When you were a kid, did books make you "uncomfortable" & "ashamed" of your whiteness?

[Hekate]

48. I want to thank you all for your replies. Please keep on. I was halfway through a longer response...

… when something fratzed and I lost it all. So, after making dinner and everything else, I will try again.

These days of book-bannings and brainwashing in schools are hellish for me, and being at DU among the like-minded is a help.

For the moment, suffice it to say I am a reader from a family of readers. I have mentioned before that we devoured sci-fi, but in fact we devoured everything. What grade level is The Last of the Just, by Andre Schwartz-Bart? The Wall, about the Warsaw Ghetto, by John Hersey? I have no idea, but they were in the house and I read them.

We are Irish-American, not Jewish. But when my mother was in high school in Colorado, a refugee Jewish boy ended up in her school. Not sure what year it was, but I’d say late 1930s. Mom never got over the horror she felt when he told her about great piles of books in the street of his former hometown, being set on fire. She transmitted that horror to me. I feel it now.