BWW Reviews: GREENHORN By Anna Olswanger Is More Than A Holocaust Story

GREENHORN by Anna Olswanger (NewSouth Books) covers one of the most sensitive areas of younger children's education - dealing with the Holocaust. But it's also about the meaning of friendship, and about the difficulties of being a "new kid" and fitting in, and it's based on a true story.

Unlike many books dealing with the subject, it's not set in Nazi Germany, in a concentration camp, or in any frightening place, but in the safe atmosphere of a yeshiva - a Jewish boys' school. Daniel, a Polish boy thought by most of the American students to speak only Yiddish, carries a small box with him everywhere, the way many children would carry a blanket or a stuffed animal. What could be in the box? The other boys are curious about that, as they are about his inability to speak English, or many of his other odd qualities.

The narrator, a rabbi's son and the one boy who befriends Daniel, has his own outsider issues - like Moses, he stutters, and because his father is a rabbi, he's suspected of thinking himself superior to the other boys. But he's really no different than Irving or Ruben or Bernie, nor is Daniel - their commonalities should bring them together, but their few differences make an almost insurmountable gulf at times, until the other boys are forced to understand Daniel's situation.

The watercolor illustrations by Miriam Nerlove are charming and evocative, and the text is suitable for middling, but not younger or youngest, readers - save this for eleven year olds. The story is roughly thirty pages long including full-page illustrations - no chapter book, but longer than the short beginning reader books, and with some definitely complicated words and ideas in it; treat it as a short story published as a standalone book. Between those and certain portions with somewhat sensitive subject matter - the contents of the box and the explanation of them - it's a book that should be read with a child, rather than left alone with them. Do review it before buying it, to evaluate your child's ability to process some of the information, if they're very pre-teen or immature.

Although it's set in an Orthodox Jewish framework, the story can be understood without you or your child's being familiar with observant Judaism; there's no heavy use of Yiddish or Hebrew terminology, and nothing obscure - although it's at a Jewish school, it's a story of the interactions of children at school, a subject familiar to almost all children. All of the other students your own child knows are here - the new student, the sensitive one, the bully, the smart one - and their behavior is the same as it is everywhere, in all schools. A glossary is included for the few difficult religious terms, and an afterword provides the conclusion of the story between the narrator and Daniel as adults.

How the story's children respond to pieces of difficult information in the book is believable, and reading it through first will guide a parent as to how to address the same material with their own children. There are no graphic images in the story, and no crude or vulgar language, but the statements themselves of certain actions that took place concerning concentration camp victims will be disturbing under any circumstances.

But the real story of the book is that of surviving bullying and forming friendships, and the narrator's own ability to do just that with Daniel shows everything your own children need to understand to be able to do just that themselves.

It's a difficult piece handled with great sensitivity, and it's educational in more than one area that children need to know, including helping with their emotional intelligence. There's an effort under way to turn GREENHORN into a film, which has put the book into some prominence. Olswanger has taken on a combination of hard subjects by telling this story, and is to be commended for that, as well as for her writing style and her content. It's a contribution to children's literature that does deserve consideration if your children are mature enough for the conversation you must have with them about it.

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