About this item
The girl is forbidden from making a sound, so the yellow bird sings. He sings whatever the girl composes in her head: high-pitched trills of piccolo; low-throated growls of contrabassoon. The bird chirps all the musical parts save percussion, because the barn rabbits obligingly thump their back feet like bass drums, like snares.Music helps the flowers bloom. When the daisies grow abundant, the bird weaves a garland for the girl to wear on her head like a princess -- though no one can see. She must hide from everyone in the village: soldiers, the farmhouse boys, the neighbors too. The lady with squinty eyes and blocky shoes just dragged a boy down the street and returned, proud and straight-backed, cradling a sack of sugar like a baby. -- The Yellow Bird SingsWhat would happen if your five-year-old child was a musical prodigy who could hear symphonies in her head What if you had to keep her silent and hidden for months during wartime in German-occupied Poland After all of the Jews in their town are rounded up and killed during WWII, Rza and her daughter, Shira, find themselves hiding in a farmer's barn. Shira has difficulty staying still and quiet, as music pulses inside her. To pass the time, Rza tells Shira a story: There is a little girl who, with the help of her yellow bird, tends an enchanted garden. The garden must be kept silent -- only the bird can sing the girl's musical compositions -- and together the girl and her bird avert many threats. Thus Rza manages to soothe Shira and shield her from the horrors around them. But then the day comes when their haven is no longer safe and Rza must face an impossible choice: whether to keep Shira by her side, or give her the chance to survive apart.The Yellow Bird Sings is a powerful, beautiful, heartrending novel about the unbreakable bond between a mother and a daughter, and the triumph of hope and beauty even in the darkest of circumstances.
About the Author
THE YELLOW BIRD SINGS is Jennifer Rosner's debut novel, translated and published around the world. It tells the story of a Jewish mother and her young daughter, a musical prodigy, in hiding during WWII. Jennifer's previously published memoir, IF A TREE FALLS, is about raising her deaf daughters in a hearing, speaking world, and discovering genetic deafness in her family dating back to the 1800s. Her short writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Massachusetts Review, The Forward, and elsewhere, and her children's book, THE MITTEN STRING, was named a Sydney Taylor Book Award Notable. In addition to writing, Jennifer teaches philosophy. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Currently, she teaches the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a college-level course for women living in economic distress. She lives in western Massachusetts with her family.
