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Thursday, December 26, 2019

What Would Joe Do? A Fist for Joe Louis and Me by Trinka Hakes Noble

Every Friday, after he came home from working at the auto plant, my father gave me a boxing lesson.

"Fists up, Gordy." he'd say.

Detroit made two things: great boxers and great cars. But when the Great Depression came, people stopped buying cars. Times got hard in Detroit. But we still had Joe Louis in our corner.

But Gordy's father loses his job and his mother has to take a job sewing for the new neighborhood tailor, Mr. Rubenstein. Ira Rubenstein is in Gordy's class, and Gordy know they had fled the Nazis to come to the United States, but he doesn't really know Ira.

When one day at recess he asks Ira what he likes to do, Ira shyly says he likes boxing. He says that he and his father always listen to the Friday Night Fights on the radio, and the two boys get together after school to practice their Joe Lewis boxing moves. The two new friends nickname themselves "Iron Ira" and "Gordy Steel."

And soon their hero, Joe Louis, the guy from Detroit, wins his World Championship fight over the boxer Max Schmelling from Nazi Germany.
Then one day at recess, Nicky Benkovski starts picking on Ira. At first Ira ignores him. But Nicky suddenly shoves Ira. Then it happened. Ira gets up ...
and puts up his dukes!

And Gordy knows what he has to do.
"I knew Joe Louis wouldn't let Ira go it alone."

Besting the school bully provides the action for Trinka Hakes Noble's latest A Fist for Joe Louis and Me (Tales of Young Americans) (Sleeping Bear Press, 2019), but there's more to this story than standing up to the classroom bully. The two boys combine forces and the lessons in boxing learned from their idol to protect each other and the other kids in the school because it is the right thing to do, in this latest title in the Tales of Young Americans series, which deals with the the issues of the 1930s-urban and international migration, the Great Depression, and the days before World War II. Artist Nicole Tadgell's perceptive ink and watercolor paintings add to this powerful storytelling of a focal point in American history.

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