A while ago, I saw a video where Irishman Tadhg Hickey challenged Irish Americans. He educated us on the history of The Great Famine. He said in Ireland, they call it The Great Hunger, because the food shortage was not because of a lack of food. It was because the British Empire, Ireland’s colonizer, was exporting all the food and leaving the Irish with fields full of rotten potatoes.

He drew a direct comparison to what is happening in Gaza. The hunger Palestinians are suffering is a completely man made problem. There are lines upon lines of trucks full of aid waiting at the crossings into Gaza, and they are actively being blocked by Palestine’s occupier, Israel.

He said that during the Great Hunger, Irish who could afford it fled en masse to the U.S. According to my DNA results, 40% of my blood is of Irish descent, and my Irish ancestors made the trek to the U.S. during The Great Hunger.

We Irish Americans had an out; the Gazans do not. They are trapped. That is why it is especially incumbent upon those whose ancestors are survivors of a manufactured famine to advocate for others suffering from the same fate.

As I listened to the man, passionately advocating for Palestinians, I realized I didn’t know much about The Great Hunger other than that a lot of people died, it had to do with rotten potatoes, and it caused a mass migration of Irish people to the U.S.

So I looked for books. I wanted to share my learning with my kids, so I found a historical fiction title called Under The Hawthorn Tree, by Marita Conlon-McKenna. Then we began to learn together.

The reading level is ages 8-12, but I would expand that 6-104 because we’re all always learning, the question is just about what (and six is the age of the youngest child in our house). It’s a well written, immersive story, and drew obvious parallels for me to the plight of Gaza – but also struck me as a tale of the Boxcar Children, if they had actually faced any realistic obstacles. I know those two ideas are very different, but when you read the book, I think it’ll make sense.

There are a thousand ways this book could be meaningful to you. Perhaps you, too, are Irish American and haven’t spent too much time thinking about how or why your people came across the pond. Perhaps the plight of Ukrainians tugs at your heart in a way the Palestinians’ plight does not, and it’s time to examine that. Maybe you just like a good historical fiction book. Whatever the reason, or none at all, this is a short read that, like the best historical fiction, may lead you to do more learning about this important piece of history.