Arthur Dobrin's Love Your Neighbor
Love Your Neighbor: Stories of Values and Virtues
by Arthur Dobrin, illustrated by Jacqueline Rogers
New York: Scholastic, Inc. 1999
ISBN: 0590044109
61 pages.
Looking for a children's book that teaches values with a light hand, not a sledgehammer? A book that entertains as well as instructs? Try Love Your Neighbor, by Arthur Dobrin, with illustrations by Jacqueline Rogers. Dr. Dobrin, a leader in the Ethical Culture movement for over thirty years, is also a poet and a novelist and a fine spinner of tales. In this beautiful book, he offers thirteen original animal stories that teach lessons about friendship and cooperation, honesty and love, respect for individuality, the costs of stubbornness and the idiocy of discrimination. Like all good writers, Dr. Dobrin lets the message emerge from the tale, and he ends each story with a provocative question a parent can ask a child, or a child can ponder alone. Some of the stories contain drama and conflict, but these are resolved in ways that teach good behavior (One of my favorites features two obstinate camels locked in a struggle about who has the right of way at a gate).
Adults who read this book to their children will enjoy the good prose and the vein of humor running through the stories (Two cats go on a shopping spree in Feline's Basement). Ms. Roger's illustration are whimsical and wonderful. Squirrels sport luxurious tails popping out of their pajama bottoms as they do good deeds at night; a giraffe sleeps in a sleeping bag as long and narrow as a dignitary's red carpet; beetloving ostriches learn about a superbeet in an ad for Jack's Colossal Veggies. The fit between story and illustrations is splendid.
A few words about the animals as teaching devices. Every story has a different set of creatures as protagonists. In reading these tales, we not only get a moral lesson, we learn a good deal about animals: bees have six legs, spiders eight, rhinos and ostriches are vegetarians. The animals come from different parts of the world; Russian ostriches are appropriately named, Boris and Natasha; when they figure out a way to harvest their giant beet, they enjoy some borscht. In this way, the animals inform young readers about different cultures, as well as different virtues.
Moreover, in almost every story, Dr. Dobrin gives his animals names before we learn that they are camels or zebras or hippos. Consider this opening: "Rhonda ate all day. She ate under a cloudless sky; she ate when it thundered and poured.... Like all hippos she knew, Rhonda ate with chopsticks." This is not only wonderful writing, it also establishes immediately the personality of the protagonist. Perhaps unconsciously, Dr. Dobrin shows that creatures are more than the categories zoologists put them in. Each has a distinctive name because no two are identical and we are all better for that. This turns out to be the theme of "Shopping Spree" and "Dandelions in the Garden," but the way names are introduced in each story strengthens this message.
Unlike so many books that try to teach virtue, Love Your Neighbor will expand your child or grandchild's moral awareness without putting either adult or youngster through the wringer.
Marc Bernstein's essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Newsday and other papers. He is currently writing a biography of Algernon Black, the civil rights activist and Ethical Culture Leader.
Love Your Neighbor: Stories of Values and Virtues
by Arthur Dobrin, illustrated by Jacqueline Rogers
New York: Scholastic, Inc. 1999
ISBN: 0590044109
61 pages.
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