When you’ve left behind everything you know, how do you find your way home?
I live in Australia, a country where so many people have come from far away. Among them is my own family. In 1947, my maternal grandparents, Polish–Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, disembarked the SS Sagittaire at Sydney’s Circular Quay and began a new life. They changed their surname to something with fewer syllables. They learned the language, slowly. My grandfather found work as a door-to-door fabric salesman, going between rural towns in what must have felt like a startlingly new landscape. At some point, there came a moment when this country of refuge became something more familiar: it became their home. This moment intrigued me. It intrigued me enough to write about it.
The Truck Cat isn’t about 1947, though. It’s about now and, in a way, it’s about always, because if one thing is constant in our modern world, it’s that so many people migrate – whether because of war, poverty, natural disaster or simply the hope of a better life. Their origins are different, but they’re all searching for the same thing: a new place to call home.
And so, in The Truck Cat, Yacoub – like my own grandfather and like so many others – must create for himself a new life in a land far, far away. He must make a new home, even while brimful of memories of the old one.
So, how do you find your way home when you’re in a strange new place?
I discovered one answer in Tinka, the truck cat – because cats are very wise, as any cat person knows. You find people to love. You hold them close. (And chasing the odd insect helps a lot, too.)
– Deborah Frenkel
The Truck Cat by Deborah Frenkel and Danny Snell is the 2025 National Simultaneous Storytime book. You can download teacher notes here.