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Dreams of the Golden Country: The Diary of Zipporah Feldman, a Jewish Immigrant Girl
Kathryn Lasky
Historical Fiction (Series)
Ages 12 and up
Scholastic, 1998, 0-590-02973-8
When Zipporah, or Zippy, arrives in New York City she gets a tremendous shock. This is not a place where the streets are paved with gold. Far from it. Her family lives in a small tenement apartment and their means are so meagre that they have to have a boarder to help pay for the place. Zippy's father has changed since they last saw him back in their village in Russia. He has done away with the sidelocks that are a symbol of his faith and his wife is shocked at this development. How many other aspects of their Jewishness are they going to have to give up in this new country?
For Zippy there is much to learn, especially when she goes to school and finds herself placed in the first grade classroom because her English is so poor. It is a humiliating situation and Zippy is determined to get herself into the class with the other twelve-year-olds as fast as she can. She even begins to write some of the entries in her diary in English.
Life in "the Golden Country" is much more complicated than Zippy ever imagined it would be. She and her family struggle to hold onto their Jewishness and yet at the same time become a part of this country that they have joined. On the one hand they cling to their old traditions and ways of thinking and yet on the other they want to embrace what is new as well.
When Zippy's sister Miriam falls in love with and marries an Irishman, a goy, the family is turned upside down and Miriam is practically disowned. Zippy is miserable and wishes so much that there was a way to bridge the gulf between her parents and her sister.
Zippy's often funny, honest little voice takes us back to the turn of the century, to a time when the great "melting pot" was filling up with people from all over the world. We can see how much she changes as more and more of the entries in her diary are in English and as she finds ways to help her mother and her father adjust to life in "the Golden Country." Kathryn Lasky tells a moving and uplifting story which beautifully shows us how hard life must have been for some of America's immigrants.
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