Dear Miss Breed
by Joanne Oppenheim
Published by Scholastic
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Reviewed by Yuka Mizushima
After Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 Americans of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) were considered high security risks and were publicly labeled the enemy. FBI agents quickly imprisoned dozens of Issei (first-generation Japanese Americans). In a few months, the remaining Issei and Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) were sent to relocation camps. They could only bring what they could carry and were given one week to store, sell or abandon their possession. Valuables were sold for a fraction of their value.
Dear Miss Breed is a tribute to Clara Breed, the children's librarian at the San Diego Public Library. When Breed learned that the Japanese-American families were going to be interned, she worried about what would happen to the children and teens. She went to the railway station to say good-bye and gave each a postcard addressed to her, urging them write to her. This gave them a way to stay connected with the outside world. Breed sent back letters, books and gifts and provided them hope and faith during their incarceration.
Oppenheim wrote Dear Miss Breed when she looked online for a childhood Japanese-American friend and learned her friend had been interned--and how Miss Breed was a lifeline during the war years. Oppenheim uses personal letters, political cartoons and recent oral histories to tell about life in the Santa Ana and Poston internment camps. The conditions were pretty horrible: communal showers and toilets that offered little privacy; being surrounded by barbed wire and being watched by armed soldiers in a guard tower. They remember long lines for laundry; the bland communal meals; and the racism and hatred that the Nisei encountered when they temporarily left the camps to work.
My own grandparents were sent to a relocation camp and still do not talk about those events. A passage from the book explains why: "The pain, trauma, stress of the incarceration experience was so overwhelming we used the psychological defense mechanism of repression, denial, and rationalization to keep us from facing the truth...that America was being racist and unfair.... On the surface we do not look like former concentration camp victims, but we are still vulnerable. Our scars are permanent and deep." (p.224)
Armchair Interviews says: This book what that life was like and how Clara Breed fought injustice through acts of kindness--and what terrible things can happen when fear and racism dictate laws.