In School: Learning in Four Languages

by Esther Hautzig, Nonny Hogrogian (Illustrator)

A text in English describes going to school, with vocabulary words given in four languages including English, French, Russian and Spanish with pronunciations. Includes the Russian alphabet.

At Home, In the Park, In School -- the child's world around the world is virtually completed by this volume. Again the key words are given in English, French, Spanish and Russian (with additional terms and a Russian alphabet at the back) while the text and pictures record a typical school day. But what is typical is hardly characteristic of ""San Francisco or San Sebastian, Cherbourg or Odessa"" and the UNifying moral is put forth at the expense of a geography lesson. (Although some indications of provenance creep into the pictures -- as per the different desks and hair-dos -- by and large they're dis-located.) Nonny Hogrogian's little figures are always active and attractive -- nor more so than when they're illustrating eight popular first names that the four languages have in common. Which is one lesson that every one will like. - Kirkus Review

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Esther Rudomin was born in Wilno, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania). Her childhood was interrupted by the beginning of WWII and the conquest in 1941 of eastern Poland by Soviet troops.

Her family was uprooted and deported to Rubtsovsk, Siberia, where Esther spent the next five years in harsh exile. Her award winning novel The Endless Steppe is an autobiographical account of those years in Siberia.

After the war, she and her family moved back to Poland when she was 15. Hautzig reportedly wrote The Endless Steppe at the prompting of presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, to whom she had written after reading his articles about his visit to Rubtsovsk.

Hautzig helped to discover and eventually publish the master's thesis in mathematics written by her uncle, Ela-Chaim Cunzer, at the University of Wilno in 1937.

Rudomin met Walter Hautzig, a concert pianist, while en route to America on a student visa in 1947. They married in 1950, and had two children, Deborah, a children's author, and David. She died on November 1, 2009, aged 79.