Literature for Adolescents (Last update: January 7, 2011) Table of contents

Autobiography

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam, 1971. Angelou shares both the good and the bad of her childhood: the horror of rape and family separation versus the love of a very special grandmother who taught Maya how to be a strong and fearless young woman.

The Free Press, 1985. Janina Bauman recounts her growing up years during WWII as her family first lives in and then escapes from both the concentration camps and the Warsaw ghetto. A prosperous Polish-Jewish family, the Baumans are able save themselves after leaving the ghetto because they have the financial resources and the "Aryan" friends necessary to survive amidst the horror of Nazi tyranny and Polish apathy.

leave Nazi-controlled Poland soon after it is annexed and head for what they hope will be freedom and a better life in Russia. But after the Nazis begin their march into Russia and Papa goes to fight with the Russian army against the Nazis, Mama decides that heading further east is the only real option. Along the way, however, Yankele becomes separated from his mother and sister and begins a four year odyssey which takes him around most of Russia and its provinces.

collection of true-life stories from today’s new citizens.

Breznitz, Shlomo. Memory Fields. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1992. In this biography, Breznitz recounts his

childhood during the Holocaust and the effect of it on his adolescent and adult life. In a back and forth narrative, he describes his life in the Catholic orphanage his parents place him and his sister in and then discusses how, as an adult, he began to understand and/or work out for himself some of the incidents of his youth and their impact on his present day life.

Anne Frank, this diary describes a young girl in Bosnia trying to cope with bombs, death, and the destruction of a way of life.

book to come out of the Holocaust era, Anne's diary tells of her own experiences as a Jewish girl; in addition, the reader is given a sense of Anne's growing up, and young readers "leave" the book with the sense that Anne is very much like them in her feelings of growing into young womanhood, having difficulties with the parent-child relationship, and dealing with the difficulties of first love.

people who helps hide Anne Frank and her family during WWII, tells her story of hiding Anne and her family. Not only do we get a sense of the difficulties many Dutch citizens went through in an effort to help Jewish friends, we also learn more of the courage of the entire Frank and vanDaan families as they struggle to survive amidst their own concerns about the safety of Miep, Mr. Koophuis, and Mr. Kraler as those three develop intricate plans necessary to save the lives hidden in the attic.

Reiss, Johanna. The Upstairs Room. New York: Thomas Y Crowell Company, 1972. Ten-year-old Annie and her family are Dutch Jews who, like Anne Frank and her family, thought that being Dutch citizens would save them much of the horror Jews in Germany were facing. Like the Franks, Annie's family also went into hiding; but Annie and her family are hidden in the Dutch countryside by various families, and this seems to be the thread that keeps them safe and hidden opposed to the many Jews who were captured in Amsterdam and other larger cities. Through the account of Annie and her sister Sini's hiding with the Oostervelts' the reader is given another look at hiding and secret rooms, and like Anne's diary, transcends the horror of the war to give the reader a sense of how individual people grew up and lived a day to day life in spite of what was happening around them.

hiding twice: the first time occurs after the Germans invade and annex Alsace and the second after the invasion of France and the occupation of Paris. Roth's parents decide to place the girls in a Catholic women's residence where their backgrounds will not be questioned. For almost three years, the girls are taken care of by the nuns, and Roth recounts her fears and questions about religion as well as the nature of hatred in this story well-suited for younger adolescents because it lacks the violence of other Holocaust stories.

experiences in a West Virginia town in the Appalachian Mountains.

formerly Riva Minska, number 55082, recounts her life in Lodz, Poland as she and her brothers practice survival in the ghetto and then in the concentration camp Mittelsteine in Germany where she, on her own, combines luck and writing talent to save herself from death. The astonishing aspect of this story is the poetry that Riva wrote in Lodz and later in Germany and its importance in buoying her brothers during the difficulties of life in the ghetto and keeping her alive in the camps, literally; in a strange twist, Riva is saved from death by a female Nazi prison commandant who is touched by a public reading of some of Riva's poetry.

non-fiction account, Nechama Tec relates how she and her sister "passed" as Polish Christians during the Holocaust while her parents hid--sometimes in locations far away, sometimes in the same home--in order to save themselves from Nazi tyranny. Tec recounts the relationships developed with the various Polish families who sheltered the family, for money of course, and her personal difficulty understanding how these people could, in essence, put their lives on the line for her while they continued to dislike Jews as a group and were quite vocal in their contempt. Additionally important is the continued prejudice felt by the family after the war when they returned home and tried to take back the factory and home that was rightfully theirs. An excellent counterpart to Anne Frank's diary, the Maus books, and those by Corrie ten Boom in terms of Gentiles helping Jews.

diary, Toll recounts her childhood memories of her time in hiding. The one childhood joy that allowed Toll to hold onto the trusting side of her nature was her love of watercolor painting, and a large collection of these watercolors survived, as did Toll, and present a vivid recollection of the trials and tribulations, fears and joys, sorrows and triumphs of the lost years.