In The Kindness of Children, her most recent book, Vivian Gussin Paley seeks to fill us with stories of mitzvot, or good deeds: “My audience is about to hear a story that will remind them of who they are and can become again” (p. 129). As in her prior books, Paley weaves her experiences together into a coherent tale full of connected anecdotes. Paley relates how, having retired as a kindergarten teacher, she feels lost without her own classroom and students. Used to telling the stories of the children in her classroom and the lessons she learns from them — as illustrated in her numerous other books — she feels at first that she should now learn how to write of something else. But, she says, “only a classroom of children can organize my experiences into a story. Like a child, without a story I cannot explain myself” (p. 4). Then, in a journey that takes her through classrooms in urban London, Chicago, Oakland, New York City, and a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she spoke with teachers about the craft of dramatizing children’s stories, Paley finds her raison d’être.

Through “Teddy’s story,” Paley is able to weave together a whole series of stories that in different ways reveal to her the kindness of children. Teddy is a young, severely disabled child whom Paley encounters in a visit to a London nursery school classroom. Teddy, strapped into a wheelchair with his head protected by a padded helmet, provides the starting point for Paley’s story. With the aid of a small red car in which he sits strapped and cushioned, Teddy is able to “play store” with the other children in the class, and is included in the story that his classmate Edmond has written and that is being acted out in front of the class. The children decide that Teddy will be the young puppy in the story who had not learned how to walk yet, and who will be frightened by a monster. Paley is deeply moved by the nursery school children’s acceptance of Teddy and by their kindness, and feels compelled to share this story.

Paley continues to visit kindergarten and elementary school classrooms, presenting and modeling the activity she has “pursued for so many years, the dramatization of children’s stories” (p. 43). On those visits, Paley tells and retells “Teddy’s story,” which touches the hearts of everyone, and leads children and adults to relate their own and others’ stories of kindness: Marianne letting Lucy, a newcomer to the school, take her turn with the jump rope; Harry giving Martin, a child he constantly fought with, his two oatmeal cookies when Martin was punished and made to sit outside the classroom; Tovah feeling so full of happiness when she heard of the gorilla at the Brookfield Zoo who rescued a toddler that fell into her compound that she gave her seat to an old lady on the bus. Such stories of kindness remind Paley of her own elderly mother, Yetta, who arrived in the United States from Russia speaking no English. Because she only spoke Yiddish, Yetta was placed in a first-grade classroom rather than the fourth-grade classroom with children her own age. Masha, a fourth-grader, visited Yetta every day in the first-grade class, translating everything into Yiddish and then back into English for her. After hearing others’ stories of kindness, when telling “Teddy’s story” Paley includes and attaches those stories of kindness, expanding the original story of Teddy.

These interconnecting acts of kindness remind Paley of her own Jewish background and the Hasidim who “taught people to think about goodness by telling them stories of holy men performing mitzvot, good deeds” (p. 20). In this way, carrying “Teddy’s story” and its offshoots wherever she goes, Paley feels like the Jewish mystics from her past. But, Paley wonders, “which part is the mitzvah? The original story or the retelling of it?” (p. 48). By the end of the book, we are also left asking this question.

In retelling the “Teddy stories,” Paley is constantly reminded of spiritual connections — to her mother who reads the Torah every day, to her Hasidic ancestors who believed that every act of kindness we witness constitutes a spiritual moment. Mr. Flambeau, Tovah’s teacher, who hears her tell the story of giving up her seat on the bus, tells Paley: “I’d call what just happened to Tovah a spiritual experience. . . . I’ve always been saddened by the absence of spirituality in school. No, the potential is here, wherever there are children, but we avoid the subject. . . . You avoid it yourself, Vivian, in your books. To me, they’re all about spirituality, but you never say so” (p. 27). In spite of these comments, Paley does not think of herself as spiritual and feels uncomfortable with Mr. Flambeau’s image of her. She sees acts of kindness in ordinary people and everyday events, and although she still wonders why she doesn’t call the events spiritual, she insists that her language and place will always be that of the secular classroom.

The power of young children and their acts of kindness is almost overwhelming to Paley and the readers of her book. Paley reads from the Torah about “the spiritual power that comes from the mouths of babes and sucklings. ‘The moral universe rests upon the breath of schoolchildren’” (pp. 57-58). Then, in an Annie Dillard novel, she reads, “No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks” (p. 82). Paley wonders if “this could be interpreted as resting upon what we teach children when they are young” (p. 58). But she thinks not; she prefers to think, typical of her style, that “it refers to what the children already know and can teach us” (p. 58).

Paley ends her story wondering what would happen “if we got in the habit of talking about [kindness and the opposite of kindness] every day, the way we examine our sentences to see if the grammar is correct? Kindness and the opposite of kindness. Wouldn’t we become more sensitive to each other’s feelings?” (p. 128). Paley suggests that maybe kindness is about reconnecting to who we were and remembering just how kind we used to be and could be.

This book will appeal to those who have followed Paley’s writing throughout the years, and to teachers and professionals who work with young children. It reveals the important ways in which children can have an impact on our lives. It is also an important reminder, to all of us, of the power of mitzvot, good deeds, and the wonderful things that can happen with an act of kindness.

B.M.B.