Immigration

Angell — One-Way to Ansonia
At the turn of the century, ten-year-old Rose immigrates from Russia to America and eventually finds that her emergence into adolescence brings employment, marriage, motherhood, and self-determination.

Blaine — Dvora’s Journey
After fleeing from Russia in 1904 12-year-old Dvora and her family face unexpected problems.

Blos — Brooklyn Doesn’t Rhyme
At the request of her sixth grade teacher, Edwina Rose Sachs records events in the lives of her Polish immigrant family and their friends living in Brooklyn in the early 1900s.

Branson — The Potato Eaters
A family attempts to withstand the hardships brought about by a blight, which strikes Ireland in the 1840's, ruining potato crops.

Buss — Journey of the Sparrows
Maria and her brother and sister, Salvadoran refugees, are smuggled into the United States in crates and try to eke out a living in Chicago with the help of a sympathetic family.

Cushman — Rodzina
A twelve-year-old Polish American girl is boarded onto an orphan train in Chicago with fears about traveling to the West, and a life of unpaid slavery.

Levitan — Journey to America
A Jewish family fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938 endures innumerable separations before they are once again united.

The 20th Century

Curtis — The Watsons Go to
Birmingham - 1963
The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African-American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.

Gogal — Vatsana’s Lucky New Year
Torn between Laotian and American cultures, twelve-year-old Vatsana faces prejudice from a boy at school as she helps her newly arrived Laotian cousin adjust to life in Portland, Oregon.

Hesse — Out of The Dust
In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression..

Hesse — Letters From Rifka
In letters to her cousin, a young Jewish girl chronicles her family's flight from Russia in 1919 and her own experiences when she must be left in Belgium for a while when the others emigrate to America.

Lehrman — The Store That Mama Built
In 1917 twelve-year-old Birdie and her siblings, the children of Jewish immigrants from Russia, help their recently widowed mother run the family store, picking up where their father left off in his struggle to succeed in America.

Moore — Freedom Songs
In the sixties, when Sheryl’s Uncle Pete joins the Freedom Riders down South, she organizes a gospel concert in Brooklyn to help him.

Paterson — Bread & Roses, Too
Jake and Rosa, two children, form an unlikely friendship as they try to survive and understand the 1912 Bread and Roses strike of mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

 

 

Taylor — Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
A black family living in the South during the 1930s is faced with prejudice and discrimination, which their children do not understand.

World War II

Kadohata — Weedflower
After twelve-year-old Sumiko and her Japanese-American family are relocated from
their flower farm in southern California to an internment camp on a Mojave Indian reservation in Arizona, she helps her family and neighbors, becomes friends with a local Indian boy, and tries to hold on to her dream of owning a flower shop.

Giff — Lily’s Crossing
During a summer spent at Rockaway Beach in 1944, Lily's friendship with a young Hungarian refugee causes her to see the war and her own world differently.

Issacs — Torn Thread
In an attempt to save his daughter's life, Eva's father sends her from Poland to a labor camp in Czechoslovakia, where she and her sister survive the war.

Lowry — Number The Stars
In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, ten-year-old Annemarie learns how to be brave and courageous when she helps shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis.

Mazer — A Boy at War
While fishing with his friends off Honolulu on December 7, 1941, teenaged Adam is caught in the midst of the Japanese attack and through the chaos of the subsequent days tries to find his father, a naval officer who was serving on the U.S.S. Arizona when the bombs fell.

Mazer — Good Night, Maman
After spending years fleeing from the Nazis in war-torn Europe, twelve-year-old Karin Levi and her older brother Marc find a new home in a refugee camp in Oswego, New York.

Orlov — Island on Bird Street 
During World War II a Jewish boy is left on his own for months in a ruined house in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he must learn all the tricks of survival under constantly life-threatening conditions.

Park — When My Name Was Keoko
With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.

Reiss — The Upstairs Room
A Dutch Jewish girl describes the two-and-one-half years she spent in hiding in the upstairs bedroom of a farmer's house during World War II.

Roy — Yellow Star
From 1939, when Syvia is four and a half
years old, to 1945 when she has just turned
ten, a Jewish girl and her family struggle to survive in Poland's Lodz ghetto during the Nazi occupation.

Vos — The Key is Lost
When the Germans occupy Holland in
1940 and begin to persecute the Jews there, twelve-year-old Eva and her family assume false names and move from one hiding place
to another.

Wolf — Someone Named Eva
From her home in Lidice, Czechoslovakia in 1942, eleven-year-old Milada is taken with other blond, blue-eyed children to a school in Poland to be trained as “proper Germans” for adoption by German families, but all the while she remembers her true name and history.