Old Enough to Know
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.
2024 Arab American Book Award Winner
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This is where Mohammed's grandmother was born and where she ended up.
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Alice Rothchild writes with deepest care and humanity, bringing the lives of children and Palestinian people into clear, delightful, honest focus. This engaging novel links generations with the verve and hope that has helped Palestinians - the "unchosen Semites" as a Jewish friend recently called us - survive so many hard, unfair times for so many years. We need more stories like this to balance the long injustices of tediously unbalanced reporting. It's a healing, joyous book of growth, and understanding.
Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Habibi, Sitti’s Secrets, and The Turtle of Oman
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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, author of The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, and Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five
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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, author of Stranger in My Own Land
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Old Enough to Know is a wonderful, heartbreaking and inspirational journey into the lives of a quirky 9-year-old American boy, Mohammed, and his Palestinian family who have just moved to a new home. As he learns to adjust to life in a smaller town, he begins to learn of his family’s history in Palestine through his grandmother’s stories. Through these stories, Alice Rothchild touches on so many of the tribulations that the Palestinian people face and have faced since 1948 (the loss of land and loved ones, oppression, the cycle of violence inside and outside the home, collective punishment, child imprisonment and other injustices). Rothchild provides us with relief from these tragic stories with humor and the strong vivid characters in Mohammed’s life making this painful topic accessible to younger readers. This is a much needed story for young adults, parents and teachers alike.
Laila Taji, Founder of ArabishWay
Author of These Chicks and My Grandfather Has a Donkey -
Alice Rothchild’s first middle grade book, Old Enough to Know, is a tour de force, embedding a sweeping view of Palestinian history in a story of recent immigrant children learning to live in America. Middle graders, parents, and middle school teachers will find much here to fire their imaginations. This book is a page turner in its own right, quite apart from its pedagogical values. And it will also help parents and middle schoolers to begin conversations about the topics most important to kids transitioning from childhood to tentative self-definitions: how to be compassionate toward self and others, how to define themselves within the often too rich and too complicated array of options offered to teenagers, how to be interested in the culture and lore, the smells, sounds, tastes of other cultures without caricaturing people into an “exotic other,” how to love nature and your grandparents’ food while being enthralled with a new bicycle or a new computer. A must-read for all Middle Grade collections and schools, and also a compelling story for adults old and young to read.
Eve Spangler is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston College, the author of Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict, a long-term member of Jewish Voices for Peace, and a member of the Advisory Panel of Experts for the United Nations’ Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Including East Jerusalem, and Israel.