To Breathe Without Choking

Being the new kid is always hard, but try starting the year with a name like Mohammed Omar Mohammed Abu Srour, with a homemade lunch of humus and za’atar. On top of that, on the very first day of school, a kid tells his older hijab-wearing sister to “go back where you came from.” Mohammed and his sister love their grandmother, but she thinks her stories about life in Palestine will help them with their problems. What does Grandmother’s ancient history have to do with classroom bullies?  She never learned to read and Mohammed can’t even find Palestine on a map. Feels like fourth grade’s going to last forever.

Nine-year old Mohammed is facing his first week in a new city and the fourth grade at a new school. He's lonely 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.

Alice Rothchild is a physician, author, and filmmaker who loves storytelling that pushes boundaries and engages us in unexpected conversations. She practiced ob-gyn for almost 40 years and served as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Harvard Medical School. She writes and lectures widely, is the author of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience (translated into German and Hebrew); On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion; and Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine and she has contributed to a number of anthologies and poetry journals. Her Young Adult book, Finding Melody Sullivan, was published in 2023. She directed a documentary film, Voices Across the Divide and is a mentor for We Are Not Numbers, a program that supports young writers in Gaza. She received Boston Magazine’s Best of Boston’s Women Doctors Award, was named in Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, had her portrait painted for Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth, and was named a Peace Pioneer by the American Jewish Peace Archive.

When she is not making good trouble, she loves hiking in the Pacific Northwest, playing with her grandchildren, tending to her boisterous garden, and stretching the boundaries of her cooking.