Refugee by Alan Gratz Vocabulary

Ruth woke up and screamed. Screamed in sheer blind terror.

They cowered together on the floor as the shadows picked up Ruth’s bed and threw it against the wall.

The Brownshirt scowled at the noise and gave the men carrying Aaron Landau a dismissive wave.

With no one to overpay for it, the cane fields dried up, the sugar refineries closed, and people lost their jobs.

She stood on the wide promenade, where it seemed all of Havana was on display.

Mahmoud and Waleed could disappear among the heaps of twisted metal and broken cement, and there were no walls to fall on them if an artillery shell went whizzing overhead.

Nobody knew a wave of revolutions would sweep through the Middle East, toppling governments and overthrowing dictators and starting civil wars.

There was an old Arabic proverb that said, “Close the door that brings the wind and relax,” and that’s exactly what they did; while the rest of the Middle East was rioting, Syrians stayed inside and locked their doors and waited to see what would happen.

Mahmoud had bristled. The differences between Sunnis and Shiites was an excuse. These boys had just wanted to beat someone up.

Mahmoud watched as these two boys attacked the boy with the bread, a boy he didn’t even know. He felt the stirrings of indignation, of anger, of sympathy.

No porters rushed to help them with their bags.

The bright yellow Star of David armbands the Landaus wore were like magical talismans that made them disappear.

In all the turmoil, a policeman caught up with her father and grabbed him by the arm.

She leaped down off the hood of the car and pushed her way through the pandemonium.

The policeman raised his truncheon to hit her father again, and Isabel jumped in between them.

The afternoon adhan from a nearby mosque echoed through the bombed-out streets of Aleppo, the melodious, ethereal voice of the mu’adhdhin praising Allah and calling everyone to prayer.

Across the room, Waleed sat like a zombie in front of the television, watching a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon dubbed into Syrian Arabic.

She hadn’t gone nearly catatonic like Waleed, but at some point it had gotten bad enough that she just stopped talking about it.

The floor lurched up under Mahmoud and threw him and the table and chairs back against the wall of the kitchen.

His breath left him all at once, and he fell to the floor with a heavy thud in a heap of metal and mortar.

His shoulder ached and his chest still seared with every hard, desperate breath, but the only thing that mattered now was getting to his mother.

A steep ramp ran to the top of the tall black hull, and hundreds of people were already on board, milling around under colorful fluttering pennants and waving to friends and family down on the docks.

Aaron Landau’s eyes bulged from his gaunt face as he turned to look at his children.

He looked around manically, like there were spies everywhere.

They watched as Aaron Landau ran for the ramp, where other passengers had already queued up to hand their tickets to a smiling man in a sailor’s uniform.