Children of War
Rosenblatt, Roger
CHILDREN OF WAR Roger Rosenblatt / Anchor Press / $13.95 Jack Beatty You are fishing off a pier in Haiphong harbor when a boat loaded with people sails past your perch; you leap for it; and 52...
...Roger Rosenblatt has crossed that gulf, and if you read his book, it will make these children part of your life...
...When the Israelis invaded Lebanon and laid siege to Beirut, Mr...
...His conclusions are complex though on the whole he thinks the children of war are bearing up well...
...And the boy's head comes off...
...It created an immediate literary sensation and won the prestigious Polk Award for reporting...
...You will be the better for it...
...You might be any one of these children, or your children might be, but for a gulf between you and them called America...
...They make you pull a ring at the end of one of the ropes...
...Or you are the baby called "Palestine," born in a "caesarean section by explosion" when Israeli jets bomb your West Beirut neighborhood (there are PLO offices there), killing your mother but splitting her side open wide enough so that you can roll out, wrapped in her placenta...
...Or you are an Israeli girl living in the Galilee town of Qiryat Shemona when the terrorists come and murder eight of your friends...
...slowly the nickelodeon starts up...
...But their recoil from all thought of revenge will seem to you a precious human victory over barbarism, even if it lets the barbarians off scot-free...
...Usually they murder out of theory but this time it is out of rage...
...Here is a patch of him at his best...
...To be sure, you may not come away agreeing with the children that good should be returned for evil...
...The passage builds to that ecstatic image of the children whirling high above Belfast, transcending while their ride lasts its dangers and divisions...
...In his essays, for that magazine and others, he has displayed the gift of being able to write about his own childhood with a candid sensitivity...
...Rosenblatt had pressed the children more on this point: had asked how goodness can stop a fiend like Pol Pot, for example...
...In Children of War he mixes reportage with moral reflection, light moments with dark, details that mean nothing with images that seem to mean everything...
...Rosenblatt first broached the idea of this book-to travel to the places on this earth where warfare is endemic and find out how the children who were born onto these wars are doing...
...Or you are a Cambodian girl and it is the evil time of Pol Pot and you are working on a Khmer Rouge mobile squad when one of the boys in your group refuses to harvest any more rice...
...and the chains that hold the swings grow taut until they parallel the ground...
...it forms the last paragraph of the Belfast chapter: By eight o'clock the sky is black, and the city pops on in a fluorescent amber...
...One night you hear the captain plotting to kill and then eat you...
...It has a noise, this city, like a train or a wail...
...All this makes him an ideal writer on children...
...The other acts of transcendence Roger Rosenblatt describes lie in the moral realm, in the children's refusal of hatred, and in the realm of thought, in his struggles to make sense of what he has seen...
...He sacrifices the appearance of knowing all the answers, an occupational necessity for most journalists, making do instead with wit, self-irony, and openness...
...There are ropes attached to it...
...Rosenblatt was settled and done with the children of war...
...Rosenblatt is a deft stylist...
...You are a ten-year-old boy...
...He says somewhere that children make better witnesses to the truth than to the facts...
...This makes the soldiers angry...
...They place a device over the boy's head...
...Roger Rosenblatt is a Senior Writer for Time...
...But no...
...The least pontifical of journalists, he approaches the spurious mysteries of the public world rather as a child, or a poet, might: from odd angles, taking nothing for granted, asking unsettling basic questions...
...Remarkably, his wife urged him on, saying he had to go "into the fire" to empathize fully with the children...
...Someone throws a sack over your head, but at the last moment the captain decides to let you live...
...A Time cover story based on this journey appeared in 1982...
...This behind him, you would think that Mr...
...Suddenly the children are on their sides in the air, whirling above Belfast, impelled from the center by centrifugal force...
...Slowly the machine turns...
...He did and from the experience learned not only about children but about himself and the human condition of war...
...The place is packed, the faces glowing orange and red in the wild spinning lights...
...Rosenblatt felt he had to go out there to check on his children-had they been turned into haters, been killed or wounded, driven mad...
...Tonight the carnival's noise prevails...
...Perhaps the highest praise of his book is to say that this is true of him as well...
...At the giant revolving swing a man solemnly takes tickets and the children mount the seats in pairs...
...Indeed, you may wish that Mr...
...Jack Beatty is a Senior Editor at the Atlantic...
...Later in the journey a boy dies-or is he killed?-and when the captain orders you to eat a strip of his flesh, you do as you are told...
...On the way fights break out and people are thrown overboard...
...Note how the noise of the Beech-mount carnival "prevails" over the noise of the city, as its spirit doesover the city's discords...
...and 52 days later arrive in Hong Kong...
...Imagine, therefore, the whoops of delight that went up at Time when Mr...
...He did his researches, in the summer of 1981, in Belfast, Israel, Lebanon, Thailand (where he met with refugees from the Cambodian genocide), and Hong Kong (where he met with refugees from Vietnam...
Vol. 16 • December 1983 • No. 12
