Saturday, November 9 at 6 p.m. join us at the 2024 Arab American Book Awards Ceremony, where Alice Rothchild will receive the Arab American Book Award for her children’s book Old Enough to Know. This event will take place at the Arab American National Musuem (13624 Michigan Avenue Dearborn, MI 48126). This event is free and open to the public, but registration (in-person or virtual) is required and can be done online.
The Jewish Voice for Peace also plans to hold events that weekend with Rothchild around the metro-Detroit area. Details are pending, but more information will soon be available.
Rothchild’s other book include Finding Melody Sullivan, Condition Critical, Broken Promises, Broken Dreams, and On the Brink. She has also written a new memoir in free verse, Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician.
Books will be available to purchase at these events courtesy of Book Beat. Please call 248-968-1190 or email bookbeatorders@gmail.com for further information.
Being the new kid is always hard, but try starting the year with a name like Mohammed Omar Mohammed Abu Srour, with a homemade lunch of humus and za’atar. On top of that, on the very first day of school, a kid tells his older hijab-wearing sister to “go back where you came from.” Mohammed and his sister love their grandmother, but she thinks her stories about life in Palestine will help them with their problems. What does Grandmother’s ancient history have to do with classroom bullies? She never learned to read and Mohammed can’t even find Palestine on a map. Feels like fourth grade’s going to last forever.
Nine-year old Mohammed is facing his first week in a new city and the fourth grade at a new school. He’s lonely and his desire for acceptance is threatened by a classroom bully and the intrusive curiosity of his classmates. As the week unfolds, Mohammed befriends Noah, a Chinese-American boy, and together they figure out their school survival strategies and bond over their unusual lunches, immigrant families, band practice, and love of soccer. Mohammed’s tough and defiant older sister Zaynab, who wears a hijab and is also faced with harassment from other students, is torn by her desire to fit in and be a “normal” American teenager while staying true to her religion. Mohammed reaches a crisis when his fourth-grade class begins a segment on family histories. He finds himself puzzling over the absence of Palestine on the world map. Zaynab, agonizing over the dress code rules for the swim team, is on the brink of taking off her hijab.
At home their grandmother, (Sitti) who came to the US from a refugee camp in Bethlehem, notices they are struggling and decides to share her story. Each day after school, through a series of vivid flashbacks told in the first person, she describes living in a peasant village west of Jerusalem in 1943, fleeing as a ten-year-old girl in 1948, and struggling for survival in a refugee camp until she decides to leave to join her oldest son in the United States. As Mohammed develops an understanding of his family, he learns that he is grounded in the US and in Palestine and comes to understand all the gifts he has received from Sitti, the stories, the food, the sense of place and dignity, the love and yearning for the land.
“Sensitive and daring, moving and funny, Alice Rothchild’s book is brilliantly written. It unapologetically and truthfully weaves the story of Palestine, then and now, through the life young Mohammad who lives in America. A great book for young people.”—Miko Peled, The General’s Son
“More than a story of children struggling to be accepted into a new school, this tale weaves in their family history in another land, a dark narrative of loss and dispossession that also forms their identity. Poignant and heartbreaking, it is a story of reckoning with the past, while trying to navigate the present, in a world that does not understand.”—Fida Jiryis, Stranger in My Own Land
Alice Rothchild loves storytelling that pushes boundaries and engages us in unexpected conversations. She has written three books on Israel/Palestine, contributed to anthologies and poetry journals, and directed a documentary film. She is a mentor for We Are Not Numbers, a program that supports young writers in Gaza and active in Jewish Voice for Peace. She received Boston Magazine’s Best of Boston’s Women Doctors Award, was named in Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, had her portrait painted for Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth, and was named a Peace Pioneer by the American Jewish Peace Archive. When she is not making good trouble, she loves hiking in the Pacific Northwest, playing with her grandchildren, tending to her boisterous garden, and stretching the boundaries of her cooking.