Last Tuesday the Teen Book Groups met.  My group had read Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy, with the option to also read Day of Tears by Julius Lester.  In the end, only three of the seven girls enrolled were able to attend the meeting (it’s softball season), but those three and I had an involved, serious, deep discussion about Yellow Star (only one of the three had read Lester’s book) and the broader issues of prejudice, war, and the Holocaust. 

In Yellow Star, Roy relates the story of her aunt’s childhood in the Lutz ghetto in free verse, portraying the thoughts and experiences of a little girl who was one of only twelve child survivors of that ghetto.  Mesmerizing and intense, the incredibly moving story is a read-in-one-sitting book, because there is no way to stop once you’ve been sucked into the vortex of its horror and beauty. 

As we discussed the book, I noticed a couple of things: that it is virtually impossible to snack on Munchkins and pretzels while talking about a book that concerns starvation and deprivation, and that it can be very hard to have a detailed conversation about a book like this one.  We talked how and why Roy had chosen to write in free verse, and we brought up our feelings about certain specific incidents in the book, but our discussion was far shorter than the one we had about the mystery novel Blackthorn Winter.  How to critique an excellent, but spare, piece of historical fiction?

In the end, our conversation turned to the Holocaust in general, films that the girls had seen in classes, books that they had read prior to this one.  One girl brought up The Diary of Anne Frank, and we spent a good portion of the group meeting discussing Anne Frank.  The girl who had brought up the topic is totally frustrated by Anne and her human foibles, such as that Anne wasa still thinking and writing about makeup and boys while others were being tortured and killed in concentration camps.  “How could that be?” questioned this girl, “How could Anne be preoccupied with things like that while in the midst of the Holocaust?”

To me, the natural answer is that, despite the Nazis, Anne was still a teenage girl.  I tried to explain how I thought that I probably would have been the same way if I had been in those circumstances while a teenager, but I know I didn’t make myself clear.  Don’t we all have idealized notions of how brave we could be, how superhuman we could be, how kind and clear-headed and generous we could be, if we were put into a trying circumstance?  I’d like to think that I’d be exemplary, but in truth I’m sure that I’d disappoint myself in my human pettiness.  It was interesting to see a smart, kind, thoughtful teenage girl’s idealism, and to realize the effect that idealism had on her reading of The Diary of Anne Frank. 

So we solved no issues, but we did have a discussion that left all of us feeling like we had accomplished something.  The next three books we’ll be reading for this group are not as serious, but perhaps we’ll sneak a serious book in again next fall and see where it leads us.