As Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany traveled throughout the colonial and quasi-colonial Global South, they encountered highly diverse local populations and authorities. Always shadowed by the emerging European catastrophe, uprooted Jews were also precariously privileged as white Europeans in non-western, colonial, or semi-colonial societies. 

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.