Kindertransport that sent 10,000 Jewish children to England at the beginning of WWII. There Lisa survived the blitz to become a concert pianist. Author Golabek is Jura's daughter and a noted concert pianist in her own right. In the conference session Golabek was stunning. She narrated portions of her mother's story and punctuated them with dramatic keyboard performances on a grand piano from the stage of the conference room. This is not a small press book, and you can find it easily on Amazon. But if you did not go to the conference session which was sponsored by the Milken Family Foundation, you might not know that the foundation makes available, through its project Facing History and Ourselves, a "Teacher's Resource to The Children of Wellesden Lane" which includes a curriculum guide and recordings of classical piano pieces performed by Mona Golabek. As further noted on the foundation's website www.mff. org, "The foundation is making both the curriculum guide and the recordings available free-of-charge on [its] website." You can use the book as a read aloud and download the music to play in class.

Amazing as the above book and the music are, they are not the coolest thing about WWII we have ever found at an NCTE conference. It may be that you will never be able to get one of these books; maybe someone reading this column can change that prospect. It was at a spring conference in Cincinnati. Virginia was not there and I wanted to get some kind of special present to take back to her. She was the one who was way into WWII. I was just getting interested. The program catalog said the session was about the WWII Japanese Internment Camp, Manzanar. It was at the time that people were just starting to talk about Snow Falling on Cedars. In the session room a very gentle and soft spoken California high school teacher, Diane Honda, was talking about resources available for teaching about the Japanese American experience of WWII. She was talking about Manzanar and showing great slides. In particular she said that Manzanar had a high school and that high school had a yearbook. Somehow, surely through every fault of my own, I was not getting the point of the presentation until the end when I realized that she was saying that this yearbook, the 1943/1944 yearbook from Manzanar High School, called Our World, had been reprinted. She had a stack of them there. I could buy one! This is what we meant when we said that your quest for these resources might require quick action. The book made a great present for a WWII searcher. It cost only $25. As it lies on my desk now, it looks like any yearbookUSA. The kind of thing we all bought in high school.