Children’s Book, Little Özil, Addresses Muslim Discrimination
The words stung Lewis J. Beilman III, like a soccer ball flush to the face.
Terrorist. Towelhead. Traitor.
Beilman was saddened by the verbal vitriol being tossed at the Muslim community.
That negativity spurred the 48-year-old Hollywood, Florida native to write Little Özil, a children’s book about an eight-year-old, who is discriminated against by his soccer teammates because he is Muslim.
The 36-page story chronicles the struggles of its central character—Mustafa—as he navigates through his young life with the safety net that soccer affords him.
Little Özil will be available in mid-September on Amazon and the Adelaide Books website. Half of the book’s proceeds will help support the Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services.
“It’s important for young people to read about these topics,” Beilman said. “I hope that children who read this book learn that what may seem as differences between people ultimately don’t change the fact that deep down we’re all the same and have the same kind of hopes and dreams.”
A Writing Career Is Born
Beilman started dabbling in writing as a teenager. Poetry became his vessel.
“Writing poetry was a way to express feelings and thoughts that I [was] struggling to express or cope with,” Beilman said.
In 1991, his poem O Raven Lover, Spread Your Wings won first place in his high school’s—Trumbull High School in Connecticut—literary journal, Broken Shells.
But Beilman didn’t continue writing when he went to college. In 1995, he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Five years later, he graduated from the University of Maine School of Law.
Despite the degree, he didn’t practice law after graduation. A year and a half into the program, he realized he didn’t want to work in the field but continued because he found the education helpful.
Beilman has put the analytical and investigative skills he fostered in Maine to good use. He has worked as a reporter and editor at the Biddeford-Saco-OOB Courier in Maine, with Osram Sylvania—a lighting manufacturer—doing corporate compliance, in the Miami-Dade Court System assisting people who represent themselves with filing family law paperwork, as a grant writer at Miami Dade College and as an intergovernmental liaison at the South Florida Water Management District.
Inspired To Write Again
It was during his time at MDC that Beilman reignited his passion for writing. In 2004 and 2005, he took creative writing one and two with Michael Hettich, who taught English and creative writing at MDC for 28 years before retiring in 2018.
Before taking the courses, Beilman had primarily written poetry. In the class, Hettich encouraged students to engage in different types of writing.
“[He] wasn’t concerned with showing off his style or being recognized as a brilliant writer,” Hettich said. “He was just more concerned with telling a good story and digging into the truth of what it feels like to be alive. He wanted me to push him harder all the time.”
That drive garnered Beilman a first-place prize for his poem When They Leave in the Fred R. Shaw poetry contest in 2009.
His work has been published online in various magazines and he has written three books—The Changing Tide, Fourth of July and Garden of the Goddesses—available on Amazon.
Although he originally wrote Little Özil seven years ago, his most recent revision is illustrated. His publishing company—Adelaide Books—hired artist Lamya Sharaby, who is Muslim, to augment his words.
“They are beautiful, colorful and complement the story perfectly in my mind,” Beilman said in describing Sharaby’s work. “I think it will bring the story to a broader audience and as a writer that’s something you always want.”
Writing the book wasn’t hard for Beilman. As an avid runner, who has completed two marathons, he got the idea while on a run.
He devoted one hour a day for about a month to writing, until he gave birth to the book. Not only was he inspired to create the book to counter the anti-Muslim backlash that was prevalent but he also incorporated another of his passions into the storyline—soccer.
Beilman, who serves as manager and a player for Hamden United’s over-40 division II soccer team in the Southern New England Adult Soccer League, gained an admiration for the sport as a five-year-old living in Germany. The youngster was there for about three years because his father, Lewis Beilman II, worked for a power plant company there.
When he returned to the United States, the bits of the German language he picked up didn’t stick with him but his love for soccer did.
In Little Özil, the title character is named after one of Beilman’s favorite soccer players, Mesut Özil, who helped carry the German national team to third place in the 2010 World Cup finals even though he was of Turkish descent.
“A portion of the German public didn’t consider [Özil] a player because he wasn’t your typical blond-haired, blue-eyed German,” Beilman said.
That topic also resonated with Beilman and his experience in Germany.
“I was an outsider in Germany since my family and I didn’t speak the language, so I definitely saw parallels,” Beilman said.
Beilman, who is a grant writer—a person tasked with acquiring funding for an organization through grant proposals—for Cornell Scott Hill Health Center in Connecticut, wants to keep feeding his creative side. Watch NFR 2021 Live Stream
He is currently working on a short story geared toward a more mature audience and wants to publish another collection of short stories.
“Writing started out as a way of unknowingly being a type of therapy for me, and it now more knowingly continues to be that,” Beilman said.
The headshot of Lewis J. Beilman III used in this article was provided by the Miami Dade College Media Relations Department.
