'The Shepherd’s Granddaughter' Under Attack
By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal,04/28/2010Author, librarian, and teacher Anne Carter’s book, The Shepherd’s Granddaughter (Groundwood, 2008) has won a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award and the student-selected Red Maple Award. It was also chosen as a Book of the Year for children by the Canadian Library Association in 2009.
But Toronto District School Board trustee Sheila Ward is demanding that the book, about Israeli settlers attacking a young Palestinian shepherd girl and her family, be banned from library shelves. B’nai Brith Canada is also calling for its removal from all school reading lists, and the Canadian-based Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies is cautioning against the title.
SLJ spoke to Carter about why her message of hope and peace for the Palestinians is garnering so many protests.
How did you first hear about the protest against the book?
I was informed in February when the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies sent a letter of caution to school boards in Ontario. It was sent quite widely. I was not sent a copy, but I have contacts at schools and libraries, and friends let me know. In the letter they quoted a sentence from a comment on a blog. It was an extremely unfortunate comment, and I felt it was taken out of context a little bit.
Do you think those who object to the book have a point?
The novel was not written in the spirit of demonizing Israelis. I first went to Israel when I was 17, and spent the summer there for about 12 weeks. I honestly had an absolutely wonderful time. I saw Israel only through extremely sympathetic eyes. I had read a lot of Holocaust literature, went back when I was 19, learned Hebrew, was there for the Yom Kippur Wars and saw how extremely difficult it was to be Israeli and constantly being attacked. I was there for a year, I married a young man I met there, and then I came home and made a life here in Toronto.
What prompted you to learn about the Palestinians under occupation?
I suspect after 9/11 I realized that like a lot of people in North America, I did not know much about Islam. I watched the horror of suicide bombing, and again I had been very sympathetic to the Israeli side. I watched on the news what was going on in Israel [with suicide bombers], and I felt that collective punishment was harsh. But we’re not living in our cities with suicide bombings. It is an extremely difficult problem.
Did something click for you?
After 9/11 I became a librarian and had Muslim students and Palestinian students and realized there were no books on the shelves representing their point of view. And I realized that I had lived in Israel for one and a half years, but I had not made friends with Palestinians. And here we were 30 years later, and we had even more fear. I recognized I lacked information.
How did you research your book without knowing any Palestinians,?
Through an international organization, the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), I was invited to teach creative writing in Ramallah. I always like to stay with families. I am not a hotel kind of person, especially if I am trying to understand a people. I knew someone with the Christian Peacemaker Teams who put me in touch with people outside Hebron who spoke a little English. I visited both places, and spent two weeks and thought I might write something. I was terrified there. I‘m not a journalist. I don’t seek out conflict situations to write about.
How did you react to being with Palestinians?
It didn’t take me long. When you go on the other side of the separation wall and live with Palestinians, you see that the occupation is a very hard thing. The people I met didn’t hate Israel and didn’t hate Jews, but they hated the occupation. I met a lot of patient people who believe in democracy and long for peaceful ways to resolve that, and are not giving up and not resorting to violence, and I had not heard that story. You can read in the paper about not being able to get permits, having schools closed, not having any water. But when all these things are accumulating, it’s really hard. I began to see the Palestinians as a very long-suffering patient group.
Did you base the book on a real family?
I lived with a family in Hebron, very rural, and very poor, and their story inspired me. I found it hopeful. And a lot of people are not hopeful about the conflict. And these are people working for peace. It is possible. There are these examples, people reaching out to each other and not getting dragged down by the hatred and violence of the past as neighbors. And that was the spirit. It took me three years to write the book. I was very careful, and I wrote the book as gently as I could.
What do you hope readers take away from the book?
I was writing it for that person in the Jewish community, very defensive about Israel’s right to exist. And of course it should exist and be safe. I just feel that what’s going on with Palestinians and the occupation, that the occupation is a horrible thing. And the settlements have been internationally condemned, and I would like to see them stop. The Jane Addams Children’s Book Award was, to me as a writer, the highlight of my career. It was very meaningful to me. And they read it as a book to build some understanding and moving toward a peaceful solution. It was not written to engender animosity. I know it was naive, but I hoped it would open up some hearts, to understand the conflict after reading it from both sides. I would hope young readers would read this and then go on to read other things, go research and think about it for themselves, and never get one point of view.
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