The Bat-Chen Diaries by Bat-chen Shahak

Shahak, B. (2008). The Bat-Chen Diaries (p. 110). Kar-Ben Publishing.

ISBN: 0822588072

Price : $16.95 library binding

Reader's Annotation: Selected writings, diaries and letters of Bat Chen Shehak, who was killed in 1996, on her 15th birthday, in a terrorist bombing.

Summary: In the same way the diaries of Anne Frank and Zlata Filipovic have illustrated the day to day lives of tweens during the Holocaust and Bosnia, the Bat-Chen diaries paint a picture of life growing up in modern day Israel. Bat-Chen began to keep a diary when she was in the fifth grade, and she wrote frequent letters and poems. Collections of her writing have been published in Arabic, Japanese, Italian, Dutch and German. Her familiar concerns, friends, school, siblings, first romances are set against a backdrop of war and an enduring hope for peace.

Genre: book, nonfiction, war, identity, friends, coming of age, siblings, family

Series : This book is not part of a series.

Evaluation: This collection of journal entries, letters, and poems is all the more touching for the places in which it is sometimes overly dramatic or simplistic. It looks like the diaries we all wrote when we were tweens, and that is what makes it so powerful.

Why it belongs in a Tween Collection: First person accounts make history and current events real to readers. Tweens will identifiy with Bat-Chen, who fights with her siblings and hates homework even while she's contemplating living in a country at war. Bat-Chen will make Middle East politics real for tweens.

Readalikes :

• The Diary of Anne Frank
• Zlata's Diary by Zlata Filipovic
  

Other Useful Info:

• YouTube intro to the book
  

Reviews:

School Library Journal Review

he Bat-Chen Diaries released in February, 2008, nearly slipped beneath my notice. Perhaps because I love bats or the Chen portion may have caught my eye. Whatever reason, I'm glad that I read this title from Kar-Ben Publishing.

I know The Bat-chen Diaries have been published in other languages (Hebrew, Japanese, Arabic, Italian, Dutch, and German) and this is the first English translation of her work. There is a free teaching guide that can be downloaded from the publisher.

In March 1996, Bat-Chen Shahak was killed by a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv's Dizengoff Center. It was Purim, and it was her 15th birthday. Interestingly she had written a condolence poem to widow Leah Rabin after the assassination of her husband Israel's Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin in November, 1995. After Bat-Chen's death her family gathered together pieces of her writings in notebooks, diaries, letters, and drawings to produce this tribute to Bat-Chen's life and desire for peace.

Knowing the main character's fate and that there is no happy ending can make reading war diaries by children very difficult. Even reading grown-up accounts of tragedies is difficult to accept.