Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children's Literature (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Quest for Excellence in Jewish Children's Literature
Judaica librarianship, 2006
When book selectors, book award judges, and reviewers seek to identify excellence in Jewish children's literature, they must look beyond the accepted criteria for literary and artistic quality. This article discusses that criteria and focuses on the special elements that contribute to excellence in the Jewish content of books for children and teens.
Multicultural Books for PreK-Grade Three: A Guide for Classroom Teachesr, 2023
This chapter provides background about Jewish identity and children's literature. There are resources provided as well as activities to complement the suggested title to start with.
Negating Diaspora Negation: Children's Literature in Jewish Palestine During the Holocaust Years
European Judaism, 2009
For years, it had been assumed that since the end of the Second World War and up until the Eichmann trial in 1961, Hebrew culture in Israel tended to repress the Holocaust or narrate it according to the Zionist ideology's viewpoint-to accentuate the events of the rebellion against the Nazis and to infer from them a lesson of national revival and restoration. The consensus concerning children's literature, in particular, maintained that it had been utterly committed in the early decades of statehood to extracting out of the Holocaust a 'fortifying tale' bearing a national lesson. This paper, however, argues the existence of a developed Holocaust discourse in children's literature written in Jewish Palestine during the war years, and suggests that children's literature even predated adult literature in setting the Holocaust theme at centre stage. This article aims to shed light on a rare narrative in the Israeli public discourse of the Holocaust: the literary story told to Jewish children in Palestine during the years of the Holocaust. At the time, this new narrative for children was extensive and diverse. For the first time in the history of Zionist children's literature, it challenged the Diaspora-negating code that had been dominant since its beginning. Nevertheless, only a few years later, with the founding of the State of Israel, this new narrative was rapidly 'forgotten' by the Israeli collective memory and proceeded to be neglected by literary and educational research as well. Although it spanned a short time period and failed to leave a literary impact on writings for children in Israel, this Holocaust narrative is tremendously important, having evoked the unique voice of the Jewish settlement in Palestine (the Yishuv) during the Second World War. It also serves as a case study of the crucial function of children's literature within the public discourse during traumatic times, illuminating the advantages of children's literature as a marginal and peripheral form of communication in the public domain.
Teaching 20th century Jewish American Literature: Community, family, and displacement
UMI Dissertation Publishing, 2013
This thesis will articulate my philosophy of teaching a higher level undergraduate literature course while serving as a curriculum guide for other educators interested in teaching a course on 20th century Jewish American Literature. The curriculum I created for this thesis provides students with a comprehensive understanding of three major themes in Jewish American literature: family, community, and displacement. By exploring various texts where the characters and themes are specifically Jewish, students can then understand and discuss how various authors attempt to define the complexities of Jewish American identity in their works beyond the experience of the Holocaust biography protagonist. Before students understand Jewish identity in literary works, it is essential for students to explore the meaning of Jewish identity as a whole. Identity is a complex topic by itself, and it is even more complicated in terms of Jewish racial awareness. Exploring texts that truly make a difference in finding the meanings behind Jewish identity in terms of community, family, and displacement is an integral part of understanding the 20th century Jewish American culture through literature.
The Holocaust Novel and the Child’s Viewpoint – Mediating for the Non-Experiencer
The paper proposes that the future of Holocaust studies is in literature—from children’s and young adult literature, works for higher education, and literature for popular consumption. The creative arts can be an opportunity for people across generations, education levels, countries, religions, cultures, languages, genders, and interests to engage in a difficult subject they might otherwise avoid. The novel can reach a broader audience than the historical document, though it can also be brought into the classroom and used as an approachable teaching tool. Aesthetic literature can also memorialize experiences through the combination of real historical or autobiographical documentation with fictional imagination. Specifically, I argue that narratives written from the child’s viewpoint facilitate availability and new insight into the subject. Narrative strategies involved in the child perspective exemplify aspects of the Holocaust experience, such as muteness and incomprehension. Early criticism focused on whether the imagination was sufficient to undertake Holocaust representation and representation of atrocity in general whilst remaining historically faithful. The narrative strategies employed in writing Holocaust fiction and utilising the child’s perspective provide opportunities for multiple aspects of study—of children, the Holocaust, and literature. As survivor narratives gradually can no longer be produced, we look to second and third generation authors who have the ability to connect the Holocaust to a current cultural context and regenerate the Holocaust imaginatively. Though research focuses on the narratives written by survivors, the children of survivors, and other second- and third generation authors are also staking a claim in the literary memorialization of the Holocaust. This paper suggests that Holocaust literature, particularly narratives with a child’s viewpoint, can act as a gateway to awareness of current conflicts, whilst continually reinvigorating Holocaust memory for future generations.