Dear Miss Breed: True Stories of Japanese American Incarceration During World War II and a Librarian Who Made a Difference by Joanne Oppenheim (2006)
I picked up Dear Miss Breed on a whim at a used bookshop because I love letters and I’m a librarian who loves reading about other librarians and their adventures. I must confess, I didn’t look at this book too closely in the shop (I was short on time!), so I expected it to be simply a collection of scanned or transcribed letters.
When I started reading this book, I immediately realized that Dear Miss Breed not only preserves letters written to the titular Miss Clara Breed by her former library patrons who were sent to internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII, but it also features an impressive amount of historical research and photographs that provide valuable context for those letters. This book is very clearly intended to be an educational resource.
The book opens with a forward written by Elizabeth Kikuchi Yamada, one of the Japanese American children who was incarcerated in an internment camp in Arizona during World War II and wrote to Miss Breed about her experiences. Kikuchi Yamada writes, “Every book that Clara Breed sent me was an affirmation that we were not the enemy[…] Every book was more than a story[…] Every book was hope.”
Next, Oppenheim includes contemporary photographs of all of the young people mentioned in the book, followed by a charming portrait of Clara E. Breed from the time when she became the first Children’s Librarian of San Diego Public Library. Oppenheim discovered Clara Breed’s efforts to keep books flowing to her incarcerated Japanese American library customers while Oppenheim was planning a high school reunion and researching one of her former classmates who, it turned out, had been interned in Arizona during WWII but never mentioned it to Oppenheim while the two had been in school together.
To help orient readers and establish a baseline, Dear Miss Breed defines numerous key terms surrounding the camps (relocation vs. internment vs. incarceration vs. concentration) and includes a map of the Assembly Centers, Relocation Centers, and Internment Camps that operated from 1942 through 1946 across the western United States (all west of the Mississippi River). I found this baseline helpful, because I hadn’t realized that the internment camps had been operated by two different arms of the WWII-era US government.
The first chapter of Dear Miss Breed opens by asking readers to remember where they were on September 11, 2001, and then describes how the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942 by Empire of Japan was basically the September 11th for the generation of Americans born in the 1930s. Oppenheim describes the fear and terror that immediately swept the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor—and how San Diego’s first Children’s Librarian, Clara Breed, was immediately filled with fear for the safety of her young library users, as many of them were of Japanese descent.
Throughout the US internment of Japanese Americans, Clara Breed remained a compassionate, active librarian and regularly gifted books to her former library customers so that they could keep up with their reading, education, hobbies, and daydreaming. Breed provided a lifeline to the world outside the internment camps, and she also sent along books that could help incarcerated Japanese Americans acquire new skills they needed to cope and adapt to the hostile living conditions of the internment camps. Although she was their librarian, Breed proved herself to also be a friend: she fulfilled internees’ requests for school supplies, curlers, shoe polish, clothes, fabric, soy sauce, safety pins, umbrellas, barbering tools, and other necessities of internment camp life. After WWII, Breed ended up serving as San Diego’s Head Librarian for more than two decades.
The book proceeds chronologically, interlacing testimonies and interview snippets as well as contemporary news articles, photographs, and and political cartoons with letters from Clara Breed’s library customers. All 200+ of the letters that Clara Breed saved from her former library customers are included throughout this narrative, carefully inserted in precise chronological order at the appropriate moment.
By skillfully incorporating historical artifacts, Oppenheim weaves a moving narrative that places readers in the shoes of the Japanese American children and their families who were arrested, forcibly uprooted, and moved to internment camps thousands of miles from home during WWII—all despite being legitimate US citizens. Oppenheim shares, in heart-wrenching detail, how widespread government-sanctioned paranoia and racism forced thousands of Japanese Americans to abandon the only homes they’d ever known (and, in many cases their beloved pets) for shoddily constructed barracks in hostile environments, inedible food, and appalling living conditions. Oppenheim’s historical narrative is a humanizing, insightful, and frank examination of a chapter in US history as recounted through children’s letters to their librarian.
Dear Miss Breed concludes by examining the lasting impact of these WWII-era internment camps on not just interned Japanese Americans, but also on US society as a whole. It took nearly three decades after the last internment camp closed for their Japanese American survivors to begin speaking up about the trauma they experienced and to demand an apology from the US government for the injustices they suffered during WWII.
In 1983, Oppenheim writes, the US Commission on Wartime Relocation and Interment of Civilians (CWRIC) “acknowledged that there was no military reason for removing [Japanese Americans] and that the incarceration had been based solely on hysteria and racism. […] No Japanese American, alien or citizen, was ever accused or convicted of any act of sabotage or espionage.”
The CWRIC recommended a monetary award of $20,000 (about $69,000 in today’s money) be paid to each remaining survivor of the internment camps, but the camp’s survivors begged for far greater compensation: they wanted the US government to require all Americans be educated on the horrors of the WWII-era incarcerations and internments that it perpetuated against Japanese Americans who US citizens. The survivors prayed that by educating the populace, the US government would be able to prevent history from repeating itself so that no one would ever experience the same tragedies and trauma that they did.
Indeed, in her forward to Dear Miss Breed, internment camp survivor Elizabeth Kikuchi Yamada pleads, “Place this book in every classroom. Encourage adults to read the book with their children. […] They, too, can make a difference and never allow any group or individuals to be deprived of their civil liberties and rights again.”
I found Dear Miss Breed to be a sobering, educational read that intersperses trauma and horror with moments of compassion, community, and hope. Although some might find Oppenheim’s writing style too straightforward (the book is published by Scholastic and geared toward young adults), I felt that Oppenheim’s depth of research and skill at synthesizing a coherent narrative far outweighed this potential con. I highly recommend this book for anyone curious about domestic US history, the impact of internment or detention camps on children, the heroism of librarians, or how one person can positively impact the lives of hundreds of people.
Clara Breed’s efforts to continue helping and serving her Japanese American library customers long after they were no longer technically part of her clientele speaks to her heroism. She was an exemplary librarian, dedicated to keeping books in the hands of those who needed them most, helping children survive, hope, and thrive despite their incarceration. She was an exemplary long-distance friend who supported the well-being of her young friends by valuing them first them for who they truly were: human beings, just like the rest of us.
MOLO WRITES 