Hannah Moushabeck‘s debut picture book “Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine” opens with a tenderly familiar scene: three sisters wait for their father to get home from work so he can tell them a bedtime story. In their shared childhood bedroom in Brooklyn, snug in their pjs, the three sisters listen to their father’s stories of his own childhood, back when he could visit his grandparents in the Old City of Jerusalem in Palestine. On this particular night, he tells them of the last day he saw his grandfather, Sido Abu Michel, who was the head of his neighborhood community in East Jerusalem, called al-Mukhtar, and who owned a café where “[p]oets, musicians, historians, and storytellers gathered to listen to the exchange of ideas.” After a delicious breakfast of fresh ka’ek pulled up by his grandmother, Teta Maria, through the window from a vendor below and after walking through the colorful and lively multicultural streets, past vendors selling “everything from olive oil soap with rose water and heaping bags of za’atar to gold jewelry and embroidered textiles,” Michel and his grandfather arrived at the café, but that wasn’t the end of their journey. Sido then led Michel into a vibrant garden behind the café, home to hundreds of homing pigeons, and “with the help of only a black piece of cloth tied to the end of a long stick,” Sido and the pigeons performed a marvelous spiraling routine, a great circle of birds filling up the sky. Continue reading “Debut Picture Books We Love: Homeland by Hannah Moushabeck ”