Journey Back - Softcover

Johanna Reiss was born and brought up in Holland. After she was graduated from college, she taught elementary school for several years before coming to the United States to live. Her first book for children, The Upstairs Room, was a Newbery Honor Book, an American Library Association Notable Children's Book, and a Jane Addams Peace Association Honor Book, and it won the Jewish Book Council Juvenile Book Award and the Buxtehuder Bulle, a prestigious German children's book award. Mrs. Reiss writes that soon after she had finished Tie Upstairs Room, she found "there was still something I wanted to say, something that was as meaningful to me as the story I had told in the first book, the story of a war. `The fighting has stopped'; `Peace treaty signed,' newspapers announce at the conclusion of every war. From a political point of view, the war is over, but in another sense it has not really ended. People are fragile. They are strong, too, but wars leave emotional scars that take a long time to heal, generations perhaps. I know this to be true of myself, and of others. And out of those feelings came The Journey Back, a story of the aftermath of the Second World War." Though Mrs. Reiss lives with her daughters in New York City, they make frequent visits to Holland to visit Mrs. Reiss's sisters, Rachel and Sini, and Johan and Dientje Oosterveld.

Grades 6-10--Johanna Reiss' moving sequel (HarperCollins, pap. 1987) to The Upstairs Room (HarperCollins, 1972) is a vivid testimony to all whose lives were changed forever by World War II. Narrated by the author, this compelling story of a Jewish family struggling to reunite after three years of separation and hiding from the Nazis becomes a very personal account of a young girl's coming of age in war torn Holland. This simple dramatization is poignant and heartwarming as Annie de Leeuw and her older sister, Sini, bid farewell to the kind family who hid them. Now it is time to pick up the pieces of their former life as they rejoin their father and another older sister. But their widowed father is remarried and their sister Rachel has become a devout Christian. Once again, life has turned upside down for Annie as she makes her own journey back. This is a superb performance and an essential purchase for all libraries.
Celeste Steward, Contra Costa County Library, Clayton, CA
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