In the Face of Catastrophe, Coherence
How Yiddish Taught Its Children About the Holocaust
What did children growing up in New York, Buenos Aires or Montreal need to know about the events that came to be referred to as “the (third) Destruction?” The secularist-Yiddishist world and its trusted teachers felt they lacked the dubious luxury of waiting for some developmentally optimal moment: the wreckage was all around them. Beginning with Yankev Glatshteyn’s 1939 young adult novel Emil and Karl, and extending over two decades, Yiddish children’s literature developed a set of stylistic and thematic norms for representing the catastrophe and depicting children as cultural rather than martial heroes. This talk will describe these patterns and consider the place of the children’s Yiddish Holocaust canon within a broader set of Jewish literary resources for depicting anti-Jewish violence, resistance and survival.
Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. Her ongoing research looks to children’s literature and culture as a powerful force for political formation and a resource for the intergenerational transmission of culture, values, and ideology.
