The Nation and the Child: Nation Building in Hebrew Children's Literature, 1930–1970 by Yael Darr (review)

It is an old but important question: How does children's literature provide a location to teach, form, even indoctrinate children in the values of their culture and nation? Yael Darr's The Nation and the Child surveys the ways in which leading Israeli children's writers and the editors and publishing houses that supported them did just that.

Darr brings considerable expertise to her project. Her first and second books treated aspects of this question, focusing first on children's literature produced in the Yishuv (pre-state Jewish settlement) and second on the political institutions that created a canon for children based on the Labor movement's ideals. The present volume extends Darr's research into the 1950s and 1960s; as she points out, the process of nation building—and the critical importance of children's literature in that project—did not end after the State of Israel was established.

Darr's work covers a wide-ranging set of topics. These include the role of educational systems and newly formed state institutions in the production of children's literature, finding political platforms for its dissemination, and designating a "national poet" specifically for children. The Nation and the Child also explores how children's literature served to provide explanatory models for establishing national rituals, traditions, and celebrations. We read about the influence of the Second World War and the Holocaust in the construction of both war narratives for children and models for how survivors could or should be integrated into Israeli culture. Darr addresses all of these questions and more, neatly weaving essential historical data into her narrative.

Darr's book details the emergence of Hebrew children's literature well before the creation of the State of Israel. Late in the nineteenth century, Zionist leaders worked to establish Hebrew not simply as the language of sacred texts, but also as a living language of a new nation. Early Hebrew literature was meant to create a "new Jewish child," modern, open to other cultures, but in possession of a national spirit. Once ensconced in the kibbutz movement, Hebrew children's literature became critical to the socialist project: the young heroes whom the books and poems portrayed cast off their parents' diasporic inheritance—including the Yiddish language—and became the agents, emissaries, even missionaries for Zionism.

While the kibbutz and the collective are presented in early Hebrew children's literature as the antithesis to presumably thoroughly depressing conditions for children in the Diaspora, "apolitical literature" also emerged for Yishuv children, including nonsense literature, humorous rhyming tales, and lyric poetry. The selection as national poet for children of Hayim Nahman Bialik, a writer who offered children positive portrayals of Jewish life in Europe, proved that hard and fast boundaries between socialist agendas and the larger European Jewish past would be difficult to maintain. The Labor movement eventually claimed Bialik for its own, even when its publications for children distorted his words in order to present him as especially and particularly close to the movement's schools.

Darr's book documents the efforts of specific "taste setters" such as modernist and children's author and editor Lea Goldberg, who promoted and wrote children's literature that could be aesthetically pleasing while simultaneously depicting and challenging kibbutz life. But Darr continues to note the compelling ties that Hebrew children's literature must have to the nation-building project. A centuries-old Jewish holiday such as Shavuot could—with the help of children's authors—be transformed into a secular harvest celebration celebrating the Zionist collective. Folksongs could be created by authors who self-consciously never signed their names to their work, thus creating the illusion of a literary tradition namelessly handed down to the present generation. And so on.

As Darr points, out, Hebrew children's literature would eventually have to "make amends" to Yiddish after the Holocaust and abandon the dismissal of the Diaspora that...