Another original Pamela Allen book to share with the very young. As with her award-winning Who Sank the Boat?, there is something for all of us to learn from this simple but amusing story of John and Jane's attempts to pick a pear from the pear tree

Esperanza tricks Señor Death but realizes the death is a necessary part of life and alleviates much suffering in the world.

In the spring of 1942 Czech Resistance fighters assassinate the head of Nazi-Occupied Czechoslovakia. On the flimsiest of evidence, the Nazi high command sends troops to demolish the small Czech town of Lidice, execute the town¿s men, and abduct and racially profile its women and children. The Pear Tree tells the story of the assassination and its effects on:

The fascinating history of a tree that's older than our nation. In the 1630s in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a Puritan settler planted a pear tree—the first pear tree in America. More than a century later, the tree still bore fruit, impressing a famous poet and one of the first US presidents. The pear tree survived hurricanes, fire, and vandalism, and today, more than 350 years after it was first planted, it's alive and strong, and clones of it grow all around the US. This is the amazing true story of the Endicott Pear tree, and how it grew up with our nation.

Tracing the dramatic lives, through 500 years, of the old and distinguished Sephardic Jewish family from whom he is descended, Victor Perera brilliantly re-creates the history not only of his own people but of an entire culture. The story he tells begins in Spain in the fifteenth century, when the Sephardim are offered a choice of conversion, exile or death. It is the story of a richly flourishing tradition - intellectual, religious, worldly and spiritual - interrupted by massively cruel events; a story of persecution, escape and renewal, carrying us from the Iberian Peninsula across Europe to the Holy Land and Central America. And the Pere(i)ras whose lives we enter are both fascinating in themselves and emblematic of the Sephardic diaspora created by the Inquisition and the Expulsion - some of them, under threat of torture and execution, capitulating to the Cross or becoming Marranos, crypto-Jews who practiced their ancestral religion in secret; others remaining loyal to the pear tree that became their symbol and crest. Among the Marranos: Ana Pereira, a merchant's daughter, a Sephardic convert in Portugal who, at age fifteen, was sentenced to wear penitential raiment and undergo spiritual penances in prison, where, under torture, she incriminated fifteen of her close relations. Among the reclaimed: the fabulously wealthy magnate and author Abraham Israel Pereira, who participated in the excommunication of philosopher Baruch Spinoza; and the beautiful Maria Nunes, who was abducted to Shakespeare's England, and rejected the marriage proposal of a duke and Queen Elizabeth's entreaties on his behalf, marrying instead a cousin in Amsterdam's first Jewish wedding. In nineteenth-centuryFrance we follow the meteoric rise of the brothers Emile and Isaac Pereire, who founded the French railroads and the Credit Mobilier banking system. Over the centuries, the stories of Pereras in all walks of life - among them rabbis and Kabbalistic scholars in the Holy Land - unfold

"First published in the United Kingdom by Ebury Press in 2015."--Title page verso.

FROM A YOUNG AGE the author was intrigued by her mother Gaetanina's storytelling. She took seriously her mother's urging to scrivi e ricorda ("write and remember"). Itri, Italy nestled in a valley south of Rome, surrounded by the Aurunci Mountains, is home to the Santuario of Maria SS della Civita, and to her parents and ancestors. Many of the Itrani people, including the author's parents, immigrated to the small town of Knightsville in Cranston, Rhode Island. Their faith, courage, and hard work in the face of severe hardships left a lifelong impression and a resolution to one day tell their story and fulfill the commitment made to her mother to write the family history. In this telling it is hoped that all generations, present and to come, will remember their familial roots and the people who have come before them. Told by the perspective of this one Itrani family, Under the Pear Tree is a moving account of the trials, traumas and emotional life surrounding the Italian immigrant experience at the turn of the 19th century. This story is sure to inspire the reader to discover one's own ancestral past.