Yesteryear Through Youthful Eyes : HERO OVER HERE <i> by Kathleen V. Kudlinski illustrated by Bert Dodson (Viking Kestrel: $11.95; 64 pp., 0-670-83050-X) </i> : A LONG WAY TO GO <i> by Zibby Oneal, illustrated by Michael Dooling (Viking Kestrel: $11.95; 64 pp., 0-870-82532-8) </i>

Theodore, a fourth-grader, is in his classroom. His teacher announces that the town officials have just decided to close down his school, and only then does he realize how many desks around him are empty.

Before now, he has scarcely taken notice of the epidemic of deadly flu that has stricken his town; it has entered his consciousness only in the forms of increasingly prevalent ambulances and funerals. Suddenly he is overwhelmed with its immediacy. He is asked to escort his best friend home, as the other boy’s mother has died.

Theodore’s story is one of the first books in a new series, “Once Upon America,” for readers ages 7 to 11. The series, according to the publisher, presents “tales of young people growing up in a young, dynamic country.” Other titles scheduled in the series will take as their subjects the civil rights movement of the 1960s, life among the Seminole Indians in the 1830s, the Chicago fire of 1871, Ellis Island in 1892 and the Johnstown flood of 1889. The goal of the series is to present the effects of historical events upon individuals, and these first two books succeed admirably.

In “Hero Over Here,” the year is 1918, and Theodore is faced with an enormous task: He must care for his sister and mother when they, too, become ill, because his father and older brother are both away. The father is fighting in Europe, and the brother has just joined the armed services. “Grown-ups were supposed to do this kind of thing, not kids,” the boy agonizes.

But Theodore sets to the brutal task of caring for two desperately ill people, with only a little practical advice from an adult acquaintance. His disgust, his fatigue, his exhaustion, his hunger and his terrible fears are described in a most natural and believable manner. He longs to escape to Montana, where his cousin is and where he imagines the flu is not, until he learns that the flu is “everywhere.”

He realizes that his mother, too, might die, and tries in vain to fetch a doctor to help her. After failing in this task, for a brief, lunatic period, Theodore tries to run away from the flu, racing down the railroad tracks with a subconscious thought of fleeing to Montana, running as a child would, as anyone might wish to. But strength of character brings him back, and the strong-willed boy is able to carry on in his duty, reluctantly but capably, a duty as vital and difficult as any soldier’s.

This well-written, suspenseful story should intrigue today’s young readers even more when they come upon a page of explanation at book’s end: The war was real, the deadly flu of 1918 was real, and Theodore could have been your great-grandfather.

While Theodore’s experience was Everyman’s, Lila’s experience in “A Long Way to Go” are less universal; but the repercussions of the social issues she encounters in the novel are vital today. Lila, 8, first hears of the women’s suffrage movement through her brother’s nursemaid, Katie Rose. It’s 1917, Lila’s grandmother has been arrested for picketing the White House, and Lila leans over the bannister, eavesdropping.

Lila’s father opposes the woman’s right to vote, but to Lila, her grandmother’s stance seems fair and logical. Lila formulates arguments of her own: Why should her baby brother grow up to vote and not she? Why should her classmate Billy vote some day when Lila gets better grades than he does?

As Lila is digesting the confusing new knowledge, she is invited by Katie Rose to visit the nursemaid’s Lower East Side tenement. A neighborhood boy, Mike, shows Lila around, and when he must leave to pick up the newspapers he sells, Lila wants to come along. The boy taunts her with the pronouncement that girls are too delicate to sell newspapers, and Lila is overcome by all the frustrations over the injustices she has recently discovered. Before she knows what is happening, she strikes Mike, astonishing them both. Mike gives her the test of selling papers herself; she quickly catches on to the trick of enticing people to buy, and sells her papers, proud of herself but not unaware of how she has made the boy feel in her success.

Lila’s sensitivity to the boy’s feelings is echoed in a superbly written scene between Lila and her father; an exciting opportunity to march in a Suffragette parade arises, and at first, a solid “no” is her father’s response to the girl’s request to attend. The intelligent, thoughtful girl finally bursts forth with a logical summation of all she’s decided based on the barrage of new information. When her father reacts with stunned silence, she fears he will stop loving her. Yet her father has recognized the logic, the fairness, the determination of her appealing approach.

Both books have scaled down historical events to show their effects on a child of the intended reader’s age. The two authors focus on the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists, and pepper their stories with details of life in the early 1900s, including language and living conditions. Both books are fast-paced and well-written, but the prose of “A Long Way to Go” is particularly lovely. Zibby Oneal has written several other novels for older readers, including “The Language of Goldfish.” Both series books are illustrated with full-page black-and-white drawings that provide a good look at period costumes, architecture, street scenes, interiors.

Jean Fritz, the eminent writer of historical fiction for young people, has said that the past should be accessible to young people, that she doesn’t want them to think of the past as something that is completely over, and that the present as something entirely different. Historical novelist Erik Christian Haugaard concurs: “A knowledge (of) and a feeling for the history of mankind makes you realize that others have lived before you . . . that every minute the present becomes the past and becomes history.”

The first two titles in the “Once Upon America” series will help readers to understand that history is made up of the lives of real people like themselves.