Grandfather's Journey

Redo because of changes

Summary

Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say is a historical look at a young man’s memory of his grandfathers’ story. Say’s grandfather, from Japan, came to America as a young man. He tells about what he saw and how much he was in awe of America. He needed to get married and so he returned to Japan to collect his bride and then returned to America with her. He raised his family in America before returning once again to Japan never to see America again due to WWII although his grandson (Allen Say) eventually got to America too.

Impression

This book gave me a sense of happiness for the author. I enjoyed the book because it showed how every person wants to have love and a family in their lives. It is a timeless story of immigration to America and the challenges all immigrants face with homesickness and love for their new home. The pictures are very detailed and add a nice element to the story.

Customer Review at Amazon.com

A poignant story of the immigration experience, March 16, 1999

By A Customer

Allen Say's book is a sensitive and poignant story of a Japanese man who came to explore America around the turn of the century. Enraptured by the beauty of the country, he brings his bride to California and proceeds to build his life there. At times, however, he grows wistful for his homeland and longs to return. Finally, the desire to return to his homeland overcomes him and he goes back to the small village where he was born. The years pass, his children grow up and have children, and he begins to long for the beauty of his second home, so he plans a trip. A war erupts, however, and he is never able to revisit the United States. Beautifully illustrated and sensitively told, Grandfather's Journey demonstrates the strong emotions evoked by one man's love for two countries and two cultures. The story also demonstrates that it is possible to love two countries equally well and to discover that as soon as you are in one, you long for the other. The book also presents a refreshing retelling of Japanese-American relations. The book raises an awareness of the immigrant experience in a tone that is both simple and subtle.

From Publishers Weekly

Say transcends the achievements of his Tree of Cranes and A River Dream with this breathtaking picture book, at once a very personal tribute to his grandfather and a distillation of universally shared emotions. Elegantly honed text accompanies large, formally composed paintings to convey Say's family history; the sepia tones and delicately faded colors of the art suggest a much-cherished and carefully preserved family album. A portrait of Say's grandfather opens the book, showing him in traditional Japanese dress, "a young man when he left his home in Japan and went to see the world." Crossing the Pacific on a steamship, he arrives in North America and explores the land by train, by riverboat and on foot. One especially arresting, light-washed painting presents Grandfather in shirtsleeves, vest and tie, holding his suit jacket under his arm as he gazes over a prairie: "The endless farm fields reminded him of the ocean he had crossed." Grandfather discovers that "the more he traveled, the more he longed to see new places," but he nevertheless returns home to marry his childhood sweetheart. He brings her to California, where their daughter is born, but her youth reminds him inexorably of his own, and when she is nearly grown, he takes the family back to Japan. The restlessness endures: the daughter cannot be at home in a Japanese village; he himself cannot forget California. Although war shatters Grandfather's hopes to revisit his second land, years later Say repeats the journey: "I came to love the land my grandfather had loved, and I stayed on and on until I had a daughter of my own." The internal struggle of his grandfather also continues within Say, who writes that he, too, misses the places of his childhood and periodically returns to them. The tranquility of the art and the powerfully controlled prose underscore the profundity of Say's themes, investing the final line with an abiding, aching pathos: "The funny thing is, the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other." Ages 4-8.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Lesson

I would use this as a read aloud to introduce a research project about immigration to/from other countries.