Book Review

Book Review

Refugee High By Elly Fishman

Review by Jim Vail

As a teacher and writer, I can count on my hand the number of books written about the Chicago Public Schools that would be worth reading for teachers who are in the trenches battling it out day after day.

My book of baptism was Greg Mitchie’s Holler if You Hear Me, his day by day account of teaching middle school in the Back of the Yards as a social studies teacher. The book was both inspirational, heart breaking and very realistic. He was a teacher who described exactly what we teachers go through every day trying to manage our classrooms and deal with the undaunting realities that face our students.

A new book has been published about Sullivan High School in Rogers Park that focuses on the lives of refugee students called Refugee High. The writer Elly Fishman has written a riveting account of several students who hailed from Syria, Iraq, Burma, Guatemala and the Congo posing as a fly on the wall. She was able to tail her students and record their lives not only in the classrooms, but in their homes and other places they frequent with their friends and relatives to paint the whole picture of their lives that many of us teachers wonder about as we try to teach and reach them in the classroom.

Her book was similar to two other fascinating accounts where the writer or journalist goes ‘undercover’ and lives with their subjects: 

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond - is a fascinating and heart-rending story about how the people are desperating trying to avoid the inevitable evictions that come with not paying the rent in Milwaukee. Desmond lived with these people so he could write an in-depth account of their plight. I believe Core had a study group that focused on this book to help shape the Chicago Teachers Union strategy to advocate for affordable housing. The other book - Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, where she too lived among the minimum wage workers trying desperately to get by on very little in the cruel industries of Wal-Mart and fast food.

These types of books where the writer lives with their subjects have both pros and cons. The pro is you read a riveting account of what these peoples’ lives are really like. The con is that the writer can easily slip away back into his or her comfortable middle class lifestyle and move on, leaving behind a very troubling account of a lifestyle we can read and gawk about, but do very little else. How much can they actually understand their subject if they are not really who they pretended to be in order to write about them? 

So I wondered who Elly Fishman was before I saw all the wonderful reviews about her book. She is not a teacher, she is a writer. She wrote for Chicago Magazine and she first wrote about Sullivan’s refugee students in a magazine article. She said she wanted to write a book about their lives when she showed up to the protest at O’Hare International Airport after President Trump had banned people from certain Muslim countries from entering the U.S.

When it comes to writing about the violence that the students face everyday, nobody knew more than George Schmidt who edited Substance News for years before he died. He would write and speak about how much gangs permeated the schools and even controlled some buildings, which he said you could tell by the amount of graffiti on the walls. Fishman also documented the gang violence at Sullivan High School. The refugee students from Africa got caught up in a confrontation with gangbangers for the simple fact that they did not know how to navigate the tricky world of Chicago teenage violence. If they are not street smart enough to quickly leave school and have family protection to escort them home quickly, then the gangs ever on the lookout for new recruits pounce. One boy from the Congo was shot and the family did what families from other countries have done - they left the city. I remember my sweet immigrant student Alfonso, who learned English and loved to smile, but was later mimicking the gangbangers’ dress and behavior. His mother moved back to Mexico which probably saved his life. His buddy and one of my favorite students, Williams, was not so lucky after he was shot and killed his first year at Farragut High School. His mother was too busy playing five-card draw at the casinos every night to do something about his chronic absences from school.

“In recent years, Rogers Park, like much of the city, has turned into a complicated mix of block-level gang territories run by young men who have splintered off from the long-standing ‘super’ gangs such as Gangster Disciples and Vice Lords.”

“According to a neighborhood gang map, Esengo’s (the Congo boy who was shot) path home crossed through three different gang territories: the blocks surrounding Sullivan High School are claimed by PBG, or the Pooh Bear Gang, a set of Gangster Disciple members named for the 15-year-old rapper Pooh Bear who was murdered in Rogers Park in January 2012. On Ashland, Esengo crossed through a several-block radius where Ashland Vikings, a mostly Puerto Rican gang, runs its operation. Closest to Esengo’s apartment building is an area known as “the jungle,” a large swath of blocks run by Loyalty Over Cash, or Loc City, another offshoot of Gangster Disciples, locked in a nine-year war with PBG.”

When I first started working at California and Cermak, one veteran teacher would tell me about the four different gangs that controlled each corner. Any teacher who has taught long enough in Chicago's public schools has attended student funerals. 

The other alarming picture Fishman paints in her book centers around her female Muslim students. One wanted to commit suicide because her parents wanted to sell her off to an older man to get married and have a family at the tender age of 15. It happened to her older sister, who once loved school. The pressures of the old way of life where women are treated as property continues even in this country.

“Shahina explains that she needs a job to pay back the man she was supposed to marry last year. Sarah’s heart sinks, but she doesn’t show it. Almost exactly one year ago, Shahina tells Sarah, her mother and stepfather sent her to Atlanta, Georgia, to marry a man named Hamid, almost ten years her senior. When Shahina made it clear she had no intention of marrying him, the wedding was called off. Now, she explains, she has to help pay back the $2,000 Hamid’s family paid her mother as an engagement gift.”

Girls continue to be bought and sold right here in a Chicago Public School. This practice of selling off women is common throughout the world, and not only in Muslim countries. My Greek mother told me when we visited her village across the Aegean Sea that there was a reason why the mothers would walk side by side with their daughters in the town at night as people sat outdoors in cafes overlooking the moonlit sea. She said they were showing off their daughters to future male suitors. My mother said her parents wanted the same for her, but she fell in love American-style and married an Irishman.

I highly recommend this moving, riveting and suspenseful novel about Sullivan High School and the intimate lives of its refugee students. Their stories are the stories of all our immigrant students and first generation kids who are desperately trying to make a better life in a rough city where danger lurks not only on every corner, but even in their homes.