The Travail of Jewish Children's Literature

Ethnic interests control a significant segment of current children's literature. This fad is readily reflected in conferences and conventions, in journals, in book reviews, and advertisements. Black literature, once the principal ethnic mode, now must share the stage with tales and traditions of Chinese, Chicanos and Chippewas, Poles and Puerto Ricans, Apaches, Italians and Eskimos. No group is too remote or numerically insignificant not to appeal to the outranging appetities of the general reader, and classroom reading fare often resembles a literary soup line ready to serve up all kinds of minority customs and adventures. Peculiarly inconspicuous in this harvest of cultures are the Jews, the people of the Book themselves. Jews, unlike some groups currently enjoying expanded literary coverage, are a people long associated with the production of books, and yet they make only a feeble contribution to the present ethnic extravaganza.

The offerings in Jewish children's literature are impressive neither quantitatively nor qualitatively. A recent issue of Judaica Book News, a semi-annual periodical devoted to blazoning anything in print which is even remotely Jewish, lists some twenty-five titles under the heading "New and Forthcoming Books: Books for Young Readers." Ostensibly this might appear to be a respectable amount for a twice yearly listing, but the editors of necessity made the subject quite elastic in order to secure sufficient numbers to allow children's literature to qualify as a legitimate category.

Among the titles considered juvenile Judaica are a book on the Crusades; a study of the Arab world in the twentieth century; a biography of Felix Mendelssohn (who was not a Jew); a volume comparing ten religions; and a story describing certain archaeological finds. All of these books bear only the most ephemeral relationship to things Jewish. If the crusades, the Arabs, and a composer with a Jewish grandfather are directly relevant to Jewish literature, then by the same standards books on suburban white America would be of immediate relevance to blacks, and sexist literature of considerable appropriateness to everyone interested in women's liberation. Some other titles on the list are more nearly related to Jewish concerns but are hardly evidence of any creative flourish. Among these marginal literaria are a pop-up book on Noah's ark, some retellings of three Bible stories, a reissue of the Children's Passover Haggadah, and biographies of Helena Rubenstein and David Sarnoff.

There is of course a biography of Eliezer ben Yehudah and his fanatical but successful struggle to revive Hebrew as a spoken language, and there is The Upstairs Room by Johanna Reiss which recounts the adventures of two young Dutch girls in hiding from the Nazis, an apparent expansion of the Anne Frank tradition. But the remainder, including two quasi-textbook studies of Judaism, Jewish holidays and Israel, and two picture books catering to the fashion for nostalgia by depicting bygone eras of Jewish life in America, are hardly very exciting literary ventures. And allowing for inevitable omissions, therein lies the bulk of what might be generously labeled Jewish literature for children during one half year.

While it may be argued that I have selected but a single issue, and that the catalog, if complete and accurate, may simply reflect a particularly lean year, almost any librarian, bookseller, educator or concerned parent will confirm that the famine in Jewish children's literature is one of long standing, so long in fact that it is difficult to recall good times. The recently published Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971) devotes some fifteen full pages (including several of charts and illustrations) to an article on children's literature, but the assemblage is noteworthy for the paucity of familiar authors and memorable titles. True, there are such notables as Israel Zangwill, Chaim Nachman Bialik and Isaac Leib Peretz, but neither Zangwill's Prince of Schnorers nor Bialik's Tales of King Solomon can rate as classics comparable with The Wind in the Willows, The Wizard of Oz or A Child's Garden of Verses. Possibly the most famous achievement by a Jewish author in the field of juvenile literature is Bambi by Felix Saiten (1869...