Flying Lessons

Living in a village in Israel where her father grows oranges, a motherless girl befriends a sensitive shoemaker from Djerba from whom she hopes to learn how to fly

Grade 6-8?In an Israeli village where there is only one of everything except citrus growers, 12-year-old Hadara practices so that she can be the only girl there who can fly. Her dreams are nurtured by the lone shoemaker, a Holocaust survivor who uses the metaphor of flying to help the girl deal with her mother's death?"She was the one and only dead mother in the village." When Hadara literally tries to fly, she breaks her leg and is helped by a schoolmate, who cherishes his own dream of grafting new strains of citrus. The plot is minimal but the feeling of triumph over despair is lovingly conveyed with small details that capture the characters and sustain the mood. Hadara knows that the shoemaker from Djerba has shared with her a secret that will be a lifelong guide?"to fly with both feet on the ground." A haunting piece for special readers.?Amy Kellman, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Israeli author of Becoming Gershona weaves dreamlike images and innocent profundity into a coming-of-age tale of great power. In a remote part of Israel, Hadara, the 12-year-old daughter of the "one and only dead mother in the village," decides to learn to fly. While her father works in his citrus grove, Hadara visits Monsieur Maurice Havivel, the village's "one and only" shoemaker. After inflaming Hadara's imagination with tales of the magical circus of flying Jews he once belonged to, Monsieur Maurice agrees to help her learn to fly. No matter how much she practices, however, he tells her that she is not yet ready. But as drought threatens the citrus groves and with them the welfare of the village, Hadara thinks, "If I could fly, I would tie all the clouds to a string and pull them back down with me." Her maiden flight, from her father's tallest tree, culminates in a broken leg?and in the life-giving rain?but a saddened Monsieur Maurice tells her, "You weren't scared enough to fly for real." Only after Hadara recovers and Monsieur Maurice goes away is his past revealed?although readers knowledgeable about the Holocaust will have intuited much of it already. Sensitive translation preserves the lyricism of Semel's deeply moving work. Ages 10-up.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 7^-10. There's too much metaphor and too little story in this coming-of-age novel set in an Israeli village in the 1950s. Lonely and motherless, 12-year-old Hadara dreams of flying. The shoemaker next door, Monsieur Maurice, says he was once in a circus, and he encourages her to fly. She tries one day and breaks her leg, but eventually she learns to fly "with both feet on the ground." It turns out that Monsieur Maurice was not in a circus but in a concentration camp, where he fixed shoes for the Germans. There are echoes here of Hamilton's exquisite story The People Could Fly, about slaves who flew away to freedom, but Semel's magic realism doesn't really work. The Holocaust revelation comes right at the end--some of it only in the final historical note--and most kids won't get the elliptical images in the story. In contrast to the understatement, there's a crudely overwritten "comic" character, a village scold who'll do anything to get a husband. Halkin's translation from the Hebrew is clear and lyrical, and what comes across best is the sense of daily life among the Israeli citrus growers: their petty rivalry, their friendship, and their dreams. Hazel Rochman