An atmosphere of anxious concern surrounds the production of Jewish books for children. Can they be counted on to make our youngsters conscious, self-respecting Jews? Or—others ask—do they stress Jewish uniqueness (or Israeli prowess) so much as to separate and estrange Jewish children from the common American life? This is a field in which ideologists, educators, group workers, social scientists, and just plain parents have done a good deal of theorizing; and quite a few bright-jacketed books have been coming off the presses. Here Isa Kapp offers some reflections on several recent representative examples. Though Miss Kapp does not claim to be an “expert” in the field, some will consider as no small qualification for her task the keen, sensitive observation of the ways of life of American Jews, adults and children, which her writing has shown, as well as the fact that she is sufficiently young to remember what it felt like to be a child. We invite comment on her opinions, and plan to print in early issues other articles, from diverse points of view, on this and other phases of Jewish children’s education.

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There was once a time when very few children’s books were published and children roamed like explorers through adult libraries, investing Dickens and Defoe with all the credulity and awe of their own fantasy world. Now it is quite the reverse: the adult treads heavily into the nursery with his own anxieties, his own obligations.

If we are to judge from a recent sampling¹ of “wholesome” (and undisguisably feminine) books for Jewish juveniles, a Jewish renaissance should flower under the leadership of children from four to nine.

The small American Jews of this sententious literature live from one holiday to the next (“As soon as Pesach was over Danny would begin asking, ‘Now will it be Shavuos?’“), are obsessed by images of Shabbes chala and candles (“I must hurry, hurry, hurry/What a worry, worry, worry/See the sun has almost set/I’ve no Sabbath candles yet”), and already long for Eretz Yisrael (“I’ll sing the holy Kiddush/And drink the holy wine/And then when I’m a real big man/I’ll go to Palestine”).

These sunny tales and verses, it is very apparent, were intended to minister to the heart’s ease of the parent rather than to the imagination of the child. (An old parental trick, to bequeath one’s guilt to one’s children.)

One can well understand the troubling sense of their own lapse from the Jewish tradition which affects the present generation of parents. Raised in an age of debunking and depression, they rebelled against an Orthodoxy that seemed to keep them from becoming (according to their politics) either true Americans or true internationalists. If they came to seders or fasted on Yom Kippur, it was only to keep the older folks from apoplexy. Two decades later, when support of Israel has become a substitute (or parallel) loyalty for a languishing social idealism, they are shame-faced Jews who hardly remember how to observe a Jewish ritual. Rushing to fill the vacuum, they make themselves familiar with Sholom Aleichem and the Hasidim, and indoctrinate their children with a vengeance. A sensitized, conscious Judaism—lore and rite—is their desperate legacy to their children, the dividends of which are meant some day to revive both parents and children as Jews.

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There is, fortunately, a close alliance between Jewish piety and Jewish pleasure: perhaps no other holidays can so gratify the actual senses as the palpable cleanliness and indulgence of Passover, the rural nostalgia of Sukkos, and the masquerading and playacting of Purim. But what child would really focus his desires and emotions on these pleasures to the exclusion of his ordinary (and, as a matter of fact, entirely absorbing) American life? In Rose Golub’s Down Holiday Lane, grandparents come to visit bearing gifts. “A lulov and esrog for Sukkos!” shout Leo and Hulda, as if they had been given a chemistry set or a 42nd Street turtle. “Ho,” chants a ritualistic little Jew, “it’s fun to be horses on Shabbes,” as if the game required sanctification. When dolls are named, it’s never Sylvia, Shirley, and Sadie: nothing less dignified than Rebekah, Judah Maccabee, or Zipporah will do.

Jewish tradition contains a rich variety of legend and custom that will directly beguile children who are exposed to it, and it is a pity to cut such natural material to the model of adult design. If the child is later to accept his Jewishness he had better simply experience it for himself from the beginning. And in the cultural medley which the American climate allows, there is every reason for him to be encouraged to experience it as fully as possible, for his earliest outlook to be colored and reinforced by a specialized knowledge and tone.

But a tone (and it seems to me the Jewish tradition consists in large part of tone—if not tam) can only be absorbed haphazardly and to a large extent unconsciously, in the gradual, thoughtless way that a child comes to know that he is American, that his home is in the city, that he is more interested in science than in music. There is a difference between overhearing a family joke and memorizing a sugared jingle, the difference between spontaneity and artifice. No city child suddenly brought into an arbor decorated with fruit and leaves needs mechanical words: “Let’s build a sukka/It’s always such fun/I know you’ll be glad/When our sukka is done.” No actor of the be-rouged and be-costumed troupe that confidently demands its Purim contributions in the neighborhood hallways will be interested in lyrical declarations: “Oh Purim’s such fun/For girls and for boys/We turn our greggars/And make lots of noise.” The real fun is to be left to one’s own devices, to stare unnoticed at busy adults, to discover unexpected gestures and voice intonations, to become a Jew by free association.

What the purist lady authors will not believe is that an American child can become a Jew despite the impure, confusing existence he leads, and in the context of the communal games, outbursts of violence, and variations of ego-display that are common to all children. Either he will be ardently and exclusively Jewish, they reason, or he is lost to us. “Dear Dick,” writes a properly raised youngster in one of these works of fiction, to his erstwhile enemy. “You remember what Miss Green said about Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. She said, all Jews are brothers. If we have any quarrels, we must make them up and be friends.” In another story, a large American flag turns up on the center wall of a sukka, apparently in irrelevant and worried concern over double loyalty. But in most cases the mixture of cultural loyalties in American life is hushed up, on the theory, supposedly, that children can learn only one thing at a time.

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In fact, however, childhood is the age of dilettantism, guiltless promiscuity, and dogged investigation. Children thrive on divided loyalties and stark contradictions. Isabel Bolton, in her novel The Christmas Tree, describes the power of the movies to enthrall a small boy’s mind: “And even when these spell-binding scenes of murder, mystery, and passion had been exchanged for the fiction and fantasy of a Disney cartoon, he had endured the transition without protest or expostulation, quite at home in this mad world where nothing could surprise but everything exhilarate . . . . Perhaps that had been . . . the beginning of his assumption that life was preparing for him an endless sequence of enthralling joys, for having learned this trick of walking back and forth, with no disturbance to his sanity, between the two dear worlds of his delight—the world, on the one hand, of Gargantuan side-splitting mirth and multiplication of merriment, and on the other, the hair-raising, the blood-curdling, the nightmare world of horrendous crimes and plots and punishments—his demands had grown exorbitant.”

If movies do not constitute the whole childish landscape, they do account for and project many of its real elements. The child who has been exposed to the flickering lure of the movies at once loses his innocence and no longer expects the world to be simple. He can now be all things to himself: swimmer and bookworm, leader and apostle, atheist and Jew. It would constitute a cultural lag to be maidenish with this stoic, to pussyfoot about violence, or about any of the facts of his world, to approach him coyly.

Nevertheless, in a story by Sadie Rose Weilerstein, the normal procedure of childbirth is mutilated by the feminine imagination: at the Sabbath dinner, the family’s voices rise up in secret wishful conception of a baby brother (“The Sabbath Queen could see them going up—in thin whirls of breath with music notes dancing in them”). Because there is so much joy in the room, an angel appears, and when it comes time for him to leave, the Sabbath Queen promises he can return to the family in the shape of a baby brother. While he is up in heaven waiting for his entrance cue, he studies the same Bible verses as his sisters-to-be on earth, but when he finally arrives he is as ignorant as a new-born babe because “the nicest part of having a baby brother is to watch him learn.” Grandma announces him: “Mother has something new for you for Rosh Hashana. I’ll give you three guesses.” It seems quite possible that such well-meant euphemisms betray a certain disgust with the human body and its emotions. Certainly children, who are much less squeamish in every sense than adults (the bloodworms, crabs, and frogs that bring a shudder to the most insensitive grown-up will be freely and lovingly handled by the most timid child), need no awkward substitutes for facts, which are a source of endless fascination to them.

Only a person who has seen the cold disdain in the eyes of a child listening to baby talk can realize how futile it must be to tell him stories of dogs who bow their heads in “Shabbat shalom,” and of foxes who run to prayer and rise for Kiddush, of birds who say their Sabbath rest. Ben-Ami, who wrote the text for The Jingle Book for Jewish Children, was shrewd enough to challenge rather than to condescend. He follows up his apparently aimless jingles with a sudden worrisome question that will plague his readers till they find the answer. After a poem identifying animals, he demands: “Can you draw a whale or a rabbit? Can you make them out of clay?” Describing the noises in Noah’s ark, he persists: “Have you ever seen a live cow?” His poem says, offhandedly: “Every lion/Has a bite/Is big and roary/Full of fight/ But every lion/Near to Daniel/Was as gentle/As a spaniel.” The question probes even further: “Do you know the story of Daniel in the lion’s den?” Most pleasing of all is the concrete materialist question that follows a dreidel song: “Is your dreidel made of wood or clay?”

Ben-Ami seems to recognize, as very few children’s authors do, that a 20th-century child, living at a heightened, nervous 20th-century pace, expects, needs, and can manipulate—even more than children of previous ages—ideas and words that are beyond his full grasp. Novelty, elusiveness, deduction, are all part of the coup he has to make on language; and in that way they become part of his natural life, and he can extend them to all kinds of knowledge, eventually to aesthetics and morals. For while the adult is generally hostile to what he does not understand (which is the trait we mean by “philistinism”), the child is by nature quite the opposite, an avant-gardist.

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My main quarrel with this library of books for Jewish children is that by worrying most about the child as a Jew, the writers have forsaken the Jew as a child, who needs to have his literature filled with varied, lively words and ingenious notions. The authors are very much in the position of girls who set themselves to find husbands in a hurry: the pressure of time and singlemindedness shove out of the way the possible accompanying graces. Thus the stories, whether domestic or legendary, are too much to the point (the point being always Jewish history or habits) to contain the luxury of charm. It can be said quite fairly that in such of these books as are for younger children there is hardly a challenging thought or an original turn of phrase. And yet it is known that children relish difficulty and like certain words for their intricate sounds. Anis Duff, who in Bequest of Wings has written very engagingly and spiritedly about her children’s reactions to books, tells how, after reading Peter Rabbit, which is full of startling or onomatopoeic words, her son (aged four), peering anxiously at one of his boats that had got washed in under a log, exclaimed to it: “I implore you to exert yourself.” Her daughter chose words for their physical characteristics that appealed to her—"torso” because of its roundness, “styptic” for (I imagine) its aggressiveness, and “lapis lazuli” probably for its exotic quality. “All words,” says Mrs. Duff, “belong to children. They choose them for their own use by the simple process of selecting the ones they need to express what they want to say . . . . Children, like the rest of us, need to be articulate, and it seems to me a withholding of what is properly theirs, to limit their experience of words to the vocabulary already possessed by an an ‘average’ child of any given age.”

Now I am not suggesting that the publishers of reading matter for Jewish children are deliberately impoverishing the vocabulary of their books, but rather that poverty is the by-product of their more serious intention. Observe the thin gruel of an instructive Jewish story:

So the next Sabbath afternoon, after Michael had had his nap—and Daddy had had a Sabbath nap too—the family set out for Paoli’s.

They walked, and they walked, and they walked—past little houses and big houses and stores and garages and vacant lots.

I never knew our street was so long, said Ruthie.

(The Paolis lived on the same street as Ruth and Debby but away down, at the other end.)

Even the sidewalks were gone now. The street had turned into a road.

See the robin, Michael, said Ruthie.

See the dandelion, etc.

Now compare this with the strong flavor and thick texture of the insouciant Peter Rabbit:

Pony Billy got out of the bog with a jump and a scramble up the steep grassy slope of the hill. Round and round and round he went underneath the oaks, always going widdershins, contrary to the sun; always leaving back and front misleading marks behind him. Six times round he went; and he saw nothing but the bluebells and the oaks. But the seventh time round he saw a little Jenny Wren, chittering and fussing round an old hollow tree.

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Language and style have never really put themselves at the service of those writers who did not court them for their own sake. They balk at the first signs of ulterior pedagogical or ideological motives. That is why, to find the best writing for children, we have to turn from contemporary, occasional stories to classics that were written simply for the pleasure of fabrication, arrangement, and diversion. And it is not until we take another look at Andersen, Grimm, Ruskin, Kipling, Milne, that we can feel sufficiently ashamed of our little drudge of a Jewish library. Andersen starts his The Snow Queen in a business-like and mystifying way:

He was an evil goblin. He was one of the very worst, for he was the demon himself.

One day he was in a very good humor, for he had made a mirror that had this peculiarity—everything good and beautiful that was reflected in it shrank to almost nothing, but whatever was worthless and ugly became prominent and looked worse than it really was. The loveliest landscapes, seen in this mirror, looked like boiled spinach, and the best people became hideous, or stood on their heads and had no bodies.

Although we know The Snow Queen to be an allegorical diatribe against science and rationalism (in the typical 19th-century spirit), we see how subservient Andersen made his polemic to his serene, affectionate prose. The magical story that makes use of the most prosaic elements of his world—flowers, snow, crows—transforms them into something inexplicably exotic and haunting. Before we are finished, we have heard of reindeer, of Lapp women and Finnish women, of cannibals and robber girls, of kindness, loneliness, and fear, and all this in the midst of adventures and a long search. Andersen may have invested his adventures with a single idea, but in his writing this idea sets no strict boundaries to thought, emotion, or language.

It is just this boundlessness which ought to be the adult’s bequest to the child. The worst affront to a childish mind, which is willing indefinitely to unfold, to absorb, to be curious—is to present it with closed spheres of experience, with concepts that are already concluded and immutable. There ought, on the contrary, to be endless avenues of possibility, all manner of conflict, and even insoluble problems, rather than permanently solved ones. No knowledge can hurt a child: he has the immunity of his age. It is a reflection of our adult anxieties to be cautious for his sake.

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The books for very young readers show a need to keep the audience at home, securely tied to the maternal apron-strings—there is a very close relation in these stories between being a good Jew and being a good child. The jovial escapades of the young very often consist of shopping, dusting furniture, and acting as long-suffering baby-sitters on permanent call. I do not want to make too great a point of the restricting effect of having so many books written by women and mothers, but the fact cannot be avoided that the larger part of the most resourceful, inventive, and experimental writing for children has been done by men.

In the group of books for older readers, the problem, as I have mentioned, is not so much one of limiting information or harping on sentimental truisms. Some volumes are carloads of geological and historical fact, but again, the facts are in the service of a conscious Jewishness and move heavily in their work of persuasion. Israeli Tales and Legends, which might, by virtue of their heroic struggles and their invocation of the miraculous, have a natural appeal, lumber under a weight of piety. In most cases the Jew, who represents the martyric Good, is put to the test of Job-like persecutions at the hands of Satanic anti-Semites. All contests are won, all evil routed, through the persistence of Jewish faith and virtue. The same morality is part even of the absorbing secular stories of Sulamith Ish Kishor, who is probably the most intelligent and original writer on Jewish subjects for children. Although, as Anna Freud has pointed out, children between eight and ten are vividly engrossed in conflicts between good and evil in the world (having recently experienced the same struggle internally), is it really useful to let Jewishness become identical with the quality of abstract goodness? It is not only that the obtruding myth violates the complexity and truth of Jewish history, but that the morality, being general and confused with national pride, can no longer be precise and personal.

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This does not mean in the least that morality (which must be distinguished from sermonizing or imposing opinions) need be pushed out of children’s literature. It does mean that moral issues had best be presented as they exist in the world, that is, in their realistic contexts and proportions, or else, possibly, in a pure symbolic form as, for example, to illustrate some Biblical text. Thus Sulamith Ish Kishor’s fairy tale The Palace of Eagles begins very simply with King Solomon’s loss of humility before God, and then, by proceeding symbolically instead of literally, becomes more and more fanciful and atmospheric, but no less authentic.

Hugh Lofting’s well-known Dr. Dolittle books are full of notions of right and wrong, but they pop up in the most practical forms, in the midst of a whirl of activity and in the context of natural sympathies. When Dr. Dolittle’s caravan of animals is a roaring success in the Canary Opera, they are suddenly faced with the problem of what to do with money, and also, since they are solicited by all kinds of industrialists, with the evils of advertising. These latter evils are demonstrated with absolute clarity and poignancy when Gub Gub, a performing pig very popular with audiences, is asked to stand in a butcher’s window and skip up and down with a rope made of pork sausages. The caravan agrees to advertise only comfortable and healthful animal equipment, thus turnning vice into virtue. But although the Dr. Dolittle books champion the weak and expose charlatans, they are basically concerned with non-moral matters, with pleasure and vanity and making a living, with the art of communication, with exploration and geniality, with alien lands and sea voyages and leisurely conversation. They constitute a humanist library, and their enduring charm suggests that we would do better to make humanists out of our children than moralists.

Two incidents from what is called real life may be relevant here.

A progressively educated child, who was recently looking for a book to borrow, found one with “Palestine” in the title, and immediately put on the face of an old woman imparting her life’s tzores.

“I don’t like books about Palestine,” he said piteously.

“Why not?”

“Because (breathlessly) Hitler is bad. Pharaoh is bad. He made people into slaves and they had to work without being paid.” (Hesitation, then a gleam of triumph.) “But Abraham Lincoln freed them!”

On another occasion, a teacher asked her class how many states there are in the union. One excited child cried out, “Forty-nine.”

“Why forty-nine?” he was asked.

“Because there is a new state, Israel, and that makes forty-nine,” was the confident reply.

At seven history was still out of focus for these children, but the power to declare allegiance and make moral judgments was in full play. It is not the adult’s function to give the child this power of judgment, but only to open locked doors, and reveal hidden rooms. Judgments and allegiances will be undertaken soon enough, but in the dominion of childhood it is more important to gratify curiosity than conscience. More than one generation of American youth has been inspired with patriotic American fervor through a reading of Kipling’s and G. A. Henty’s accounts of British imperial heroes; the same children who hiss the British when they reenact the Boston Tea Party, identify themselves with Clive of India and George Washington at one and the same time. The ability to confound simple ideologies is the test of a really good book.

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Jewish children’s literature suffers not only from the imposition of the ethical values of its adult authors, but also from their parochial intellectual standards. It is obvious, for instance, that the authors under discussion have never been told about—or else have forgotten—the impassioned, fanatical devotion of children of certain ages to machines and everything connected with them. They seem unaware that the child is by nature a mechanic and an inventor; the Disney world is his oyster because in it the logic of the mechanism takes control—the heroes are subject to the interior laws of a clock or a piano, they are hurtled through space, deflated, wound up and invigorated, all by means of mechanical devices. But a child could plow through a dozen of these books without hearing the raucous hum of a motor or seeing a sketch of a metallic object. A barren Arcadia! The single oasis is The Little Tractor That Went to Israel; but even here the reader will sense immediately that the writer’s feelings are centered not on the internal intricacies of the tractor, but on the lyrical patriotic geography of Palestine.

Children need to establish a tactile control of the universe. In order to be at home there they have to know its physical techniques: how things are constructed, why they move, and even how they smell and feel. They are inordinately fond of abandoned birds’ nests because they can find them, examine them, see how they were put together, and handle the eggs. Joseph Altsheler’s novels of the French and Indian Wars are recalled with affection precisely because they were so full of physical appreciations: senses, skills, the use of hands and feet, the presence of animals; how to walk in the woods without making a sound; how to detect the approach of an enemy. Although the young heroes are on the side of the English, the books’ and the readers’ real admiration is for the Indian enemy—his craft, his strength, and his lordly knowledge of terrain.

But in the books for Jewish children, except for the writings of Sulamith and Judith Ish Kishor, smell, taste, and texture are kept in humble roles, and the action takes place in higher realms. Henry J. Berkowitz’s Boot Camp, for example, which is the story of a Jewish boy’s initiation into the Navy, and which should have been an enjoyable early adolescent boy’s book in the sporting manner of Ralph Henry Barbour’s prep school series, bears instead the full responsibility of Jewish self-assertion. It is permeated by a kind of belligerent, defensive Jewishness that has to prove itself by outfighting, outswimming the Gentiles, by out-normalizing normalcy. Dr. Berkowitz, who was a naval chaplain, has set superman standards for his Jews, which imply that if a Jew were small and unathletic, he would lose all chance of Gentile respect.

Much more sensible for the young adolescent reader is the approach of Judith Ish Kishor’s Adventure in Palestine, which emphasizes not the Jewishness of its hero, but his heroism. What this book lacks in subtlety is somehow made up for in vivacity and in direct interest in foods, places, and people. It spiritedly describes all the things that make children look for travel books in libraries. Its rambling plot has room for swimming as well as kidnaping, boasting as well as conniving. Best of all, it treats Palestine as one more strange, explorable place. From the rollicking tone adopted, this might be an adventure in the Congo as easily as in “the Jewish homeland.” This tone does not diminish the importance of Palestine, it merely allows the reader of twelve to enjoy what he understands and defer judgment upon what he has still to work out in his mind in relation to many other kinds of knowledge.

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The truth is that even at twelve the child is not yet a Jew, though he has already absorbed those habits and inclinations that will some day make him ready to become one. He is not yet even an American, and most surely not an Israeli. As yet he is a world citizen, and rarely, without imposition, a stridently loyal member of any nation or religion: as a child he is willing to explore—Israel as well as the Bronx zoo, but certainly not the former to the exclusion of the latter, which he will come to know so much more concretely. He is still an individual, and this is the quality we have most to respect in him.

There is no such thing as a mass of children, and almost no such thing as a childish type—only endless forms of awkwardness and grace, unpredictable gestures of affection and rebellion, and infinite curiosity. These are the qualities that a child’s literature must appeal to, if he is to reach his adult Jewishness on terms suited both to his own nature and to the Jewish tradition itself.

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¹ Adventure in Palestine, by Judith Ish Kishor (Messner. 241 pp. $2.50); American Promise, by Sulamith Ish Kishor (Behrman House. 209 pp. $2.50); ABC Bible and Holiday Stories, by Daisy Phillip Aronoff (Bloch. 60 pp. $2.00); Boot Camp, by Henry J. Berkowitz (Jewish Publication Society. 350 pp. $2.00); Habibi and Yow, by Althea O. Silverman (Bloch. 108 pp. $2.00); Israeli Tales and Legends, by Arnold Posy (Bloch. 270 pp. $3.00); Jolly Jingles for the Jewish Child, by Ben Aronin (Behrman House. 62 pp. $2.00); Little New Angel, by Sadie Rose Weilerstein (Jewish Publication Society. 152 pp. $2.00); The Bible Legend Book, by Lillian S. Freehof (Union of Hebrew Congregations. 240 pp. $2.25); The Jingle Book for Jewish Children, by Ben-Ami (Shilo. 46 pp. $1.75); The Little Tractor Who Traveled to Israel, by Evelyn Levow Greenberg (Behrman House. 48 pp. $1.00); The Palace of Eagles, by Sulamith Ish Kishor (Shoulson Press. 216 pp. $2.50); The Stranger Within Thy Gates, by Sulamith Ish Kishor (Shoulson. 206 pp. $2.50); Torchbearers of the Middle Ages, by Alvin S. Luchs (Behrman House. 176 pp. $2.00).