The Journey Back - Softcover

Reiss, Johanna

3.67

414 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0064470423 ISBN 13: 9780064470421

Publisher: Trophy Pr, 1987

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How does it feel to leave the people you've grown to love -- and go back to a family you no longer know?

Holland,1945 -- World War II has finally ended. For thirteen-year-old Annie de Leeuw and her sister Sini, Almost three years of hiding from the Germans in the upstairs room of a remote farmhouse have also ended. Saying good-bye to the courageous family who hid them is very difficult. And Annie finds that being home again isn't easy either. Her mother is dead; her father, distant and distracted. Sini is out dancing with the soldiers every night , trying to make up for lost time, and Annie's oldest sister, Rachel, has become a Christian. Soon Annie has another problem -- getting used to a new stepmother she cannot seem to please. Annie learns that though the fighting is over, some of the wounds of the war still remain. Her old home is gone. Now she must build a new life for herself.

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About the Author:

Johanna Reiss was born and brought up in Holland. After she was graduated from college, she taught elementary school for several years before coming to the United States to live. Her first book for children, The Upstairs Room, was a Newbery Honor Book, an American Library Association Notable Children's Book, and a Jane Addams Peace Association Honor Book, and it won the Jewish Book Council Juvenile Book Award and the Buxtehuder Bulle, a prestigious German children's book award. Mrs. Reiss writes that soon after she had finished Tie Upstairs Room, she found "there was still something I wanted to say, something that was as meaningful to me as the story I had told in the first book, the story of a war. `The fighting has stopped'; `Peace treaty signed,' newspapers announce at the conclusion of every war. From a political point of view, the war is over, but in another sense it has not really ended. People are fragile. They are strong, too, but wars leave emotional scars that take a long time to heal, generations perhaps. I know this to be true of myself, and of others. And out of those feelings came The Journey Back, a story of the aftermath of the Second World War." Though Mrs. Reiss lives with her daughters in New York City, they make frequent visits to Holland to visit Mrs. Reiss's sisters, Rachel and Sini, and Johan and Dientje Oosterveld.

From School Library Journal:

Grades 6-10--Johanna Reiss' moving sequel (HarperCollins, pap. 1987) to The Upstairs Room (HarperCollins, 1972) is a vivid testimony to all whose lives were changed forever by World War II. Narrated by the author, this compelling story of a Jewish family struggling to reunite after three years of separation and hiding from the Nazis becomes a very personal account of a young girl's coming of age in war torn Holland. This simple dramatization is poignant and heartwarming as Annie de Leeuw and her older sister, Sini, bid farewell to the kind family who hid them. Now it is time to pick up the pieces of their former life as they rejoin their father and another older sister. But their widowed father is remarried and their sister Rachel has become a devout Christian. Once again, life has turned upside down for Annie as she makes her own journey back. This is a superb performance and an essential purchase for all libraries.
Celeste Steward, Contra Costa County Library, Clayton, CA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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