Representing the Holocaust in Children's Literature

How can the unspeakable be represented? Writing stories for children about the horror of the Holocaust presents an unusual challenge. Steering a course through literary, historical, and ethical concerns, authors must find ways to engage young readers with the serious truths of genocide, brutality, and human suffering at its most extreme. How can these writers capture a child's attention without exploiting the subject, the victims, or the reader? The last two decades have seen an upsurge in attempts to make the Holocaust comprehensible to young people through novels, biographies, and picture books. This unique study examines genres of Holocaust literature for children and young adults in order to explore the ways in which material that has been called "unrepresentable" can be portrayed. Drawing upon a large corpus of texts that address Nazi persecution of Jewish, Gypsy, Mischling, Catholic, Slavic, and gay populations, Lydia Kokkola outlines various narrative approaches to the representation of horror. She provides stirring analyses of selected works by David Adler, Erich Hackl, Louis Begley, Maurice Sendak, Art Spiegelman, and Carol Matas, among others. Specific topics of discussion include the rhetoric and power of silence, the reliability of life writing, and the attraction/revulsion of Holocaust literature. In its probing search for answers, this book invites readers to consider the challenge of sustaining appreciation for the horrors of history among adults and children alike. Book jacket.

Lydia Kokkola is Lecturer in English at Turku University in Finland.