Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children's Literature

Part I: Crossing and Dwelling

Part I Crossing and Dwelling This page intentionally left blank >> 27 Afterlives of Moses and Miriam Exodus journeys provide a narrative foundation for writing and reading African Americans and Jews as pilgrims and pioneers; the making of homes brings us to a Victorian mode of containing difference and expressing religious cultures according to recognizable tropes. The two chapters that follow show how “crossing” and “dwelling” metaphors drive these religious narratives .1 We thus move from the introductory survey of chapter 1 to the push and pull of migration within and to the United States, followed by the makings of American homes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter 2, “The Unbearable Lightness of Exodus,” considers how the trope of exodus is present in both literatures, ranging from echoes of exodus in Jewish immigration stories to African American texts on the Middle Passage and slavery. Chapter 3, “Dwelling in Chosen Nostalgia,” shows how domestic imagery figures in the telling of each group’s past and an idealized hearthside vision that glosses over moments of trauma; domestic objects are used to make painful histories more accessible to children. For both Jewish and African Americans, the biblical book of Exodus— with its story of slavery, liberation, and travel—is a central text, one that has been worked and reworked in countless genres and that has influenced political movements, liturgy, song, and celebration.2 Although some texts below directly reference the book of Exodus, the evocations of exodus are usually subtle ones. Moses, as a charismatic, legendary prophet of the Israelites, and Miriam, his sister, who is revered as prophetess in recent feminist theologies, are each present in these literatures, both explicitly and submerged into various avatars. The afterlives of Moses and Miriam range from resonances in the experiences of immigrants on their way to the United States to rereadings of 28 << Part I Exodus by slaves who attempt to flee Southern plantations. In this way, the making of religious meaning can be an “aquatic” process, one that fluidly uses biblical tropes to understand history and practice.3 Miriam and Moses both carry traces of otherness, of being strangers in a foreign land, in their symbolism. In this way, their literary afterlives are fertile ground for fathoming identity through the lenses of transnationalism and hybridity; they provide a means of questioning, “beginning with the moment when the citizenindividual ceases to consider himself as unitary and glorious but discovers his incoherence and abysses, in short his ‘strangenesses.’”4 This theme of strangeness continues into chapter 3, which emphasizes stories of dwelling, of making homes in spite of suffering. Crucially, the nostalgia of domestic rhetoric in African American and Jewish children’s books both reinforces and attempts to obliterate this sense of being set apart. Unlike Moses and Miriam of the biblical exodus narrative, who do not enter the Promised Land, Moses and Miriam as identity symbols do inhabit American domestic imaginaries, sustaining a memory of motion even generations after their figurative descendants have settled down. In readings of many picture books, we will see how textiles, food, and family all combine to create ideally chosen homes in children’s literature. Here, issues of material culture and gender are highlighted in images of dwelling as religious Americans, which becomes a way of claiming hybrid identities and creating a heritage. ...