Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teachers, and the One-Room School Where Everything Is Possible by Stephen Haff (review)

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 educational 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 increasing 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...