Children's literature, perhaps more than any other artistic outlet, is subject to the spirit of the times, to the passing trends and the changing conventions regarding the artistic needs of its target audience, "the children of today."
With unquestioned ease, we tend to decide that an old children's book has language that is too high, illustrations that are too boring and a story that is too long and complex for today's children. The book may be too ideological and the world it portrays might not correspond with what we feel is appropriate today.
Yemima Avidar-Tchernovitz (1909-1998), was one of the most beloved and widely read children's authors here in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Some of her books became passe quickly.
In effect, already by the 1980s, her books seemed too forced, too educational, too nationalist and not politically correct, primarily in regards to gender issues.
Today Avidar-Tchernovitz is hardly read in kindergartens and many school libraries, which in the 1960s and 1970s were full of copies of her books - required reading in class - don't even have them on the shelf.
Avidar-Tchernovitz's 100th birthday, which fell on Simhat Torah, is a fine opportunity to go back and try to read her works.
Indeed, many recall fondly from their early childhood encounters with "Kindergarten Songs" which she wrote and edited with Levine Kipnis (starting in 1947), "Stories for Rami" (1936), "Muki" (1943) and "Grandma's Dove" (1963); the radio skits she wrote and aired, first on Kol Yerushalayim and later on Kol Yisrael; and from their later childhood years "Eight on the Track of One" (1945), "One of Ours" (1947), "Two Friends on the Road" (1949), which she wrote together with Mira Luba, or "Towers in Jerusalem" (1968).
But rereading Avidar-Tchernovitz's works in honor of her 100th birthday is not for the sake of nostalgia alone, as pleasant and legitimate as that may be. It is an opportunity to remind the shapers of tastes today - parents, teachers, librarians and publishers - that old children's books, with the right handling, have a lot to tell our young children.
This is specifically because of the slightly different language they use, the different messages they convey, the places that seem a bit different and even the children they depict, who talk and act differently than we do.
Avidar-Tchernovitz herself felt her books were becoming outdated and tried to revive them. Her most successful book, "Eight on the Track of One," published in 1945 and which deals with Palestine during the first years of World War II, was revised by her 50 years later together with her daughter, Rama Zuta, and republished by Keter in 1996.
The wave of irate reactions in the press which assailed the "destruction of the original" and the fact that the revised book did not sell in huge numbers, indicated that updating the old work and the attempt to adapt it to the spirit of the times were apparently not the way to go about it.
Another way to revive old children's books is to stress, and not conceal, the past, the time and place in which it was created and which it represents.
To do that, in addition to reading the books themselves, look at Avidar-Tchernovitz's "Yomanim Gnuzim" ("Hidden Diaries" 2003, Mercaz Yemima for Children and Adolescent Literature, Beit Berl, Kinneret Zmora Bitan Dvir).
This contains large excerpts from seven notebooks of journals Yemima kept starting at the age of 9 in Kiev after the Bolshevik Revolution, and ending in 1936, when she wrote as a young woman in Palestine, during the period of the Arab Revolt from 1936-1939, while she was a kindergarten teacher in Tel Aviv and a children's writer at the beginning of her career.
'Parasites and nothing more'
The book, edited with careful attention by Zuta, from the hundreds of journals Avidar-Tchernovitz left behind, is moving and riveting, both on a personal level and from a historical perspective, as well as from the perspective of the study of Hebrew children's books. So for example, Yemima at 16, then a student at the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv, describes a day in her life, Adar 23, 5686 (March 9, 1926):
"The entire gymnasium is frenzied. Everyone is getting ready for a trip. We are leaving on Sunday morning, we will visit the whole valley and also part of the Upper Galilee. I'm eagerly awaiting this trip ... Wow, how I want to visit those places. We just had a discussion in the lecture hall. H. Rabinowitz, the music teacher, talked about places in the [Jezreel Valley.] Provided a few facts. Here are the heroes, those who are building the land! And us? We are nothing. As if we are living in a foreign land. Living a life of idleness with no sense of responsibility for building the land, upholding the verse 'eat and drink,' not noticing the future. Just living, today a party, tomorrow a movie, the day after and this called living? And they, the heroes, they eat some stale bread, build the land with their blood, we are parasites and nothing more. And I thought in these moments, would I also be able to leave the city, the theaters that I enjoy and leave for such a life, to work, to leave the idea of continuing my studies and go to a village? I thought a lot and I don't know what the future will bring, but in any case, I will not continue living an empty life."
Avidar-Tchernovitz, like many other city dwellers in those days, was very fond of the settlers working the land and praised them, but chose not to join them.
After studying psychology and education in Berlin and Vienna, she started working in 1933 at Tel Aviv municipality kindergartens.
Tel Aviv, which like Avidar-Tchernovitz is also celebrating 100 years this year, was not a place in the 1930s and 1940s - when Avidar-Tchernovitz wrote many of her books - that you could write a lot about.
Children's authors preferred for the most part to glorify the people working the land and their offspring.
While Tel Aviv has benefited from years of urbanization, the kibbutz has lost some of the charm it held in Israeli society and is hardly portrayed in children's literature anymore. This fact can bode well for Avidar-Tchernovitz's stories about city life, which at the time were less popular, perhaps because of their clear urban bent.
The story "Three Diligent Girls," which was written in 1936 is not politically correct, in the sense that it relates the story of three city girls aged 4-5 who help mother and clean the house, to the delight of all.
However, it can, in a historical context, tell something about the young city of Tel Aviv and its children in the eyes of writers then.
By including older stories in our literary repertoire, stories that were once eagerly read, we are making a place of honor in our cultural agenda for the past, for its literary depictions and for the writers and children of the past, for whom the old books were intended.
