The Boy from Over There

AGE: 9-13

The hero of this story is a boy called Avramik, who has spent World War II hiding in a European village with his sick mother. When the Allies liberate Europe, his mother is taken to hospital, and although she never returns, Avramik cannot accept that she`s dead.
The book opens with Avramik`s first day at the kibbutz to which his uncle has brought him. The boy from "over there" slowly integrates into kibbutz life, but he stubbornly guards his secret - his belief that his mother will come back one day. The only person he is close to is Rina, whose father died serving in the Jewish Brigade in Italy and who, like Avramik, cannot accept his death. When the War of Independence starts in 1948, the kibbutz is shelled and all the children have to be evacuated under heavy fire. At the end of the dangerous journey, Avramik finds an answer to the question that has haunted him.
 

Chosen as Best Children`s Book by the University of Haifa`s Center for Juvenile Literature. 
Winner of the 1984 Bernstein Prize as Best Children`s Book of the Year. 

A rewarding, consistently entertaining, multilayered book of emotions and ideas, one in which the underlying wealth of metaphor is never overstated.
New York Times Book Review