by Joanne F. Oppenheim
There's only so much you can cram into a book. I don't remember any of the history I was taught in school, but if I did remember, I expect it would be about presidents and wars and inventions and discoveries. Columbus discovered America-- how exciting is that? Well...not exactly America. The West Indies (which he thought were the East Indies) and the coast of Central America. Nowadays I think history textbooks try a little harder, but they still seem to be telling the tale, not showing.
If I were boss, schoolkids would spend ten minutes of each class period on facts and the the rest on books like this. Movies, too--documentaries for sure, and works of fiction so long as the fiction was true to the times. Every American schoolkid learns that Hitler killed Jews, but how many know that the United States relocated and incarcerated 110,000 people? Once a Jap, always a Jap--even if they were American citizens born in America and speaking no more than a word of two of the Japanese language. Most of the people had to leave behind their possessions and sell their properties at a huge loss. They were kept in concentration camps (actual term employed at the time), surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers with guns...for their own protection. If the guns are for our own protection, they wondered, then why are they pointed at us?
In San Diego a children's librarian named Clara Breed walked among the kids queuing up for evacuation trains, hugging her many small patrons and handing out stamped postcards with her address on them. Write to me, she begged.
This book is the result. Her letters from Elizabeth, Ellen, Tetsuzo (Ted), little Katherine and others make up the icing of this nutty treat. The letters are mostly cheerful and amusing, speaking of the sunsets on the distant mountains or the stars overhead...but the darker reality left unsaid is always in the back of your mind, if you only stop to think.
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