Reviews
“Part parable and part memoir, this powerful meditation on language and memory, teachers and students, has a mysterious and magical force to it. It’s a beautiful gift from Robert Radin to his students, and to us, his fortunate readers.”—James E. Young, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst, author of The Stages of Memory, At Memory’s Edge, and The Texture of Memory
“Robert Radin’s book Teaching English to Refugees is a major achievement. This compassionate memoir explores the author’s engagement, as a friend and a teacher, with students who seek to find their places in a foreign world. Rather than teach language in the standard ways, Radin takes a different approach, one that imitates the process by which young children first learn. An impressive and stirring story.”—Merrill Joan Gerber, Professor of Creative Writing, California Institute of Technology, author of Glimmering Girls and The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn
“Robert Radin’s Teaching English to Refugees is brilliant, poignant, and profound. A master storyteller, Radin offers powerful portraits of his adult students, thoughtful commentary on language acquisition, and vivid personal narratives. Teaching English to Refugees is superb creative nonfiction at its best.”—Miriam Kotzin, Professor of English, Drexel University, author of Reclaiming the Dead
"Radin, who lives in Western Mass and is the director of citizenship and immigration services at social service agency, writes of teaching adult learners from Iraq, Eritrea, Bhutan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, people who have fled violence and upheaval to make new lives in the U.S. His lessons, on kitchen tools, laundry, driving, serve as scaffolding for exploring larger questions of language and meaning. “Words are tools, not the indications of the ultimate nature of reality.” We are introduced to his students, their specific triumphs and hardships, their moments of joy and fear, and he writes with candor of his own Jewish upbringing and gestures with grace and specificity at painful moments and memories in his own history. The book braids philosophic inquiry and intimate personal narrative examining what it means to teach, to learn, to speak, to read, the power language, and its limits.“—Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe, 25.03.2021