A Sky Full of Song

A Sky Full of Song explores a lesser-known Jewish immigration experience in an introspective, compassionate story set in the North Dakota prairie in 1905. Susan Lynn Meyer (Black Radishes) positions the power of family identity against the allure of assimilation for a child who misses home but finds much to love about the new "big and lonesome" land.

Shoshi Rozumny, her sisters, and her mother flee escalating antisemitism in Liubashevka, Ukraine, and join her father and older brother, Anshel, in the United States. In "Nordakota," the Rozumny family joins homesteaders who have claimed free land--available "even for Jews"--and are working to "prove it up." School offers 11-year-old Shoshi an opportunity to make friends, but "trying to be like the others didn't keep the kids at school from thinking that [she] was different." Shoshi and sister Libke, 14, are repeatedly othered and verbally harassed for being Jewish; Shoshi is physically assaulted. Learning to play her father's fiddle offers Shoshi an escape, and a harrowing incident during a whiteout storm teaches Shoshi that Judaism is both part of her proud past and important to her new beginning.

Meyer's contemplative first-person narration allows readers to share Shoshi's newcomer experience. Yiddish peppers the family's dialogue, and the suggestion is that the Rozumnys exclusively speak the language at home. A note references the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Dakota people displaced by it; references to Native Americans in the text offer an empathetic, modern perspective. A Sky Full of Song is a thoughtful piece of middle-grade historical fiction featuring a sympathetic protagonist. --Kit Ballenger, youth librarian, Help Your Shelf

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