His sister Annie finds his secret stash of 'englische' clothes, a forbidden copy of Treasure Island, and a harmonica. Gideon Stolzfus, 16, chafes under the rigid tenets of his family's local sect, and plans to run away to his uncle's more lenient community. When Isaac Litvak, 12, is injured on an Amish farm, his Jewish peddler father leaves him behind to recuperate with the whispered reminder, 'Remember who you are.' Though kind and well-meaning, the foreign-speaking family's eating habits and religious laws are strange. In this novel set at the turn of the century, two boys'one Orthodox Jew and the other Amish'are brought together by chance. Not one of my most popular books, but one I really enjoyed writing.Grade 6-9. I was fascinated by this story, and of course the research was fun, searching for commonalities of which there were a lot. So he made his way to central Pennsylvania, to Lewistown, and established his practice there. Eventually, Stan's father went to law school, but at that time, many big city law firms didn't hire Jews. They also were deeply religious, although not the same religion. It was a good business relationship, Stan told me, because they had a nearly common language-Yiddish and the German dialect spoken by the Amish. Stan's father, Harry Siegel, went with him.

His grandfather had been driven out of Europe and wound up in Philadelphia, where he became a peddler, traveling to Lancaster County every week with a pack on his back to sell his goods to Amish farmers. So I asked Stan how his father had ended up there, of all places. Lewistown was a very small town with lots of German names, mostly 'Pennsylvania Dutch'-my grandparents' name was Knepp-and only a small handful of Jewish families.

I didn't know Stan very well, and I was curious about him and his family. He suggested that we have lunch, and I agreed. Stanley Siegel had been my mother's lawyer, as his father had been before that. Nevertheless, one day I was wandering along Market Street, looking for anything that looked familiar, when I ran into an old family friend. I no longer had any family there, my parents both long dead, and everything had changed so much over the decades that I could scarcely find my way around. One summer in the 1990's I went back to my home town, Lewistown, Pennsylvania, for a visit.

Gideon's People by Carolyn Meyer