3 January 2025 GITTEL by Laurie Schneider, Regal House/Fitzroy, April 2025, 144p., ISBN: 978-1-646-03551-9

“Half a world away

Or just across the street

May my eyes be open to

Anyone in need

Well, I can’t change the world

No, I can’t change the world

No… No…

But I can pray and I can love

And when all is said and done

I can’t change the world

But I can change the world for one

For one”

– Andrew Witt, “Compassion” (2009)

“The scenes from the other side of the world were devastating.

Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing government oppression in Southeast Asia were taking to the sea, and many were drowning as they tried to escape.

A crisis that began before Carter took office was becoming increasingly dire by the day. In 1978, Carter ordered American ships to pick up refugees fleeing by boat. A year later, the exodus had only intensified.

And as world leaders met to discuss top issues facing their countries, Carter took a dramatic stand, announcing the US would double the number of refugees accepted monthly from the region from 7,000 to 14,000. The move, according to news reports at the time, was aimed at pushing other countries to take similarly significant steps.

It was not politically popular. As writer Thu-Huong Ha noted in a 2016 piece for Quartz, a poll from CBS and The New York Times showed that 62% of Americans disapproved. And a Gallup poll indicated 57% of Americans were opposed to the US relaxing its immigration policies for refugees from the region.

Carter did it anyway.”

– CNN, “These decisions on refugees weren’t popular. Jimmy Carter made them anyway” (12/30/24)

“I wasn’t there to see it myself. Mama has told me the story Bubbe will not.

I am five, and it is spring–not winter. Papa sends Ben and me to the countryside to stay with cousins in a neighboring shtetl.

It starts with posters, Mama says. Approved by the tsar himself. Posters all over the city, calling on Christian men to attack the city’s Jews on Easter. Why? Because Jews make their Passover matzos from the blood of Christian babies. Stupid, hateful words. Words so ludicrous no one in the Jewish community thinks anyone could believe them. Still, they take precautions. Those who can, like Papa, send their children away. Shop owners draw chalk crosses on their doors to show they do honest business with Christians.

Easter morning is sunny and warm, Mama says. Some men from our neighborhood go to Chuflinskii Square to see what is happening, to see the families picnicking and the men drinking. Drinking and ranting. They come back to warn everyone. ‘We locked and barred our doors,’ Mama says. ‘Like mice caught in traps, waiting for the cats.

They wait and watch. The most beautiful day of the year and not a soul in the street. When Mama peers from the window of our second-story flat she can see the faces of our neighbors looking out too.

She hears the yelling before she sees the mob. ‘Like a flood of sewage pouring down the street,’ she says. Dozens of men with clubs and knives, hatchets and crowbars. They break everything in sight, smashing store windows and stealing whatever they can stuff in their pockets and destroying what they can’t.

They kick down the door of the synagogue, split open the ark, and tear the Torah from its scroll. And when every stained-glass window is shattered on the floor they rage from house to house, hurling chairs out windows, using their clubs on anyone they can find. Young, old, it doesn’t matter.”

GITTEL by Laurie Schneider is a stand-out piece of historical fiction for tweens and teens. Set in Mill Creek, Wisconsin over the 1911-1912 school year, it portrays the anti-Semitism faced by thirteen year-old Gittel Borenstein, a bright student and a big fan of Emily Dickenson, after her family is relocated to the U.S. in the wake of the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903.

(Undoubtedly, for the sake of making the story accessible to upper elementary readers, Gittel’s recounting of Mama’s account of the pogrom is a childproofed version of history. Look it up on Wikipedia and elsewhere. You can see photos of the piles of bodies and read about the rapes, the severed breasts, and the two year-old boy who had his tongue cut out while still alive.) 

Amidst that history, GITTEL is a story about compassion. It’s a coming-of-age tale that often reads like other fun adolescents-in-the-olden-days books. What is different are the struggles Gittel periodically faces–primarily the names and outrageous statements spewed by a class bully whose father is a preacher–as she hangs out with girlfriends, does home chores, completes the last year of schooling (eighth grade) in the little town’s one-room schoolhouse, and attracts the (positive) attention of a cute, polite, older Gentile boy.

But when things get down and dirty and climactic, Gittel displays a compassion that would have made her by-then-dead beloved grandfather even prouder of her than he already had been.

Numerous famous people of the day make appearances in the story, providing additional background about that era (George Banks’s “Age of Man" if you're a Mary Poppins fan).

In a closing aside, the author subtly suggests that the history of European settlers’ treatment of native Americans could well be seen as the moral equivalent of the Russian pogroms. 

What comes to my mind as being so timely is how, this week, we are laying to rest one of my heroes, Jimmy Carter, a Christian who walked the walk, and did the right thing without regard to the political and personal fallout. 

I trust that someone somewhere will be better off tomorrow, thanks to some young reader picking up this engaging read, and getting inspired to do the right thing when the time arises.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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