The Year That Was: Jewish Children's Books, 1978

Rosen, Ellsworth

THE YEAR THAT WAS JEWISH CHIIDREirS BOOKS 1978 ELLSWORTH ROSEN The problem, it seems, had already surfaced in Biblical days. "Of making many books, there is no end," deplored the author of...

...Her mother runs the inn...
...The events in Germany are hardly mentioned, even though there is a strong Jewish consciousness in the family...
...New York: Farrar...
...Adapted by David Bamberger...
...Holman...
...Written for younger children, the plot revolves around a boy who believes he sees the Angel Elijah slip through the door at the Passover Seder...
...And yet they had to know...
...Isabella...
...Koehn...
...The nearest synagogue was in Plainfield, and we only went there on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, so I didn't really know much...
...Eisenberg...
...The Devil in Vienna...
...Plattsburgh: Tundra Books of Northern New York...
...And we began the lesson with the words "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people...
...New York: Greenwillow Books...
...Yet the events of the world impinge strongly on her...
...Rachel's Legacy by Hila Colman strives to portray on a teenage level the struggles of an immigrant family in the same Lower East Side setting of the early 1900's...
...The principal character, English born Ann Lindsay, is residing with a German family in 1938...
...Both the poverty of the shtetl and the richness of its Jewish life are revealed...
...Children of the World Paint Jerusalem...
...Publishers, 1978...
...I took some clothing...
...Rachel's Legacy...
...A much more benign picture of life in Russia emerges in Grandmother Came from Dworitz—a Jewish Story, by Ethel Vineberg...
...The fact that so many of their products are doomed to commercial failure almost becomes a matter of pride...
...Her Jew-ishness is an intrinsic part of her psyche, yet also a source of inner conflict, as she struggles to assert her independence from her family and her environment...
...Related to the Holocaust, but with a different focus, is The Secret Ship by Ruth Kluger and Peggy Mann...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...It was Isaiah...
...Grandma Esther is definitely vintage "Bubbie" complete with strudel-baking and quilt-making...
...M. B. Goffstein is obviously comfortable with her American Jewish milieu as portrayed in Family Scrapbook...
...Abba...
...Let us hope, however, that in future years, the vibrancy, variety and excitement of the largest Jewish community in the world will itself be more central a focus for an emerging American Jewish literature...
...One learned educator explained it this way when he was asked why the writings of certain prophets survived and others did not: "When our ancestors went into exile, into Babylon, into Rome and elsewhere, they could only take with them a portion of their literature...
...New York: Pantheon Books...
...Later, the young girl realizes that she does not know how to say a prayer for a pet dog that had died...
...The Wineglass...
...New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan...
...What was the guilt of families like Use's...
...This is a fictionalized story of a 14-year-old Ukrainian refugee boy who struggles to survive as a displaced person in Nazi Germany during the final days of the war...
...New York: William Morrow and Company...
...Three other books deserve special mention...
...The setting is Vienna in 1938, just before and after the Anschluss...
...Full of pictures, both in black and white and color, it captures both the sweep and richness of Jewish history and a good deal of the depth and uniqueness of the Jewish people...
...Hirsh...
...Even Las Vegas offers better than ten to one odds...
...We were all fearful...
...Growing Up Guilty...
...But a group came to me and asked me if I would continue to teach, even there in the Town Hall...
...Grandma Dorrie, on the other hand, is a lively flute-playing extrovert, who even has a gentleman friend to pay her court Little Lisa flows enraptured between the two worlds...
...Greene...
...Publishers know the perils full well...
...Marie...
...Were the authors of these books trying to reach an exclusive Jewish audience, or were they writing for a more general market...
...New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, Publishers...
...she argues with her husband...
...And then he added a personal vignette from his Holocaust experience that put it all into perspective...
...One wonders how frequent was the attitude of one of the grandparents who tells his daughter "I wish you to read Tanach (the Bible), my daughter, but I also wish you to read Tolstoy...
...Hila...
...Illustrated by Marilyn Hirsh...
...Use was part of the Hider Youth Movement She was the embodiment of the "typical" German...
...Every day...
...Marilyn...
...Some 2500 children's books get published in the United States each year...
...Barbara...
...Kluger...
...Many non-Jews as well as Jews will gain new insights into what it meant being Jewish in one (somewhat unlikely) section of America...
...Could that subconsciously have added to her feeling of growing up guilty...
...Ike and Mama and the Once-a-year Suit...
...But Deborah the Dybbuk—A Ghost Story—written and illustrated by Marilyn Hirsh succeeds too well in simplifying the dybbuk legend to a child's level—it ends up oversimplified...
...His goal was to plumb "the innermost recesses of the Jewish religious spirit and the Jewish national genius...
...We knew what was in store for us...
...New York: Lothrop...
...A Ghost Story...
...Doris...
...And to our good fortune: without new approaches, new insights, reexaminations and reaffirmations of basic truths, as well as explorations of new ones, we might well have perished as a people...
...Bloch...
...R my name is Rosie...
...Bettyanne...
...Is it because they feel untouched or unmarked by our present way of life...
...Snyder...
...The girl's adventures—and those of her fantasy alter ego, Rosalie—will strike a responsive chord in that age group...
...It is probably less meaningful to try to predict the winners of this year's literary "survival of the fittest" lottery than to examine the totality of the material...
...The reality, of course, is that no one really knows what will or will not achieve popularity...
...Contemporary American Jewish life is almost totally ignored and in most instances where it is part of the story, the Jewish component tends to be an incidental backdrop rather than a dominant theme...
...Finally, one book that not only is charming in its own right, but may also augur the beginning of a new trend...
...These were among my first thoughts when I opened the first of almost two dozen children's books on "Jewish" subjects that have been published in 1978...
...Ellsworth E. Rosen is Director of Public Relations for the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston...
...Hanukah Money...
...Clearly the most definitive book on the Holocaust to come out this year is Hitler's War Against the Jews, a young reader's version by David A. Altshuler of Lucy S. Dawidowicz's War Against the Jews 1933-1945...
...Less than 10 per cent survive the second year, as a visit to a bulging "remainder" shelf in a book store will attest...
...Inc., 1978...
...Illustrations by Susan Jeschke...
...It may have been that way for many...
...A Mitzvah is Something Special by Phyllis Rose Eisenberg, depicts a contemporary young girl with two grandmothers...
...New York: Walker and Company...
...Soon he would die, my grandmother too, and what would happen...
...Perhaps more than any other people, Jews were forced to select which writings deserved immortality...
...Selected Bibliography Aleichem...
...The pogroms carried out separately by both Ukrainian and White soldiers foreshadows the horrors of the Holocaust It's a personal story, complete with family pictures, that dramatically underscores the reasons why Russian Jews so urgently wanted to emigrate...
...More than mere curiosity is involved...
...The melting-pot atmosphere of the Bronx of 1918 pervades Ike and Mama and the Once-a-Year Suit by Carol Snyder...
...New York: Behrman House...
...What does get written—and published, therefore—reflects not only individual literary merit...
...On the other hand, their perspective tends to be limited to their own "part of the elephant...
...The sprinkling of Yiddish words and phrases, along with an ethnic lilt when the characters speak to each other, impart a Jewish flavor...
...Understandably, a much harsher verdict of German guilt comes from Isabella Leitner in Fragments of Isabella, a Memoir of A uschwitz...
...It begins as follows: "On the Jewish High Holy Day, Yom Kippur, Neither my little brother nor I went to school" Later on: "Our temple was sixty miles away, My father drove us there to hear the organ play, before the rabbi rose and said: 'This is the day of God' " Although this is the only one of the vignettes with a Jewish theme, it has, like the others, the ring of honesty...
...Cohen...
...The title comes from an accusation hurled at 12-year-old Hershy Marks that he murdered Jesus...
...1 is an outstanding example of how history can be made alive for teenagers...
...The urge to write—and have one's words printed—was clearly ingrained in our ancestors...
...The Lincoln Brigade songs were singable, meaningful, and, in their day the epitome of liberal chic...
...One memorable passage interrupts the story halfway through...
...Lee & Shepard Company...
...One can quarrel a bit about the format and the frequent interruptions of the narrative to deal with related issues...
...Manya's Story by Bettyanne Gray is an arresting example of the Jewish "roots" syndrome in full sway...
...I reached into my suitcase...
...How significant is it that so many of the books were put out by recognized commercial publishers—not by already established Jewish houses...
...Almost a dozen of the books seek to recapture the "old days" either in the Russian shtetl of the early 1900's, or, curiously enough, the transplanted shtetl of immigrant Jews in America...
...New York: Bantam Books...
...With what message, if any...
...Will there be many American-born parents capable of capturing the lilt of the Yiddish nonsense verse "Eingeh, beingeh, stupeh, tseingeh...
...Only a handful have the earmarks of "long-timers," which confirms the hazards of book publishing cited earlier...
...Illustrations by Charles Robinson...
...My People...
...One is Children of the World Paint Jerusalem, a colorful compilation of children's pictures selected from thousands of drawings submitted as part of the tenth anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem...
...Displaced Person...
...The events of the summer of her German soldier still figure heavily in her mind...
...a Jewish Story...
...Or is it simply that we do not yet have enough perspective...
...The Murderer...
...It is an understated book...
...It is not an "atrocity" book as such, but the horrors of the Appels, the hunger, the marches, the constant presence of death, scorch each page...
...In Face of Danger...
...Peggy...
...Colman...
...Books are one of those tools, particularly in the formative years...
...Only some of the words remain Abba Eban's, whose 500 page history published 10 years ago served as the basis for this volume...
...She understands the dilemma of a German family who hides two Jewish girls in its attic...
...This is the kind of book one hopes will be widely read...
...It's the kind of book that will and should undoubtedly end up on coffee tables from coast to coast...
...Like most people of that age, 15-year-old Susan Green is more concerned with what's happening in her own life...
...Two books for the very young (four to eight, according to one book jacket) color the shted with the rosy hues of the first act of "Fiddler on the Roof...
...Without foreknowledge, the marketplace itself becomes the barometer of literary mint...
...To what extent did the whims, egos and psyches of the authors—and their publishers, of course—influence the decisions...
...Bette Greene writes well, and this introspective narrative of a girl's transformation into a woman will undoubtedly attract a wide audience...
...Eban...
...Twice a day the people saw us...
...But so slight an awareness of what was happening in Germany...
...The Holocaust from another point of view (for that, read "non-Jewish") is presented in Displaced Person, by Marie Halun Block...
...Rosie is an 11-year-old girl living in "Waterbridge Inn" in New Jersey...
...For as formal modes of Jewish education become less and less significant, as the family itself becomes less cohesive a unit, informal tools of transmission take on added meaning...
...It also gives a picture of poverty during the Depression years of the 1930's...
...Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Company...
...The economics of publishing— particularly children's books—represents a strange blend of idealism, luck, and calculated stupidity...
...The concept that it is the consumers of literature, not the critics, who ultimately determine quality and durability is refreshing and peculiarly Jewish...
...Orgel...
...New York: Harper and Row...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...New York: Behrman House...
...Early on, we learn that "Aunt Faye celebrated Christmas, even though she was Jewish, like us...
...It is also a reflection of the milieu in which Jews find themselves in America in the late '70's...
...As a result, they take on added believability and poignancy...
...Of making many books, there is no end," deplored the author of Ecclesiastes...
...It is a story of courage and daring and deserves retelling...
...It serves as testimony to their altruism and artistic integrity...
...Filled with authentic pictures, background "sidebars," presentations of "issues and values," it tells the story with unusual thoroughness and depth for readers of this age level...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...Dates are played down...
...New York: Lothrop...
...New York: Harper and Row...
...If one becomes numb when contemplating 6,000,000, one cannot be untouched by the story of one family and two Jewish teenage girls cowering in an attic...
...They took the Torah...
...This adaptation for children meets the goal impressively...
...Mara...
...Introduction by Ayala Gordon...
...Vineberg, Ethel...
...She is an eyewitness to Kristallnacht...
...Would their ideas and beliefs die...
...A Passover Story...
...David A. Hitler's War Against the Jews...
...There are forwards by Danny Kaye and Mayor Teddy Kollek, but the drawings themselves are the attraction...
...The Secret Ship...
...Carol...
...The Devil in Vienna by Doris Orgel concentrates on the friendship of a Jewish girl and the daughter of a Nazi...
...Second Degree...
...It is important to be reminded that others suffered during those times as well...
...New York: Bantam Books...
...He lives in a Pennsylvania mining town in the early 1930's and his fight to understand and relate to some of his prejudiced Polish classmates reflects both honesty and deep understanding of the various human forces at work...
...There is an affirmation of life throughout, particularly after her liberation from the camps and eventual marriage...
...And if you asked them now, not a one would admit it...
...Fragments of Isabella...
...Phyllis Rose...
...They also included certain prophets...
...Patty Bergen is now 18 years old and graduating from her Jenkinsville, Arkansas, high school...
...Shepard Company...
...Felice...
...New York: Holiday House...
...When I was in Birn-baumel, they used to march us skeletons through the streets every morning and every night to dig tank traps against the Russians...
...Would it be a different message if the audience were primarily Jewish—"in the family," so to speak...
...Illustrated by Uri Shulevitz...
...Translated and adapted by Uri Shulevitz and Elizabeth Shub...
...Gray...
...Ruth and Mann...
...Schwartz...
...Illustrations by Rita Briansky...
...Manva's Storv...
...Closer to today's generation—or at least, the parents of today's generation—is The Murderer by Felice Holman...
...Her parents—once active Social Democrats—chose to be totally apolitical, concentrating on mere survival...
...Ruth Kluger was a 25-year-old Palestinian Jew who was in charge of the illegal ship Hilda...
...These questions are not answered, probably because they cannot be...
...They had to make choices...
...The author of two children's books, he prepared this article for moment in honor of Jewish Book Month...
...Clearly, there are enough books in the 1978 crop to permit several rewarding choices for Chanukah gift-giving and for library-stocking...
...Norman...
...Two trends stand out sharply: a large number of "nostalgia" books and an equally large number of Holocaust-related stories...
...He still maintains after all that has happened that "many of the non-Jewish people of Germany were good and decent— not all of them approved of the brutality and misery which in the end they were unable to stop...
...This may not be what committed Jews want to hear, but, it does reflect a typical contemporary pattern...
...Those who read Bette Greene's Summer of My German Soldier or saw its recent television dramatization will be particularly interested in its sequel, Morning is a Long Time Coming...
...New York: Doubleday...
...Morning is a Long Time Coming...
...Written with a younger audience in mind, this is a gentle and informative, though somewhat sparse, recounting of one family's history starting in 1820...
...The human point made here is that not all Germans were participants...
...His outlook, reminiscent of Anne Frank, is a positive one...
...Communism, fascism, the Spanish Civil War are the emotion-evokers...
...It's a "with it" story that combines nostalgia with believable current Jewish living and solid Jewish values...
...One of the seven brief tales deals with Yom Kippur...
...This is the recounting of a true story involving the rescue of 700 Jews from Nazi Europe shortly after the outbreak of World War II...
...Nevertheless, the epilogue tells of an encounter with some Germans in 1975...
...Rosten...
...Now a professor at Bristol University in England, Hannam recalls his growing-up years in Nazi Germany as well as his experiences in England after his escape in 1939...
...Mischling...
...Hannan...
...Charles...
...I pulled out the book...
...Publishers...
...But once one comes to terms with the method of presentation, the substance is first-rate, particularly the inclusion throughout of explanations of Jewish traditions and ethical values...
...Have you ever heard a German say he knew about the camps...
...Straus...
...Subtitled "The harrowing account of a Jewish family's ordeal in revolutionary Russia," and designed for teenagers, it is a fictionalized account of Manya Polevoi and her family in a Ukrainian shtetl, starting in 1917...
...In terse but poetic language, she describes her experiences after being sent to Auschwitz from a Hungarian ghetto in May 1944...
...Grandmother came from Dworitz...
...There is more than usual emphasis on people—not just the warriors and kings, but the prophets, thinkers, and philosophers as well...
...And it is a microcosm of the ideas that will inform a future generation of American Jews—the next generation, in fact...
...What happened to Hannam, he states in the foreword, "is a small detail of the great catastrophe...
...I thought of his believing," the boy reflects about his grandfather, "believing, year after year, when everywhere around him the world was changing...
...A different aspect of life in the late 1930's, ending just after Pearl Harbor Day, is pictured in Growing Up Guilty by Sheila Schwartz...
...Bette...
...A Mitzvah is Something Special...
...Mama Greenberg is the quintessence of fictional Jewish Mama-hood: all knowing, tyrannical, shrewd in her shopping skills, but underneath, the inevitable loving heart...
...Shtetl-like in tone, but with a Lower East Side New York setting, is The Wineglass, A Passover Story by the poet playwright and novelist Norman Rosten...
...Stories of individual acts of bravery and love testify that there were those who cared...
...Deborah the Dybbuk...
...Many of the "teenage" books dealing with the Holocaust published this year are personal recollections...
...Sheila...
...And I looked at my collection of books and chose just one...
...A Memoir of Auschwitz...
...Did they know the full extent of grimmer horrors others experienced...
...Illustrations by Allen Davis...
...Sholem...
...A precursor of the "publish or perish" syndrome was, perhaps, at work...
...The expedition to buy suits for 14 boys from East 136th Street has warmth and humor, with all the exotic flavor designed to entice a generation nurtured on the blandness of suburban shopping malls...
...Hanukah Money, a story by Sholem Aleichem, translated and illustrated by Uri Shulewitz is enhanced by its appealing, stylized illustration...
...One wishes that more writers would also look about them rather than concentrating so exclusively on the past...
...It captures both the feelings of a growing boy in his impressionable bar mitzvah year as well as the cross currents of an American in transition during the 1930's...
...A Bov in that Situation: An Autobiography...
...Altshuler...
...Similar in tone and time frame is In Face of Danger by Mara Kay which appeared in this country last year after being published in Great Britain under the title Storm Warning...
...M. B. Family Scrapbook...
...A Mitzvah is Something Special shows what can be done when present-day American Jewish life is handled by an imaginative author...
...Leitner...
...Both girls are 13, but with full knowledge of the seriousness of the events swirling around them...
...The story is compelling, and goes beyond the suspense of "can they get out in time...
...Publishers were obviously banking on the enormous carry-over impact of two recent television series, "Roots" and "Holocaust," to help garner readers...
...My People, Abba Eban's History of the Jews, Vol...
...Kay...
...Can one really derive weighty conclusions from the happenstance of a single year's output...
...Mischling Second Degree by Use Koehn recounts the story of a young girl growing up in Germany during World War II...
...Goffstein...
...So is television: much less demanding, less involving, more passive, but also more pervasive—and perhaps more persuasive as well...
...One understands her suffering in the air raids, the terror she felt when the Russians came into Berlin...
...I remember that first night particularly...
...She found out after the war that she was a mischling— that one of her grandparents was Jewish...
...New York: Crown Publishers...
...Another book originally published in England is A Boy in That Situation, an autobiography by Charles Hannam...
...However, for a book that wants to convey the message that money is not so important, it spends a long time discussing this subject...
...By the time I had concluded my assignment, a number of questions had surfaced as well...
...Giroux...
...some were bystanders caught up in the maelstrom...
...There are hazards in generalizing in this fashion...
...When the Nazis came into our town in Hungary, they told us to pack one suitcase and gather in the Town Hall...
...The Jewish component is virtually non-existent in My Name is Rosie by Barbara Cohen...
...If the publishers knew, they would have a bestseller each time...

Vol. 4 • December 1978 • No. 2


 
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