CERVANTES

Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America

Haff, Stephen.
Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teacher, and the One-Room School Where Everything Is Possible.
New York: HarperOne, 2020. 304pp. ISBN 978-00-6293-406-2.

Kid Quixotes is the most revealing and inspiring book on Don Quixote a Cervantes scholar, and for that matter any Cervantes enthusiast, can read. And yet, it is not a scholarly work. It illuminates Cervantes’s masterpiece in the most indirect of ways, for it is children in a Brooklyn neighborhood who bring it to life. Since fall of 2016, a group of 15 to 20 children and adolescents ages 5 to 17 have been translating episodes from Don Quixote under the expert guidance of Stephen Haff, a former high school teacher with a degree in theater from Yale University. Haff founded in 2008 an out-of-school edu- cational nonprofit called Still Waters in a Storm that works with children of migrants, mostly Mexican and Ecuadorian, on learning Latin and translating early-modern classics, including Paradise Lost and Don Quixote. As they translate Don Quixote from the original Spanish to contemporary English, they adapt it into a musical play featuring original songs written with the help of accomplished composer Kim Sherman. The resulting play, which also includes some Spanish, updates the old book for our contemporary times with the authenticity and urgency that only children can convey.

The Kid Quixote project is in its fifth and last year, pending the delays caused by the pandemic, but Haff vows to continue refining and potentially expanding it for many years to come. The musical play will have a total duration of around 90 minutes. Shorter, incomplete versions have already been performed in the past three winters at several universities in the North East (Columbia, Yale, Georgetown), local consulates, and even in New York’s City Hall. A performance at my institution, Drexel University, was recorded and is available on YouTube.com as “The Adventures of Don Quixote.” For the duration of the project, until the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted their face to face sessions, the group was meeting three times a week, including a four-hour session every Saturday. Still Waters’s rented space, or one-room school as described in the book’s title, is in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, where most of the families live. The barrio used to be mainly Puerto Rican and Dominican but is now majority Mexican and Ecuadorian, with an in- creasing presence of young Caucasians, often artists and small entrepreneurs.

The book is structured around the four songs that articulate the play, titled The Traveling Serialized Adventures of Kid Quixote. Haff skillfully weaves three different periods of his life into each chapter: his own personal family life, growing up in Canada and dealing with the effects of bipolar disorder in his adult life; his tempestuous but rewarding experiences in a Bushwick high school where he founded the Real People Theater company with several of his Puerto Rican students; and his current work at Still Waters. While the book offers many profound insights into life from the margins of society, including Haff’s own experience with mental illness; drug violence and abuse at the formerly Puerto Rican-majority high school; and the present struggles of Mexican and Latino migrants under the Trump administration, I focus only on what this book teaches us, Cervantes scholars, on Don Quixote.

The four songs each revolve around one episode from the novel, and each cunningly adapt it to the children’s reality. Chapter 1, “The Rescuing Song,” updates little Andrés’ beating at the hands of his master Juan Haldudo (1.4) with a scene in which Stephen Haff himself (an Anglo-Caucasian adult man) beats a brown Latina girl. The violence is re-enacted in an age-appropriate way: In Brechtian style, Haff wields no whip and its hissing and striking is simulated by the chorus of kids. The implications of the children’s take on the present political moment in the United States are obvious. In the “Friendship song,” later renamed the “Adventurous Adventure Song,” several episodes including the flock of sheep (1.18) and the windmills (1.8) prompt reflections on the concept of friendship, particularly between Don Quixote and Sancho. Chapter 3, “The Ruler of Myself” song, adapts the Marcela episode (1.10-14) in the most personal of ways based on the life experience of one of the teenagers in the group, named here “Alex” (the book often uses pseudonyms to protect the identity of the children and their families). Alex is shy, rarely speaks in public, and when she does so is often in a whisper. But when Haff asked the kids to write their own version of Marcela’s “I was born free” speech, Alex made a strong case for the acceptance of different sexualities, declared herself pansexual, and later on sang “The Ruler of Myself ” in front of her parents. In his uneasy English, her father said in front of everyone after the performance, “I’m proud of you.” Finally, “The Song of Basic Needs,” written in the fall of 2018, translates the galley slaves episode (1.22) into the contemporary realities of incarcerated migrant minors separated from their parents after crossing the border to request asylum or refugee status. As with the other songs discussed in the book, multiple variations on the basic theme (in this case, freedom and injustice) further illuminate Cervantes’s story: Haff’s mother struggles with old age in a nursing home; a former actor from the Real People Theater writes poems from jail; and a Kid Quixote laments his dad’s abandonment after his parents’ divorce.

Out of many, one lesson I learned about the story of Don Quixote through the Kid Quixotes is the power of reading and staging one’s story. In a very understated way, acting fuels the transformation of Alonso Quijano as he decides to craft and perform a new flamboyant identity for himself. Sharing a similar compulsion to act, Haff describes his organization’s “public agenda” as “a story [that] needs to be told, a story of kids on the margins of our nation’s love” (160). Still Waters’s Don Quixote adaptation is not a simple staging of Cervantes’s words, but a distillation of the novel’s main message about the empowering effect of theater and literature in ordinary people’s lives, particularly those who inhabit the margins. As Haff explains, “acting is not pretending to be someone else. It’s being yourself as you tell a story”; it is “the story of your blossoming” (157). As a Cervantes scholar myself, I keep thinking about whether and how the phrase “the story of your blossoming” applies to and maybe even explains Alonso Quijano’s uncompromising performance of Don Quixote. Still Waters’s motto, “Everyone listens to everyone,” resonates with Cervantes’s book in that both put characters, books, and society in constant and productive dialogue with each other. Directly from the margins, the actor who embodies Don Quixote in this musical play is a little girl, Sarah Sierra, who at the age of 8 years took on the protagonist role despite her extreme shyness. The transformation that ensued, not only of Sarah but of the entire group, would make Alonso Quijano and Cervantes himself proud. Additionally, Sarah does not portray Don Quixote as a lunatic, but rather as an actor who consciously transforms herself into a knight errant committed to effecting real and positive change in society.

In sum, this book and the project it chronicles offer in my view the key that unlocks Don Quixote’s relevance to our world today. Transnational, multilingual, multi-generational, out-of-school, applied, and theatrical, the Kid Quixote project embeds Cervantes’s story into our present moment. A book co-written by Stephen Haff and Sarah Sierra, Becoming Kid Quixote: A True Story of Belonging in America, recounts the project from the perspective of its now 11-year-old protagonist and serves as a companion to Haff’s book. No classic could have a better and more loyal following, for Don Quixote lives today in the pens, voices, and life stories of brave, smart Latinx children. The future of our classic, and of our country as a whole, could not be brighter.

—Rogelio Miñana, Drexel University

LIBRARY JOURNAL

Haff, Stephen.
Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teacher, and the One-Room School Where Everything Is Possible.
HarperOne. Apr. 2020. 304p. ISBN 9780062934062. $27.99. ED

Still Waters in a Storm, a one-room schoolhouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn, serving Spanish speaking immigrant children, was a safe space—both for the students who went there after school and for its founder, Haff, a teacher battling bipolar depression. Under Haff’s guidance, the students, who ranged in age from five to 17, embarked on a five-year project to translate Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote into English and turn it into a musical. Since their language and written skills differed, they had to listen to one another carefully and work together, adopting a version of what psychologist Lev Vygotsky called “scaffolding,” or collaborative learning. Despite the threat of ICE agents and deportation, the students persevered, performing their work throughout New York. Haff structures his stirring, poignant narrative much like Don Quixote, incorporating poems, songs, and dialogue; inserting stories within stories; and illustrating that even seemingly disparate tales are connected.

VERDICT — This is an inspiring account that reminds us that with trust and empathy, there’s no limit to what students and teachers can accomplish together.

—Jacqueline Snider, Toronto

BOOKLIST

Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teacher, and the One-Room School Where Everything is Possible.
Haff, Stephen (author).
Apr. 2020. 287p. HarperOne, $27.99 (9780062934062). 371.
REVIEW. First published February 28, 2020 (Booklist Online).

This is an introduction to an amazing bunch of kids, written by their dedicated teacher, champion, director, choreographer, model, and life coach (although he would probably disavow most of those titles). Former New York Public School teacher Haff offers his own test-free, all-inclusive, completely voluntary after-school program, Still Waters in a Storm, in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. The group is currently in the middle of an anticipated five-year task of reading Don Quixote de la Mancha in the original Spanish. Through thoughtful and careful analysis, Haff and his charges (some as young as seven) are absorbing Miguel de Cervantes’ story of hope, and writing and performing interpretive, bilingual skits and songs for outside audiences. Telling their story in real time, Haff documents his students’ progress, creates insightful personal profiles, unflinchingly reflects back on his previous experiences, and weaves in the realities his students and their families face: deportation, discrimination, poverty, drugs, and violence. In turns inspirational, funny, poignant, and enlightening, this will give readers an enjoyable opportunity to watch these young minds at work.

— Kathleen McBroom

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teacher, and the One-Room School Where Everything is Possible.
Stephen Haff. HarperOne, $27.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-293406-2
Reviewed on : 01/02/2020
Release date: 11/01/2019
Genre: Nonfiction
Ebook – 304 pages – 978-0-06-293408-6
Downloadable Audio – 978-0-06-293409-3

In this poignant and politically minded debut, educator and theater director Haff explains the pedagogy behind Still Waters in the Storm, the after-school program he founded in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in 2008, and dramatizes his students’ efforts to translate Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote from 400-year-old Spanish into modern English and stage a bilingual musical adaptation. After resigning his public school teaching job and entering treatment for bipolar depression, Haff started Still Waters as a way to keep in touch with former students. The curriculum evolved from basic homework help to literature discussion groups, Latin instruction, mentoring, and weekly author workshops. “Everything we do,” Haff writes, “is based on the same ritual of reading a text, discussing it together, writing a response, and taking turns reading our responses to the group.” He interweaves the story of his mental breakdown and recovery with criticisms of the New York City public school system, along with accounts of his students analyzing Cervantes’s antiquated language and developing scripts and songs connecting the plot to their own experiences as the children of undocumented immigrants living under the threat of arrest and deportation. Haff eloquently traces the journey one student makes “from shy to brave,” and makes a convincing case for the power of “mutual attention and cooperation” in the classroom. Educators, immigration activists, and school reformers will find inspiration in this frequently lyrical account. (Apr.)

BOOKPAGE

Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teacher, and the One-Room School Where Everything is Possible.
By Stephen Haff
HarperOne
$27.99
ISBN 9780062934062
Published 04/21/2020
Reviewed : August 2020
Release date: 11/01/2019
Genre: Nonfiction / Memoir / Education

Literature with a lesson

This sentiment also undergirds Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teacher, and the One-Room School Where Everything Is Possible, which details author Stephen Haff’s personal experience with bipolar depression alongside his efforts to construct a creative and individualized learning environment for kids in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. Kid Quixotes weaves together the narrative of Haff’s teaching career and the stories of his students, who are largely members of the Latinx immigrant community. These kids, who seek solace in Haff’s Still Waters in a Storm after-school program, translate Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote from its original Spanish into English and then into their own interpretative play over the course of five years. This process of reading, writing and translating allows Haff to uncover the complexities of each child’s life story, and he encourages them to bring those personal experiences to life through the play.

Each of Haff’s students speaks out from the pages of this book and implores readers to hear their voice. In particular, Haff spotlights the voice of a young girl named Sarah, the “Kid Quixote” of Still Waters, who speaks prophetically both to the other children and to the reader. After she tells her first story at Still Waters, Haff remarks that the other children were “stunned, as if they had just met God.” The reader also feels this moment’s transcendence, which continues throughout the book.

One of the final sequences in Kid Quixotes describes the response of a writer who had been invited to work with the students at Still Waters. After her encounter, she said she viewed these students differently, seeing them as “intellectual equals.” Haff’s work at Still Waters, Reed’s reflections and Wagner’s memoir all ask us to do this same work. By respecting students as equals with something to offer, rather than as receptacles for information, we allow their powerful stories to change our broken world. These books represent the best of what education could offer, if we would only believe in the power of each person’s individual story.

—Carly Nations

KIRKUS REVIEWS

Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teacher, and the One-Room School Where Everything is Possible.
Haff, Stephen (author).
Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293406-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

The story of an after-school program that helps immigrant children adjust to their new American life.

What does reading and translating Don Quixote, published in the early 17th century, have to do with modern-day life for immigrant children in Bushwick, Brooklyn? Quite a lot, according to Haff, a theater director and former high school English teacher, who set up Still Waters in a Storm for children of undocumented immigrants. As he writes, the author chose Cervantes’ work because “that book is everything human—it is funny and tragic and beautiful and disgusting and smart and stupid—and because it was written in Spanish, the native language of my students and their families.” By reading the quirky tale of a man who never gave up his dreams, Haff’s students have found new meaning in their own lives despite the constant fear of deportation amid the current toxic landscape surrounding immigration, an atmosphere inflamed by the current presidential administration. Not only did the students read the book and translate it out loud; they also adapted it into a series of musicals that they wrote. They became Kid Quixotes, acting out their own versions of the story, which they performed in multiple venues. Haff also includes his own story of being an educator suffering from bipolar depression and how this project has positively impacted his life as well. This is a decidedly upbeat book full of compassion and an attentiveness to language, and Haff imparts pertinent lessons regarding truth, hope, thoughtfulness, awareness, friendships, and what it means to be genuine. The narrative also carries the weight of what each child must endure as an immigrant, including racism, distrust, and fear, and shows how they have worked to overcome these obstacles via songs, acting, drawings, and imaginative retellings of their lives.

A kindhearted, engaging story of helping modern immigrant children via a 400-year-old classic text.

SAN FRANCISCO BOOK REVIEW

Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teacher, and the One-Room School Where Everything is Possible.
Author: Stephen Haff
Star Count: 5/5
Format: Hard
Page Count: 287 pages
Publisher: Harper One
Publish Date: 2020-04-21
ISBN: 9780062934062
Issue: June 2020

If holding to stereotypes, young immigrant kids translating into English and interpreting the classic Spanish novel Don Quixote sounds like a highly unlikely project. But author Stephen Haff was unfazed. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, one of New York’s less-than-posh areas, he set up Still Calm in the Storm, an after-school program for disadvantaged, mostly Spanish -speaking kids struggling to cope with a new land and often a new language. His aspirations for the kids and his own education along with teaching experience in different settings brought about a near-miracle.

The program he led, in a room barely big enough to cope with the popularity it achieved, ran for years as the little kids grew bigger, the shy grew bold, the imaginative shared their stories and dreams. They became “Kid Quixotes,” exploring words as they translated, sharing memories of difficult times left behind across the border and again sometimes when reviled as immigrants. The stories they developed were about themselves and their families. They wrote sketches and poems, composed songs and staged performances to audiences in venues from the finest to the most humble. They harvested their after-school experience, listening to each other, developing ideas, testing, accepting as they advanced. Not strictly chronological, the book takes time out to follow the paths of kids who entered to the program when they were tiny, just beginning to read, and later blossomed into young teenagers.

Haff’s own recovery from bipolar depression supplied a nourishing sensitivity to his encouragement and challenges and contributed to an outstanding book.

—Jane Manaster

GOODREADS

Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teacher, and the One-Room School Where Everything is Possible.
Author Stephen Haff
Goodreads.com
bookshelves: nonfiction
Apr 27, 2020

Kid Quixotes is such a powerful read about working together to complete a goal, understanding different languages, gaining a new perspective, and feeling empowered. I loved reading every page of the book and can’t help but feel inspired and amazed at these kids and teachers who made this goal into a reality.

The story is about kids from Bushwick, Brooklyn wanting to translate the story of Don Quixote. These kids were all apart of an after school program, Still Waters in a Storm. These children came from different backgrounds but they showed an eagerness to learn. At the after school program, they would learn how to read and write in English, Spanish, and Latin.

Stephen Haff is the founder of Still Waters in a Storm and has a passion for teaching kids. I loved how he made the program a refuge for the kids and even the staff. He always emphasized helping one another so that they could all learn together which is so inspiring.

As I was reading the first few pages, which introduced the book and project, I was feeling so many emotions. I was happy, hopeful, and appreciative. When the students were reading Spanish, a student admitted that they couldn’t help translate Spanish not because they couldn’t read Spanish but because they couldn’t read at all. Everyone gathered around the student and made sure that no one felt less than and came up with a way where that student would learn the language.

Learning is so different in this program and I thought its genius. Stephen made it so that every individual could learn along with understanding every other person’s way of thinking. It made me feel like this allowed the kids to learn more than a language. It taught them how to be compassionate, work together, and create meaningful bonds.

These kids worked on the project since 2016 and by doing it they showed how anything is possible. No matter your age or background.

I give Kid Quixotes 5 stars. As soon as you start reading, you won’t be able to put it down. This book is so moving and inspiring. This is one of my favorite reads of 2020!

—Living My Best Book Life