Literary Treatments of Jewish Children

The specialized quality of Jewish culture has been a subject of concern to some who have studied the prewar experiences of Jews in America and Europe. Its most striking characteristic is the degree to which, prior to the Nazibaiting period, it was essentially ignored. Before World War II, and particularly before 1920, East European Jews, who had comprised a good deal of turnofthecentury immigration, were considered entirely unassimilable into mainstream American culture and so were basically ignored by the publicschool curriculum. Indeed, as late as 1976, Schwartz and Isser note, most elementaryschool textbooks offered only token notice of Jews or other minority groups and so offered either stereotypes or virtually no role models for pupils. The implications of failure of children to assimilate on one hand and an insistence upon submerging the Jewish culture on the other are discussed in a study of elementary education of Jewish children in Weimar Germany (19201932), wh

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waste of generations conveyed. The facts of Holocaust history are such that as victims, many Jews, particularly the children, could not so much act as be acted upon. This is plainly the image of the historical photographs, and it is reflected in much fictionalized treatment of the children of the Holocaust. What writers bring to the storytelling enterprise, then, is an attempt to explain the psychology that drove the European gentile culture to cooperate in the victimization of the European Jewish culture. The portrayal of Jewish child as victim occurs in such juvenile novels as Lowry's Number the Stars, in which, during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, the family of a 10yearold Danish Christian girl takes in her best friend, a Jewish girl, and helps the Jewish family escape to Sweden. Lowry takes her text from the record of ordinary Danish citizens and resistance fighters who helped Danish Jews escape the Nazis, and she makes the Christian girl the young heroine of the novel. In some fictional treatments of the Holocaust, the Jewish child as victim is accompanied by a more proactive or heroic Jewish child. To put it another way, the fate of the children becomes material for melodrama. The popular novel Holocaust by
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Approximate Word count = 3843
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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