The Curious Conflation of Hanukkah and the Holocaust in Jewish Children's Literature

In recent years, a large number of Jewish children's books have twinned Hanukkah stories with Holocaust narratives. What brings these two groups of narratives together, and what meanings are provoked by their combination? In this article, I examine several children's selections, dating from 1990 to the present, through the lenses of memory studies and Bakhtinian literary criticism, focusing on three major themes: the interplay of trauma and nostalgia, the representation of intergenerational dialogue, and the use of literary artifacts to bridge time. I argue that the literary conflation of these two events results in an historical flattening, eliding the substantial differences between these two moments of persecution; at the same time, I attend to the sometimes quite complicated and evocative moments of memory provoked by this textual linking.