Tuesday April 9   14:00-15:30   Room 11

Literary Legacy: Making Sense Out Of Holocaust Literature For Children

Eve Tal

Hundreds of books dealing with the Holocaust have been published for children in the past fifty years. These include memoirs, non-fiction and fiction. Confronted with this growing legacy, how can we help children make sense of what they read and attain a more comprehensive picture of the Holocaust?

In this workshop I propose a theoretical model based on the study of children’s fiction both as literature and legacy.  Writing in The Horn Book Magazine in 1977, Eric A. Kimmel classified children's books dealing with the Holocaust according to a pattern based on Dante’s Inferno.  The death camps were at the center with the lesser rings of “Hell” ringed in ascending order: stories of Jewish resistance, stories of occupation and hiding, refugee novels, and in the outermost circle, resistance stories told primarily from a non-Jewish point of view.  At the time of his writing, Kimmel found only one children's book that touched on the ultimate tragedy, but he predicted that more would follow.

This workshop will examine Kimmel’s categories in detail, discussing examples from American, Israeli and German (in English translation) children’s literature. We will consider the addition of new categories influenced by the outpouring of children’s literature by “second-hand” witnesses, authors who are neither Holocaust survivors, nor, in many cases, the children of survivors. 

Perhaps the most striking change is the number of stories now set in concentration camps. We will look at the handling of death in the works of survivors and witnesses, examining differences in presentation and purpose.  We will also explore new categories of Holocaust literature for children which have appeared since the publication of Kimmel’s article:  post-war survival stories, allegories, and a category I call “contemporary catalysts,” in which a protagonist meant to be the young reader’s contemporary confronts the past through the catalyst of a Holocaust survivor.

This workshop will provide participants with a theoretical framework for classifying children's literature about the Holocaust. Workshop participants will contribute examples of children's books from their own cultures and receive bibliographical handouts of English and Hebrew children’s books.

Eve Tal is an independent researcher and author living in Israel.