Representing Childhood and Atrocity ed. by Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith (review)

Reviewed by: Representing Childhood and Atrocity ed. by Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith Sarah Minslow (bio) Representing Childhood and Atrocity. Edited by Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith. SUNY Press, 2022. This volume builds on scholarship from literary studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, art theory, memory studies, trauma studies, and childhood studies. The chapters offer cross-disciplinary approaches to texts that broach atrocities globally from the Holocaust to Darfur, Rwanda, Canada, Spain, Australia, China, and Cyprus. The volume interweaves comparative genocide studies and children's literature and explores pedagogical approaches to teaching difficult histories through works that represent childhood and atrocity. For example, Caroline Bagelman shares an activity she facilitated in which Canadian children responded to picturebooks, presenting the opportunity to engage dialogically with the texts as an occasion where children "refuse an apolitical status in identifying abuses of power they see unfolding in their worlds" (232). Bagelman argues that "the relationship between citizenship and philosophical or political truth telling is intimately connected. This truth telling or bearing witness is considered a duty" (228). While several of the chapters build on well-known theories such as Michael Rothberg's ideas of multidirectional memory and gendered approaches to children's experiences during conflict, each offers an extension of or new avenue for broadening the discourse of Representing Childhood and Atrocity. In the introduction, editors Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith explain that the book investigates how literary representations of atrocity "describe and mediate children's experiences and knowledge of atrocity" (1). Nesfield and Smith provide an overview of scholars who have shaped the field of study around children and the Holocaust, including Lydia Kokkola, Adrienne Kertzer, Hamida Bosmajian, Kenneth Kidd, and Elizabeth Baer, but bring their ideas into dialogue with the broader ideas about children and reading difficult topics from Ursula LeGuin, Perry Nodelman, and Bruno Bettelheim. Also, they explain key ideas from intellectuals such as Paula T. Connolly and Tim O'Brien about the dangers of misrepresenting historical atrocities or evading them altogether in favor of a more positive national identity. Several chapters reveal how children's literature can resist national metanarratives that would rather ignore historical atrocities, including slavery in the US, the Franco regime in Spain, Stalin's Reign of Terror, the socially-sanctioned abuse of Chinese girls, and indigenous [End Page 324] boarding schools in Canada. Whereas LeGuin argues that representing atrocity in writing for children is an "impossible task," the editors write that "we have a duty to tell children the truth, even the worst parts of the truth, before someone else tells them lies" (6). Chapter 3 explores "the trope of the wounded child" to argue that "Cypriot children's literature of the invasion . . . is undergoing transformation of a kind that shows a more mature approach to writing dealing with trauma for a younger audience" (69). Maria Chatzianastasi finds that though many of the writings suggest the profound trauma caused by violence and "the impossibility of recovery," they still "involve a sense of hope arising from the possibility that trauma can ultimately be shared and passed on" (73). Part Two of the book explores Holocaust children's literature research by revisiting ideas in new contexts and offering future directions. Rosemary Horowitz's interrogation of the differences in female and male characters in Uri Orlev's and Kathy Kacer's novels reveal that female characters have three "distinct areas of agentic female behavior: writing, smuggling, and fighting" (135), while traditional ideas of physical strength and heroism are typical of male characters. This, however, may be changing, as we see in contemporary novels like Jane Yolen's Mapping the Bones (2018) and Jennifer Nielsen's Resistance (2018). Horowitz offers valuable suggestions for how educators might use Holocaust children's and YA literature to achieve pedagogical goals by highlighting the agency of children during atrocity and the gendered differences of survival, confronting the enemy, and sexual violence. As the genre continues to expand in the twenty-first century, such topics are more often included in children's literature of the Holocaust than they have been in earlier decades. Mary-Catherine Meuller argues that the writings of children at Terezin concentration camp have usually been treated as a "creative outlet for...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.