SUMMER READING ASSIGNMENT  2009

 

Complete both assignments below, each on a separate sheet of paper with your correct heading. Save it on your computer and then print it out to be handed in to me in class on Tuesday, 25 August.

 

The Glory Field  by Walter Dean Myers

 

In this novel, Myers tells the saga of the Lewis family from the 1700s to the present day. Their experiences represent milestones in African-American history. The family's founder, Muhammad Bilal, is captured, shackled, and transported from Africa to America aboard a slave ship. His noble spirit and love of freedom inspire his descendants, who triumph over the evils of slavery, injustice, poverty, and prejudice. Each generation of the Lewis family derives strength of spirit from love of family and from the Glory Field—a plot of land in South Carolina hallowed by the blood and toil of ancestors.

 

Write a one page diary entry written by Muhammad Bilal relating a fictional occurrence of your choice he experienced on the slave ship which showed how hatred motivated his captors to        cruelty.

 

In My Hands: Memoirs of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke

When the Nazi army invades Poland in 1939, Irene Gut is a seventeen-year-old student nurse. She is studious, young, and pretty, a good Catholic girl and close to her loving parents and three younger sisters--her life thus far is as remote as possible from the horrors of war. Yet, despite her youth, she is also fiercely loyal to her beautiful Poland and committed in her soul to helping others. So it is without hesitation that she volunteers to join the Polish army in its fight against the Germans. When the Polish army surrenders, Irene is exiled with other soldiers to the Lithuanian forest (now part of Russia) and roams from town to town bartering for supplies. On one such bartering mission she is raped, beaten, and left for dead by Russian soldiers. But Irene survives. She endures internment in a Russian hospital and exile in Kiev and is able to return to German-occupied Poland to be reunited briefly with her family. This period of happiness is short-lived: she is assigned to work for Major Eduard Rügemer of the German army, who is responsible for an ammunitions factory compound. Irene serves meals to Nazi soldiers and supervises the Jewish workers in the laundry. She begins to take actions to help the Jews suffering in the ghetto just beyond the compound's walls. And, ultimately, her relatively comfortable position and favored relationship with the major give her the opportunity to save the Jews who work in the laundry--her friends--from extermination by the Nazis. At every turn Irene is faced with another impossible challenge, another degradation, more evil. Each time, instead of breaking, she becomes braver and more resolute in her determination to fight for her friends, for her country, for what is right.

Choose an example from the novel which exemplifies Irene’s humanity to her fellow man, explain it fully and tell why you choose this particular example in one paragraph.