Children’s Books and Adapting as an Immigrant or Temporary Resident

Language, History and Culture in a Bookshelf

As someone with three languages, cultures and histories (Russian, Franco/Belgian and American) by the time I was ten, I noticed, through the books that I had to read or chose to read, that the three languages represented three different environments and approaches to life.

Part of it was due to the fact that I was a weird child. I learned to read on my own starting at three by following my mother’s fingers as she read from Russian fairy tales. By five I was reading a Belgian or French magazine that was perhaps not the perfect road to life as the first article was about the quartering of a man in the eighteenth century. By ten I was reading the standard, at that time, 1956–57, schoolchildren’s introduction to American and world history in the fourth and fifth grades of a Passaic, New Jersey, public school.

Unfortunately, having come to the States as an almost nine-year-old and, having skipped the fourth grade because of my math, I did not benefit from the American schoolbooks of the first through the fourth grade.

Something struck me as a result, not enough to make an impact as I went through high school and, by miracle, made it to an elite women’s college, Mount Holyoke, but enough for a deep encounter with myself when I took a sociology course at the school.

I had noticed that, though I was truly bi-cultural as well as bi-lingual from the Russian/French point, I was not a real American. Yes, it was partly due to my parents and church, for instance a mother who would not let me wear pants, put on make-up and certainly not date, or a church that during confession when I was at college brought up, “You are certainly not behaving like American girls and kissing boys,” (last time I went to confession), but it was also due to food tastes and childhood references.

So, when I had to write a sociology paper, I chose to compare the schoolbooks of first three grades in Russia, Belgium, and the States. That was different in some ways because what I had from the Russian point was a combination of Tsarist time and Soviet books, from Belgium the schoolbooks I had brought over, and from my American hometown of Passaic the books from my local library.

What I immediately noticed was how much we form children by the time they finish the third grade. Of course, there were funny things that were true for all, including a piece in a Soviet grade schoolbook where you had little Lenin brushing his teeth so that children would follow the example. A Belgian history book from the third grade started with the cavemen and women who drew pictures on the rocks, and story on the much beloved Queen Astrid. It was, believe it or not, when I first learned of the tale of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree!

We not only have children learn how to read, write, and count. We teach them about their world, from the rivers, to the animals, to the cities, and the people in them. By teaching them to read words, we show what foods they actually eat, whether it be a cooked cereal, bread with butter with a preserve, or some kind of flakes with milk. We show them how to start navigating from their home to their neighborhood to school and beyond. We point to the different people (parents, teachers, doctors, engineers, pilots, policeman, leaders) in their lives and begin to form the process of having them think what they want to be. We give them examples of how to behave with other people, with animals and with nature.

We highlight some history and the ‘enemies’ they can encounter, explicitly or implicitly, through the celebrations of at least one or two of the defining moments of our past.

Researching and writing about this made me read some Nancy Drew books, of course the early ones, and the Cat in the Hat, so that I could make up at least a bit of what I had not had the opportunity to do as an American child.

Now, what else it did, was incredible. It made me read children’s schoolbooks and tales of the country or the people I met when I was with the United Nations. I remember how the Italian women I worked with in the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome looked at me when I asked them if I could borrow their children’s old schoolbooks. I equally recall their smiles when I spoke Italian almost like one of them within a year and enjoyed their jokes from their point of view. I did the same thing in Cameroon and when I went to Cambodia. How surprised my two assistants were in that last one in 1992 when I referred to a local tale, albeit in French, as I went through the province I had been assigned to.

Now, spending nearly a month close to two Ukrainian young women who are refugees in Switzerland, I realize that they, in spite of living at a time when world communications are instantaneous and where so much is accessible in an internation pool, still do not get many local clues or customs, and in spite of intensive French courses do not catch many simple local daily habits.

Guess what? Yes, I got them a children’s book, one meant for parents to help their children in beginning classes, one for the five/six year olds in kindergarten. It seems perfect for the purpose. The young ladies can progress to the first grade after they finish that one. They certainly will know more about the world they are now living in and how to navigate in its ways.

Thinking about that, I wonder why educators and people who are helping immigrants, migrants, temporary workers and anyone going into a new country with a different language and culture, do not use children’s books to help them adjust to and better appreciate their new permanent or temporary home.