Children's Literature and the Holocaust - Article Review and Questions

Kremer, S. Lillian. Children's Literature and the Holocaust
Children's Literature Volume 32 (2004), 252-263.
Accessed VIA Project MUSE at Michigan State University, April 2008.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/childrens_literature/v032/32.1kremer.html

This article is actually a review of the works by two Holocaust literary critics "well versed in children's literature" (252), Hamida Bosmajian and Adrienne Kertzer. These critics, as well as Kremer, take issue with the lack of true Holocaust knowledge gained after reading literature intended for children. The article describes how both Bosmajian and Kertzer focus on multiple genres and topics related to the Holocaust in their critical collections which are intended to "influence educators to think more critically about contextualizing Holocaust readings available for young readers and should influence authors of children's Holocaust literature to produce better texts for young readers" (262-263).

This article discusses how German children's authors reconstruct their view of the events World War II and omit "the lures of Nazism that attracted prewar and wartime young Germans" (253) in an effort to keep Nazism taboo and depict the Hitler Youth as 'alienated, diminished' victims of the propagandist pull of the constructors of the atrocities of the war. The article also describes the differences between East German and West German focus in literature when the theme is surrounding World War II and the Holocaust. However, German writers were and still are not the only ones reconstructing this history or memory. Writers focusing on Jewish victims of the Holocaust tend to exclude the horrors and emphasize heroic survivals and ingenuity. This leads to "misleading emphases in narratives focusing on Christian rescue and Jewish escape and heroism" (254).

I found this review to be extremely thought provoking and very well-written. Although, I have not read the main texts being reviewed, I intend to find them. Kremer provided a very detailed look at multiple sides to the critical stances on Holocaust literature, particularly children's Holocaust literature from around the world with focus on American, German, Jewish, and Christian perspectives and authorship.

Though I did not come across this article until after selecting my texts, when I was reading the books for the TE488 final project collection, I was curious if the focus of the Jewish-American children's literature pieces pertaining to the Holocaust had the most appropriate focus in regards to the intended audience. How biased are these texts and do they really provide the most positive addition to a Jewish-American child's mental library and internalization with historical identity? Yes, I agree fully that the human will and survival is an important theme in helping to develop identity, particularly in contemporary generations of Jewish-American children, but how much so if what was being faced is a sugar-coated gloss over of the true events? How do we teach children the full truth "about the Holocaust without frightening them" (257)? How do we provide hope for the future but avoid the atypical depictions of the Holocaust in children's literature?

The overarching critiques presented in this article were that of the idea that "absent from Holocaust literature produced for young readers are pervasive virulent antisemitic propaganda, behavior of the perpetrators, and the concentrationary universe" (256). I would like to know what my colleagues and others think of this. Is this true? If so, what can we as future teachers and educated persons of multicultural and diverse literature do about this?