To Breathe Without Choking

Nine-year old Mohammed is facing his first week in a new city and the fourth grade at a new school. He's lonley and his  desire for acceptance is threatened by a classroom bully and the intrusive curiosity of his classmates. As the week unfolds, Mohammed befriends Noah, a Chinese-American boy, and together they figure out their school survival strategies and bond over their unusual lunches, immigrant families, band practice, and love of soccer. Mohammed’s tough and defiant older sister Zaynab, who wears a hijab and is also faced with harassment from other students, is torn by her desire to fit in and be a “normal” American teenager while staying true to her religion. Mohammed reaches a crisis when his fourth-grade class begins a segment on family histories. He finds himself puzzling over the absence of Palestine on the world map. Zaynab, agonizing over the dress code rules for the swim team, is on the brink of taking off her hijab. At home their grandmother, (Sitti) who came to the US from a refugee camp in Bethlehem, notices they are struggling and decides to share her story. Each day after school, through a series of vivid flashbacks told in the first person, she describes living in a peasant village west of Jerusalem in 1943, fleeing as a ten-year-old girl in 1948, and struggling for survival in a refugee camp until she decides to leave to join her oldest son in the United States. As Mohammed develops an understanding of his family, he learns that he is grounded in the US and in Palestine and comes to understand all the gifts he has received from Sitti, the stories, the food, the sense of place and dignity, the love and yearning for the land.