Stories of Little and Big Blossoms : Elham und die neue Schule- Elham and Her New School / Shirin Azari

Stories of Little and Big Blossoms is about emotional ordeals like being a stranger in a strange land or losing a loved one, told from the perspective of children. Elham, for instance, a little girl from Iran, has to start over again in Germany, where everything – starting with the streets, buildings and playgrounds of her new city – is alien to her. And at school she feels insecure and excluded, and has a hard time making friends. Shirin Azari processes her own childhood experiences in these stories. One night in 1996, her family had to flee Iran – there wasn’t even time to say goodbye to relatives and friends. Over the years that followed, she attended no fewer than eleven different schools in Germany and suffered from never staying in one place for very long. Azari’s own story is the message she seeks to put across, for she learned her lesson the hard way: to struggle, to assert herself and never to give up. The tribulations of Elham, Jonathan, Aylin and her other hapless protagonists, illustrated with Azari’s delicate, poetic drawings, reflect her own uprooted childhood and youth, and the need for the most innocent victims of all, namely the children, to be courageous, assertive and open-minded.

German; English