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What We’re Scared Of by Keren David

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ACHUKA Book of the Day Wed 27 Jan 2021
[Holocaust Memorial Day]

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“I have written an issue book, and although I have furnished it with (I hope) engaging characters and an exciting plot, I do not care about those half as much as I care about the issue I am writing about. 

My book is about antisemitism –  my ‘issue’. It’s about an ancient hatred that murdered my great-grandfather and all his family, including a little girl that my grandmother told me about when I was a child. They’d visited my great-grandfather in Warsaw, in the 1930s, and they were begged to take the girl home with them to Wales. They refused: ‘How could we take her?’ She had no papers to come to Britain,’ my grandmother explained, still haunted decades later by the sure knowledge of that child’s fate.” Keren David

Evie and Lottie are twin sisters, but they couldn’t be more different. Evie’s sharp and funny. Lottie’s a day-dreamer. Evie’s the fighter, Lottie’s the peace-maker. What they do have in common is their Jewishness – even though the family isn’t religious. When their mother gets a high-profile job and is targeted by antisemitic trolls on social media, the girls brush it off at first – but then the threats start getting uglier. . . What We’re Scared Of is a taut thriller, a tale of sibling friendship and rivalry – and a searing look at what happens when you scratch beneath the surface.

“There are many children’s books about the Holocaust (and one famous one that shamefully buries its truth in a ‘fable’), but my book is about modern day antisemitism as well. About hate that flows through the open sewer that social media can become. About nasty girls making snotty, hurtful remarks about their classmates. About tropes and fantasy and denial, conspiracy theories and lies. And bricks through windows, assaults in the street and  attempts to murder Jews in Jewish places.” Keren David

For 10+


 

When The World Was Ours by Liz Kessler

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‘Liz’s masterpiece . . . an instant classic’ Anthony McGowan, winner of the 2020 CILIP Carnegie Medal

‘A wonderful book, half tragedy, but told with such sheer, warm humanity that it leaves you with hope’ Hilary McKay, author of The Skylarks’ War

‘I haven’t read a Holocaust book for children that’s better’ Charlotte Eyre, The Bookseller

Three young friends – Leo, Elsa and Max – spend a perfect day together, unaware that around them Europe is descending into a growing darkness, and that events soon mean that they will be cruelly ripped apart from each other. With their lives taking them across Europe – to Germany, England, Prague and Poland – will they ever find their way back to each other? Will they want to?

Inspired by a true story, WHEN THE WORLD WAS OURS is an extraordinary novel that is as powerful as it is heartbreaking, and shows how the bonds of love, family and friendship allow glimmers of hope to flourish, even in the most hopeless of times.


 

Confronting The Ovens, The Past Thirty Years – Ruth Franklin For The New Yorker

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Splendid highly-recommended long-farm article considering the way the Holocaust has been approached in children’s books, with special and lengthy coverage of Jane Yolen, and notable for referencing this 1977 article from The Horn Book:

In February, 1977, The Horn Book, a magazine devoted to literature for children, published an article by Eric A. Kimmel, with the title “Confronting the Ovens.” Kimmel laid out a taxonomy for children’s literature about the Holocaust, a genre that was then in its infancy. If the Holocaust could be pictured as something like Dante’s Inferno, a descending order of circles with the crematoriums at the very bottom, the books that existed when Kimmel made his study were situated on the middle to upper rings. They told stories of resistance, of refugees, of people under occupation—but not of the camps. Kimmel could find only one such work of fiction: Marietta Moskin’s “I Am Rosemarie,” in which a girl and her family are sent to Bergen-Belsen. Yet even they are “comparatively fortunate,” Kimmel writes, as they were spared the transports east to the extermination camps. And, of course, because they survived.

Why, Kimmel wondered, had no writer for children broached “the ultimate tragedy”? He concluded that it had to do with the irreconcilable tension between the subject and our assumptions about children’s literature. To write about the Holocaust realistically, in all its horror, violates the tacit promise of writing for young readers, he maintained: “not to be too violent, too accusing, too depressing.” At the same time, a story that won’t keep young readers up at night contradicts the historical reality. Kimmel continued, “To put it simply, is mass murder a subject for a children’s novel? Five years ago, we might have said no; ten years ago we certainly would have. Now, however, I think the appearance of a novel set in the center of the lowest circle is only a matter of time.”

Eleven years later Jane Yolen published The Devil’s Arithmetic and now has a new holocaust novel out:

Yolen’s latest work, “Mapping the Bones,” has points in common with her previous Holocaust novels, but it is also different, in a way that reflects how the genre she helped to create has changed in the three decades since. Although it uses “Hansel and Gretel” as a loose model, just as “Briar Rose” used “Sleeping Beauty,” the fantastical element operates mostly at the level of allusion, and the book unfolds as a historical novel.

>>> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/how-should-childrens-books-deal-with-the-holocaust

 

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