Last update - 00:00 05/01/2007
Not fairy tales, these grim tales
By Dina Porat
"Umisafsal halimudim lukachnu: hayishuv lenochach shoah ulikrat medina besifrut hayeladim heretz-yisraelit, 1939-1948" ("Called Away From Our School-Desks: The Yishuv in the Shadow of Holocaust and in Anticipation of Statehood in Children's Literature of Eretz Israel, 1939-1948") by Yael Darr, Magnes Press, 287 pages, NIS 84
Dr. Yael Darr's first book - which explores literature and newspapers written and published for children in Eretz Israel from the beginning of World War II until the establishment of the State of Israel - deliberately analyzes what authors and educators wrote rather than how the books and stories were received by children, an issue that we have no way of examining in retrospect. The basic question underlying the book is therefore what message those authors and educators wanted to convey to Hebrew-reading children in Palestine during the war and the Holocaust. In that sense, Darr's book contributes to the public and academic discussion of how the Yishuv (Jewish settlement in Palestine) responded to the fateful events in Europe, and of how national identity was consolidated prior to 1948.
The book is a welcome surprise for several reasons. First, it is a detailed and thorough academic study (conducted under the supervision of Prof. Zohar Shavit), clearly structured and fluently written, very different in style from the complex writing and frequent usage of non-Hebrew terms favored by many literary scholars and critics. Second, the book mentions and cites children's books and newspapers that were a part of growing up here in the 1940s, and the encounter with them brings back memories of hearing them read aloud by parents. Some of these books have become enduring classics and are still read fondly today.
Yet the book also contains weightier surprises. The author herself seems to have been surprised by her findings, as also happened to me when, more than two decades ago, I began to study the response of the Yishuv population to the Holocaust and its survivors. The prevalent beliefs after the war - a belief still common today - were that the Yishuv responded to the Holocaust with indifference, if not downright alienation rooted in the negation of the Diaspora; that news of the Holocaust was published in the local papers only reluctantly, and that editors communicated to their readers the impression that the reports were perhaps even wildly exaggerated; that the Yishuv was focused on itself and its future plans and that the practical public response, in the sense of gathering the means to carry out rescue operations, was out of all proportion to what was happening in Europe and therefore failed miserably. When I probed deeply into the documents, however, I discovered a different reaction, on which more below.
Darr, who likewise started out within that same general opinion, found that up until 1939 books and magazines intended for children (Davar layeladim was the leading one) conveyed to their young readers the image of a dark and gloomy Diaspora containing no hope for the Jewish children living there. This contrasted to the sun-tanned children living in Eretz Israel - an image that reflected the disparagement of the Diaspora. However, Darr also discovered that the beginning of the war brought about an abrupt change: Almost every book or magazine, she stresses, contained a story, poem or some information about the Holocaust and the children in Europe, and from a new perspective: The books and stories written from 1939 on abandoned the model of dismissing the Diaspora and, by providing as much information as possible, tried to foster in the children of the Yishuv empathy toward the children suffering overseas. The writers, some of them leading authors and poets, worked under the assumption that children had to know what was going on, especially so that they might prepare for the task of welcoming the others when they made it to Palestine - even if they came in order to escape death, and not because their parents had previously been Zionists.
No protection
The information given to children was indeed copious and detailed. It included accounts not only of hunger and cruelty, but of the actual murder of children, without making an attempt to protect the young reader. It is important to remember that the war broke out after three years of bloody clashes in Palestine, which were reported in the press and discussed in every household. And still, this approach was incompatible with the attitude that prevailed in the general Hebrew press in Palestine until late 1942, where reports of what was happening in Europe were scrutinized and doubted, since they related to the annihilation of the families, communities and movements that the immigrants had left behind when they came to Palestine. Most of the Yishuv had come from Europe, and especially from Eastern and Central Europe, between 1933 and 1939.
This demographic data make clear why writers for children used language and descriptions that today would have been received with genuine outrage: This, says Darr, was their way of depicting the life and terrible death of their beloved family homes, which could not have been described before due to the negation of the Diaspora. Now they could tell a reverse story, the story of a happy childhood in the Diaspora, of grandparents that their children had never known. The Holocaust now made it possible to write of them with empathy and a sense of solidarity; after all, it could have happened to children in Palestine, too, had the army of Field Marshal Rommel not been stopped at El Alamein in late 1942.
A child would hear the story from his parents - and the children's magazines assumed that youngsters heard parents discussing and debating the news quite a bit - while the parents, too, identified with the contents of the books and stories, and passed on to the children their grief for the loved ones they had lost and their anger at the cruelty with which these lives had been ended. Writers, and especially the educators among them, saw that the negation of the Diaspora had caused their children's generation to grow distant from that of their parents and siblings, even in the primary, literal sense of the family. Writing gave them an opportunity to correct this, to grieve and berate themselves for the sin of denigrating the Diaspora.
One distinctive example Darr provides is Kadya Molodowsky's famous "Pit'hu et hasha'ar" ("Open the Gate"), a veteran children's classic. Originally, it was written as the depiction of a happy Jewish wedding in pre-war Warsaw. However, toward the end of the war it was translated by poets Nathan Alterman and Leah Goldberg, and their wonderful works, along with an essay by Jacob Fichman, made the book a favorite in many homes. The original context was forgotten, and the book was welcomed as a kind of memorial for the dead - a eulogy for the Jews of Warsaw and for a happy world now lost.
Nevertheless, Darr emphasizes that Goldberg, Alterman and Miriam Yalan-Shteklis refused to write about the Holocaust for children; unlike most of the other writers, they focused on universal themes. And so the discussion of what the gazelles do at night (the subject of a famous poem by Goldberg) and Danny, the little boy who never cries (in a poem by Yalan-Shteklis), were actually conceived during the war years.
More information
At the end of 1942, after the Jewish Agency had officially declared that what was happening in Europe was systematic eradication and not just the side effects of war, children's magazines contained plenty of information about the Holocaust, more than they had before. In the two subsequent years, as the situation became increasingly dire, parents read to their children tales of the Diaspora usually ending in a lament. Such tales - surprising in light of the emphatically Zionist context of the 1940s - were legitimized by the events and suggested that the culture they described was actually that of the Yishuv, too. The characters of grandparents from "over there" appeared to communicate directly with their grandchildren in Eretz Israel, as a way of reviving the lost contact between them.
The well-known tale "Hannaleh vesimlat hashabbat" ("Hannaleh and her Sabbath Dress"), for example, was written with this objective in mind. It brings together a young girl from a moshav and an old man associated with the Diaspora; she helps him to carry his heavy load. The story became a popular folk legend, and the name of the author was forgotten. Also popular in those years were collections of letters written by European children, compiled and edited by Bracha Habas, who also put together collections of letters by members of youth movements and published them through Am Oved's Min Hamoked press. The letters express a range of emotions not usually shared with children, such as survivor guilt and the desire for vengeance, which the books and tales also explored pointedly and without reserve.
Along with the story of empathy and compassion, Darr writes, there emerged after 1942 a parallel story about the courage of children from the Yishuv - a courage that intensified as the clashes in the country worsened. In previous years the young audience had already been told to prepare for the arrival of the refugee children and to take practical action. Was this, Darr wonders, a hint from the writers to the parents who were reading aloud, and to the entire Yishuv, imploring them to do more to rescue and give shelter to the Diaspora Jews? From 1942 on children wage war directly on Germans, spies and all the forces of evil. The poem "Bimdinat hagamadim" ("In the Country of the Dwarves"), about tiny soldiers going off to war, was written by Ella Wilensky, then a soldier in the British army, and the first "Hasambah" books by Igal Mossinsohn (about a children's pre-state underground militia) are a tribute to what children might have accomplished in those days.
According to Darr, after the war ended in 1945 the two different kinds of stories merged into a single tale - a national-military lesson; children in the stories, fully informed about what happened during the Holocaust, become eager to take revenge on the Germans, whom they kill, drown and burn in no uncertain terms. They play an active part in welcoming the refugee children, while displaying the deep bonds of comrades, planning missions and keeping secrets - all distinctly military-nationalistic elements. The stories also feature the bravery of children who fought the Nazis back in Europe. Thus, for example, Yemima Avidar-Tchernovitz used the great success of her children's novel "Shmona be'ikvot ehad" ("Eight on the Track of One"), in which children catch a Nazi spy, to write "Ehad mishelanu" ("One of Our Own"), about a refugee boy who becomes an integral part of his new surroundings, as a way of emphasizing the importance of the immigrant-absorption task.
Deliberate writing?
Was this copious children's literature written deliberately, after the dilemma of what children could hear and understand had been debated and resolved? Darr stresses that the first organized discussion of these issues was held only in 1944. This point contradicts the claims that the Yishuv's attitude toward the Holocaust was determined from "above" - as a manipulative effort serving strictly Zionist interests - and it supports Darr's thesis about an intuitive-emotional writing that allowed writers to express themselves.
And another question: The context in which many of the books and poems mentioned here were written has been long forgotten, and children now hear about the gazelles and the dwarves and Hannaleh without any reference to the war or the Holocaust. Why? Darr argues that Story A (the empathetic one) and Story B (the tale of bravery) were forgotten because both were overshadowed by Story C (the story of the national lesson learned).
I would like to offer another explanation. The post-war criticism to which the Yishuv was and is still subjected, as a matter of public opinion that was rooted in self-accusation and failed to consider the circumstances of the war, the determination of the Germans and the limited resources of the Yishuv - that criticism is the reason why this sensitive, compassionate literature has been forgotten.
The writing that emerged in Eretz Israel was spontaneous, the real-time response of people who considered themselves responsible for the character and values of the next generation and for its ability to understand others, to embrace and fight for them. The criticism has pushed into oblivion not only the literature in question, but the rescue efforts and the reaction of the Yishuv. The negation of the Diaspora was indeed a distinct ideological conception, but it did not determine individual attitudes toward those living in Europe, toward family and friends. It was precisely because they feared for these people's fate that Jews living in Palestine tried to evade the significance of the news. For had this news been published and understood in full, it would have meant that the Jewish people had come to the end of the line, and that the 500,000 Jewish settlers who lived in Palestine and depended on the Diaspora would have no future either. The rescue plans did fail - not out of alienation, however, but because they never had a chance of succeeding in the first place, except on a small scale.
Yael Darr deserves high praise for bringing before the reader a forgotten piece of the past, for following the materials faithfully and for not shirking when confronted by opinions that derive not from the realities of the past, but from the disputes of the present.