“No, you can’t,” I tell her. “You can’t even change the school unless Brademas gives the okay.”
I’d never admit it to Caroline, but in a way, our student government really did change the world. The idea for the paper chain started at a student council meeting. And by the end of it, we had contributions from families and schools all around the globe. I can’t even guess how many people we reached. It wasn’t just ReelTok’s millions of followers. The newspapers, TV stations, and media outlets that covered us probably brought our story to hundreds of millions more. We might be almost as famous as that school in Whitwell, Tennessee, and their paper clips project—and somebody made a movie about them.
And our paper chain isn’t over yet. I mean, it’s done—we’ve got our six million links. Nobody wants to try for thirty like they did in Tennessee. But the impact of the paper chain is just getting started. The Monday after Link’s bar mitzvah, the town council votes unanimously to build a museum and tolerance center in Chokecherry. They’ve lined up the first three exhibits already. Number one is the paper chain, obviously. Number two is the Holocaust Torah that Mr. Friedrich drove down from Canada. And number three is the scorched timbers from the crosses that were burned around our town on the Night of a Thousand Flames. Technically, they’re the property of the dinosaur dig, but Wexford-Smythe University donates them to the project. They’re only interested in what happened a hundred million years ago. 1978 isn’t paleo enough for them.
I’m amazed at how many community members are there to greet Mr. Friedrich and his wife when the mountain passes are finally open and he brings the Torah to Chokecherry. Link’s bar mitzvah was more than a religious service; it really changed people around here.
Even Pouncey shows up. “Cool scroll. I mean, it’s taken more punishment than the whole town combined, and it’s still in one piece. Plus, the next time some genius like Brademas decides we need tolerance education, we can just point to the new museum and tell him to back off.”
“Admit it,” Link chides him. “You liked paper-chaining just as much as anybody.”
“The guillotine was pretty okay,” he admits. “I miss it sometimes.”
“You should join the art club,” I suggest.
It’s the wrong thing to say. The paper chain may have changed us, but I don’t think I’m ever going to make it into that popular crowd. I’m okay with that. It feels pretty awesome to be me these days. Good things are happening … and I’m a part of it.
Another person who turns up to greet the Friedrichs is ReelTok, with his ever-present camera and tripod. It’s a tricky moment for a whole town that’s embracing tolerance, because most of us have trouble tolerating ReelTok. He used us to attract followers and made our town look so bad. Chokecherry may be no place for hate now, but we’re willing to make an exception for a certain vlogger.
When ReelTok interviews Mr. Friedrich, he plays town hero, like none of this could possibly have happened without his glorious TokNation. I guess he’s partly right. He stirred up a lot of trouble, but it created a ton of publicity for our paper chain. As much as I hate to admit it, he deserves some of the credit for our tolerance museum. He also deserves a punch in the nose. But, hey, that wouldn’t be tolerant.
In my opinion, the most amazing thing about the tolerance museum is the fact that the burnt crosses are going to be a part of it. Remember, a couple of weeks ago, half the town didn’t believe that the Night of a Thousand Flames ever happened. Still, the vote to include it was 100 percent yes. That’s Chokecherry finally admitting its KKK past, even though people like Pouncey’s grandfather and Pamela’s great-uncle aren’t around anymore. I haven’t talked to the other minority kids about it—Dana, Andrew, maybe even Link. But to me, that’s huge.
Speaking of Pamela, the word around town is her dad accepted a job in Colorado Springs and the family will be moving soon. It’s kind of a relief, since she’s the one person who it’s really hard to forgive. What Link did was terrible, but it was mostly a stupid impulse. What she did—and how many times she did it—was with deliberate and evil purpose. Still, it doesn’t seem right to heap all the blame on one person or one family. There’s a history there too.
Maybe it shows that tolerance is more about the journey than the destination. A paper chain can be done when it hits a certain number of links. But tolerance is a project you always have to keep working at.
From the YouTube channel of Adam Tok
Interview with Lincoln Rowley—Final
REELTOK: Well, TokNation, our good work in Chokecherry, Colorado, is done. The paper chain is complete, and this once-unknown town has become a household word around the world. There’s one thing left to do before we bid farewell to a grateful community—pay a visit to the bar mitzvah boy himself, Link Rowley. Just let me set up my tripod on the porch so I can ring the doorbell …
GEORGE ROWLEY: You’ve got some nerve coming here!
REELTOK: I have a few questions for your son before I ride off into the sunset.
GEORGE ROWLEY: He has nothing to say to you. The chamber of commerce dropped the lawsuit. The least you can do is go away.
LINK: It’s okay, Dad. I’ll talk to him.
GEORGE ROWLEY: We don’t need to have anything more to do with this parasite.
LINK: I got this, Dad.
GEORGE ROWLEY: Okay … but I’ll be just inside if you need me.
REELTOK: First of all, Link, congratulations on your bar mitzvah. Sorry I couldn’t attend the service, but I had urgent business on behalf of TokNation.
LINK: You mean the urgent business of being kicked out by the sheriff?
REELTOK: Here’s question one: In the Jewish faith, a bar mitzvah signifies the beginning of manhood. Do you feel like a man now?
LINK: How I feel is really, really lucky. I did pretty much the stupidest thing it’s possible to do. And not stupid-funny. Stupid-awful. And everybody forgave me for it.
REELTOK: Do you believe you deserve forgiveness and Pamela doesn’t?
LINK: You mean because my family turned out to be from the Holocaust and hers turned out to be from the KKK? She has no control over that. Why should I be let off the hook and not her? We both did the same thing. But I’m trying to change—to make things right. I hope she’ll eventually do that too.
REELTOK: Are you a different person now?
LINK: I hate what I did. I’m humiliated by it and I’m sorry it happened. But I’m still the same guy who painted that swastika.
REELTOK: Not a thunderous claim that you’ve turned over a new leaf.
LINK: I’m just being honest. I want to do better. I hope I’m smarter. I’m trying.
REELTOK: Fair enough. Final question: Are you Jewish now?
LINK: I’m exactly as Jewish as I was six months ago.
REELTOK: In other words, you’re not Jewish.
LINK: I didn’t say that. Technically, I’m a hundred percent—my grandmother, my mother, me. But I don’t know how the rest of my life is going to go. Maybe that’s why you have bar mitzvahs at thirteen—it’s the perfect time to start exploring who you are. Like I was always this sports kid, but through the paper chain, I realized I could be friends with different kinds of people I never thought about much before. It wasn’t the point of the paper chain, but it was a great side effect. It brought everybody together.
REELTOK: And it made your town famous … thanks to TokNation.
LINK: Fine. You spread the word about us—along with a lot of other stuff we could have lived without. Being famous has its downside.
REELTOK: You’re speaking about how the publicity brought out Chokecherry’s racist past. I’m sure your father isn’t thrilled about that. With all this buzz about burning crosses and the KKK, his Dino-land plans must be pretty much dead. So much for making this town the next Orlando.
LINK: Hey, who needs that? With our new tolerance museum, we’re going to be the next Whitwell, Tennessee!
This novel would never have been possible without inspirat
ion from the famous Paper Clips Project, by eighth graders from Whitwell Middle School in Whitwell, Tennessee. In 1998, in response to an after-school unit on the Holocaust, the students got the idea to collect six million paper clips to represent the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. They chose paper clips because the citizens of Norway wore paper clips to protest the Nazi occupation during World War II.
That project eventually became Whitwell’s world-renowned Children’s Holocaust Memorial, housed in an actual Nazi railcar that was once used to deport German Jews to the concentration camps. The car holds eleven million paper clips, representing the six million murdered Jews plus five million non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.
In the end, the students of Whitwell collected more than thirty million paper clips and inspired several books and at least two feature films. In this novel, when the students of Chokecherry embark on a tolerance education unit in response to the swastika defacing their atrium, there’s no question that the remarkable accomplishments of their fellow middle schoolers in Tennessee would be among the first topics they’d study. And as the racist vandalism continues, it makes perfect sense that the Chokecherry kids might try to follow in the footsteps of their Whitwell predecessors. Then they can begin to learn what the Paper Clips Project taught us all: that the first step in wrapping your mind around the unimaginably vast tragedy of the Holocaust is to wrap your mind around that unimaginably vast number of six million.
In this book, Michael Amorosa says, “A paper chain can be done when it hits a certain number of links. But tolerance is a project you always have to keep working at.” Here are some of the many organizations and institutions that can provide resources in the fight against anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, racism, and intolerance:
The Anti-Defamation League at ADL.org
The Southern Poverty Law Center at splcenter.org
The Museum of Jewish Heritage at mjhnyc.org
The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive at sfi.usc.edu/collections/holocaust
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at ushmm.org, including their learning site for students at encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/project/the-holocaust-a-learning-site-for-students
Gordon Korman is the #1 bestselling author of such modern classics as Restart, War Stories, Slacker, Whatshisface, Ungifted, and This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall (published when he was fourteen). He is also the author of four books in The 39 Clues series; seven books in his Swindle series: Swindle, Zoobreak, Framed, Showoff, Hideout, Jackpot, Unleashed, and Jingle; the trilogies The Hypnotists, Island, Everest, Dive, Kidnapped, and Titanic; and the series On the Run. He lives in New York with his family and can be found on the web at gordonkorman.com.
War Stories
Restart
Whatshisface
Slacker
Level 13
Radio Fifth Grade
The Toilet Paper Tigers
The Chicken Doesn’t Skate
This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!
The Hypnotists
Memory Maze
The Dragonfly Effect
Swindle
Zoobreak
Framed
Showoff
Hideout
Jackpot
Unleashed
Jingle
The Titanic trilogy
The Kidnapped trilogy
The On the Run series
The Dive trilogy
The Everest trilogy
The Island trilogy
Copyright © 2021 by Gordon Korman
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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First edition, July 2021
Cover design by Yaffa Jaskoll
Cover photo © Shutterstock.com
e-ISBN 978-1-338-62912-5
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