Author Tags: Kidlit & Young Adult Music Women


Articles: 3 Articles for this author

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In the spring of 1947, Jack Roosevelt Robinson stepped up to the plate for the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first black baseball player to play in the major leagues. That's the historical background for Ellen Schwartz's Stealing Home, about nine-year-old Joey who needs to belong somewhere, anywhere. Upon reading American novelist Don DeLillo's Underworld which richly evokes baseball, Schwartz decided to write a book related to the game. She soon found Jackie Robinson's story irresistible. Born in 1919, the grandson of a slave and the youngest of a sharecropper's five children, Robinson was a natural athlete, excelling in football, basketball, baseball and track. He protested for black rights during his army stint, played professional baseball in the Negro Leagues and, when the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers asked him to take part in a "noble experiment,"; he endured abuse from teammates, other players and fans-including hate mail, assault and death threats.

"Get lost, whitebread,"; the black kids taunt Joey Sexton in his 1947 Bronx neighbourhood. "We don't want no crackers in our game."; Joey just wants to play a little schoolyard baseball. Then his mother, only occasionally "off the drugs,"; dies and fatherless Joey is shunted off onto relatives he's never known in Brooklyn. In the Jewish community of his Aunt Frieda and grandfather, he's called Nigger Boy. Half-white, half-black, knowing nothing of synagogues or Shabbas candles, and as a Yankees' fan trapped in Dodgers' territory, Joey also endures the whispered and not-so-whispered gossip about his mother who ran off with a trumpet player. When Joey, caught wearing his Yankees cap, returns home after a scuffle, his grandfather takes one look at the filthy clothes and bleeding face and pronounces Joey a "wild thing, a disgrace.";

Ellen Schwartz grew up in New Jersey in the 50s and 60s where "society was largely segregated,"; she says. "I never knew an African-American person, other than my parents' housekeeper, until black kids were bussed to my junior high school."; Schwartz became involved in the civil rights movement and, later, delving into Robinson's life story just prior to the 60th anniversary of that momentous baseball game, discovered, as does young scrapper Joey, the more she learned about the man, the more she admired his dignity and pride under great adversity. Two other Schwartz titles to be released this fall include Abby's Birds (Tradewind $22.95), illustrated by Elizabeth Shefrin, and Yossi's Goal (Orca $7.95), a sequel to Jesse's Star, which chronicles the further adventures of a Russian Jewish immigrant family living in Montreal in the 1890s.
0-88776-765-6

[BCBW 2006]
Louise Donnelly

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Jesse has little to write about for a project on his immigrant ancestors until his mother sends him up to the attic to dig through a battered travel case. He slips an old chain with a Star of David over his head, and he's suddenly in a Russian village. It's 1890, and thieving soldiers terrorize the small Jewish community, raiding crops, burning books, and beating or even killing anyone who opposes them. The villagers' only hope is to flee to Canada and it's up to Jesse-called Yossi now-to help them escape the soldiers. Ellen Schwartz, whose own grandparents' escape from Russia was the seed for Jesse's Star (Orca $6.50), is also the author of Mr. Belinsky's Bagels and the Starshine series. 1-55143-143-2

[BCBW Summer 2000]

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Having already had a bestseller for Michael Katz' Tradewind Books with Mr. Belinsky's Bagels, published in 1997, Ellen Schwartz has concocted another charming cross-cultural story for Katz, this time about a girl named Abby who moves into a neighborhood and befriends an elderly Japanese woman, Mrs. Naka, who teaches her the gentle art of making origami birds.

1-896580-866

[BCBW 2006]