The Author of "Dog of Knots" writes to us!

I got an e-mail from the Kathy Walden Kaplan, the author of Dog of Knots (affectionately called "The book where nothing happens" by our class) who saw our blog. I told her that our class was puzzled by the relationship between the main character in the book and an older boy, so I asked her about it. Here's her response:

Hi Amy,

We live in a strange world where kids are expected to associate only with other kids their exact age. Even having a friend a year older or a year younger doesn't happen very often. Before it was published, my manuscript was rejected many times. It was rejected because it was too pro-Israeli. It was rejected because the little girl didn't have friends her own age. It was rejected because she had a friendship with an older boy. "Very unrealistic," one editor said.

When I was nine years old, my best friend was twelve. The relationship between Mayim and Uri is based on my friendship with David who lived across the street in Sacramento. His mother loved having children in the house and that's where all the neighbor kids ended up every day after school and all day long during the summer. David was my best friend from the time I was six. He felt it was important that he should teach me everything he knew. I learned a lot about science from him. He was like an older brother to me. Then the summer I was nine he kissed me out under the tree in my front yard. I giggled.

My family moved away that fall to Salt Lake City. The year I was twelve and David was fifteen we wrote letters to each other for a year. I think he called it "going steady" and we went steady until the following year when he found a girl to really go steady with him. The year I was eighteen I moved back to Sacramento to get a job and save money for college (my folks were too poor to pay for college). The summer I was nineteen David and I dated. He was thinking about getting married, but he wasn't sure so he went off to walk the entire length of the John Muir trail (perhaps 1,200 miles) with his backpack so he could think about it. I put him on the bus with all his gear and I was pretty sure I wanted to go to college. Being a housewife didn't really have much appeal. I had been accepted to the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland and that's where I went in the fall. When David's path through the Sierras finally reached Yosemite he met a girl named Kathy who was working there for the summer. After he finished his long walk he went back to Yosemite and married her.

And there are more stories I have of unlikely friendships: when my daughter was nine, her best friend was our 12-year old neighbor, Erika, a little girl from Brazil.

I had a friend from Salt Lake City whose name was Pandora. I met her when she was 15 and her best friend was the nine-year-old boy who lived next door. They did everything together--homework, going to the library. They even wrote stories and plays together. They thought that the people who thought it was strange they should be friends were simply deprived.

Kathy

Thanks, of course, to all of you for the beautiful poster. Not only is it lovely, but the fact that you got together to make it is very touching.

Amy

Arab and Jew

During the last 2 weeks of school we'll be watching excerpts from the documentary "Arab and Jew: Wonded Spirits in a Promised Land," based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name by David Shipler. Here's how the NY Times described the film:

The history of the encounters between Arabs and Jews is told largely by the people who lived and fought and continue to fight them: from the early Zionist settlements to Israel's war of independence in 1948 and the wars that followed, up to today's ''intifada,'' the uprising in the occupied territories. There are some recollections of neighborliness before 1948, but the most deeply felt memories are of atrocities, by Arabs against Jewish settlers in the 1930's, by Jewish guerrila bands against Arab villages in 1948, by Arab states and terrorists against Israelis in the decades since, by Jewish soldiers against young stone throwers in the areas occupied by Israel after the 1967 war.

The most thoughtful comments come from journalists on both sides, who, though opposing one another's claims, acknowledge the feelings of their adversaries. An Arab attributes to Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, the observation that the conflict between Arabs and Jews is ''a fight between two rights.'' Referring to the mutual recriminations over the 1967 war, he says, ''I'm wise enough to know that in war, people do not exchange flowers.''

A Jewish journalist speaks with painful understanding of the Arab view of Jews as occupiers of ancestral Arab lands. The daily humiliations of the prolonged occupation are captured in scenes of roadblocks and official harrassment. As the program makes clear, however, the nature of the occupation cannot be understood without taking into account the years of attacks on Jewish villages, which one Israeli says, have bred ''fear and hardness.''

Turning to the situation within Israel itself, Mr. Shipler reports that Israeli Arabs, while possessing the rights of citizenship and doing better than those outside the country, remain an underclass. The most sympathetic witness here is a young Israeli Arab social worker who met hostility when she sought to move into largely Jewish upper Nazareth. A Jewish schoolteacher, a leader in the effort to keep Arabs out, says, ''They are our enemies.''

The abiding significance of the land to both sides is made powerfully clear. The two peoples, Mr. Shipler says, share ''the ideology of return.'' A Jewish settler on the West Bank, who holds that the territory was promised to the Jews by God, says, ''The Jew has to worry about the Jew.'' A West Bank Arab youth tells of throwing Molotov cocktails: ''My hatred has no limit.'' The attacks, he says, will end ''when Israel ends.''

A major theme here is the harshening effects on the young of years of occupation, terrorism and confrontation. Arab and Jewish parents alike see their children, whether they are among the stone throwers or the soldiers, as being at risk. A breath of hope is offered by efforts within Israel to bring Jewish and Arab boys and girls together and to remove discriminatory material from school curriculums. But, as Mr. Shipler says, such moves are ''fragile and vulnerable.''

How great was that?

What a lovely Sunday picnic! I'm so glad most of you could make it. Thanks to everyone for pitching in with such delicious food.

Here's a link to an explanation of Lag B'Omer.

Here's a link to my new website, currently a work-in-progress. I'd love feedback and suggestions.

War

We've been talking a lot about war over the last week. We've been studying two major conflicts in Israel's history - 1948 and 1967. We've talked about the causes, the losses and identified the resulting territorial changes. Some complex and troubling issues have come up - the Arab boycott of Israel, the Palestinian refugee problem, the Deir Yassin massacre, and the inevitable casualties of any battle. We're also finishing up a historical fiction read-aloud, Dog of Knots, which takes place during the Yom Kippur War. It relates the personal experience of one young Israeli girl, whose father was killed in the 1967 war, during the time of an attack on her country. The students have asked some great questions and made some very sophisticated observations. I'm trying to be as unbiased as possible in teaching these historical events, though I probably end up incorporating a progressive-Zionist slant. Know that I'm working hard to make sure that students gain multiple perspectives on this conflict, and I encourage you to continue these conversations at home, sharing your own views with your child.

On Thursday we'll be talking about the changes to Israel after the 1967 war with a lesson focusing specifically on the West Bank. I'll report back-