These include Shapur II, who was formally crowned king of Persia before he was born, Indian dancer/professional architect Sheila Sri Prakash, transgender spokesperson Jazz Jennings, inventor Param Jaggi, and an international host of other teen or preteen activists and prodigies. Why should grown-ups get all the historical, scientific, athletic, cinematic, and artistic glory?Ĭhoosing exemplars from both past and present, Mitchell includes but goes well beyond Alexander the Great, Anne Frank, and like usual suspects to introduce a host of lesser-known luminaries. A fine addition to the many other remembrances of the period.

Drucker enlivens her straightforward narrative with reconstructed conversations she makes the horrors (what was happening in Germany and her troubles in England, in many ways like those of present-day foster care) clear without dwelling on them. Eventually, after leaving school at 16, ``Ollie'' was happier as a live-in nursemaid for a warmhearted family until she could join her parents, after the war, in New York. Her hosts were various: she moved from a miserable first accommodation, where she picked up lice, to the home of wealthy family friends, who never quite made her feel welcome a fairly satisfactory boarding school, closed for lack of students, was followed by a stay with a dogmatically Christian couple.

Beginning in 1932 with a vignette of her family of four and their servants moving into the fine Stuttgart house her father (a children's book publisher) built for his family, Drucker briefly reviews the mounting restrictions of the prewar years on her family before focusing on the six years after her escape, in 1939, as one of 10,000 children shipped to Britain. An autobiographical account-compelling in its authentic details-of the author's WW II years as a Jewish refugee in England.

Olga levy drucker