Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children's Literature: Ghost Images 0415628253, 9780415628259

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SECOND-GENERATION MEMORY AND CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Ghost Images

Anastasia Ulanowicz

SECOND-GENERATION MEMORY AND CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

This book visits a range of textual forms including diary, novel, and picturebook to explore the relationship between second-generation memory and contemporary children’s literature. Ulanowicz argues that second-generation memory—informed by intimate family relationships, textual mediation, and technology—is characterized by vicarious, rather than direct, experience of the past. As such, children’s literature is particularly well-suited to the representation of second-generation memory, insofar as children’s fiction is particularly invested in the transmission and reproduction of cultural memory, and its form promotes the formation of various complex intergenerational relationships. Further, children’s books that depict second-generation memory have the potential to challenge conventional Western notions of selfhood and ethics. This study shows how novels such as Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) and Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself (1977)—both of which feature protagonists who adapt their elders’ memories into their own mnemonic repertoires—implicitly reject Cartesian notions of the unified subject in favor of a view of identity as always-already social, relational, and dynamic in character. This manuscript not only questions how and why second-generation memory is represented in books for young people, but whether such representations of memory might be considered ‘radical’ or ‘conservative’. Together, these analyses address a topic that has not been explored fully within the fields of children’s literature, trauma and memory studies, and Holocaust studies. Anastasia Ulanowicz is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA. She is the associate editor of ImageTexT.

Children’s Literature and Culture Philip Nel, Series Editor For a complete series list, please go to routledge.com Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins The Governess as Provocateur Georgia Grilli A Critical History of French Children’s Literature, Vol. 1 & 2 Penny Brown Once Upon a Time in a Different World Issues and Ideas in African American Children’s Literature Neal A. Lester The Gothic in Children’s Literature Haunting the Borders Edited by Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis Reading Victorian Schoolrooms Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction Elizabeth Gargano Soon Come Home to This Island West Indians in British Children’s Literature Karen Sands-O’Connor Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child Annette Wannamaker

The Fantasy of Family Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal Liz Thiel From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood Children’s Literature and the Construction of Canadian Identity Elizabeth A. Galway The Family in English Children’s Literature Ann Alston Enterprising Youth Social Values and Acculturation in NineteenthCentury American Children’s Literature Monika Elbert Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism Alison Waller Crossover Fiction Global and Historical Perspectives Sandra L. Beckett The Crossover Novel Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership Rachel Falconer Shakespeare in Children’s Literature Gender and Cultural Capital Erica Hateley Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature Edited by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard

Into the Closet Cross-dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature Victoria Flanagan

Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa A Study of Contemporary Fiction Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann

Russian Children’s Literature and Culture Edited by Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova

Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature Kathryn James

The Outside Child In and Out of the Book Christine Wilkie-Stibbs

Fundamental Concepts of Children’s Literature Research Literary and Sociological Approaches Hans-Heino Ewers

Representing Africa in Children’s Literature Old and New Ways of Seeing Vivian Yenika-Agbaw

Children’s Fiction about 9/11 Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities Jo Lampert

The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature Jan Susina

Re-visioning Historical Fiction The Past through Modern Eyes Kim Wilson

Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers Maria Nikolajeva

The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature Holly Virginia Blackford

“Juvenile” Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 The Age of Adolescence Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson

Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity The Mechanical Body Edited by Katia Pizzi

Picturing the Wolf in Children’s Literature Debra Mitts-Smith

Crossover Picturebooks A Genre for All Ages Sandra L. Beckett

New Directions in Picturebook Research Edited by Teresa Colomer, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Cecilia Silva-Díaz

Peter Pan’s Shadows in the Literary Imagination Kirsten Stirling

The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature Invisible Storytellers Gillian Lathey

Landscape in Children’s Literature Jane Suzanne Carroll

The Children’s Book Business Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century Lissa Paul Humor in Contemporary Junior Literature Julie Cross Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature Tison Pugh Reading the Adolescent Romance Sweet Valley and the Popular Young Adult Romance Novel Amy S. Pattee Irish Children’s Literature and Culture New Perspectives on Contemporary Writing Edited by Valerie Coghlan and Keith O’Sullivan Beyond Pippi Longstocking Intermedial and International Perspectives on Astrid Lindgren’s Work s Edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz Contemporary English-Language Indian Children’s Literature Representations of Nation, Culture, and the New Indian Girl Michelle Superle

Colonial India in Children’s Literature Supriya Goswami Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Painting in Paris, 1890–1915 Marilynn Olson Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre The Nation in Children’s Literature Nations of Childhood Edited by Kit Kelen and Björn Sundmark Subjectivity in Asian Children’s Literature and Film Global Theories and Implications Edited by John Stephens Children’s Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness Layla AbdelRahim Charles Dickens and the Victorian Child Romanticizing and Socializing the Imperfect Child Amberyl Malkovich Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature Ghost Images Anastasia Ulanowicz

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SECOND-GENERATION MEMORY AND CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Ghost Images

A NA STA SI A U L A NOW ICZ

NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of Anastasia Ulanowicz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Cover image created by Emily Sneeden. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ulanowicz, Anastasia Maria. Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature : Ghost Images / By Anastasia Ulanowicz. pages cm. — (Children’s Literature and Culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Children’s literature—History and criticism. 2. Collective memory and literature. 3. Atrocities in literature. I. Title. PN1009.A1U43 2013 809'.89282—dc23 2012040803 ISBN13: 978-0-415-62825-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-07868-6 (ebk) Typeset in Minion by IBT Global. From ZLATA’S DIARY by Zlata Filipovic, translated by Christina Pribichevich-Zoric, translation copyright (c) 1994 Editions Robert LaffontlFixot. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Contents

Series Foreword

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: The Ghost Image Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

1

“Seeing Beyond”: Memory, Forgetting, and Ethics in Lois Lowry’s The Giver

29

Sitting Shivah: Mourning and Performance in Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself

61

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir”: Intertextuality and the Intergenerational in Zlata’s Diary

89

“The Past Is a Foreign Country”: The Individual, Diaspora, and Nation in Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s The Hunger

123

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September”: Mordecai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers and Second-Generation Memory after September 11 155

Notes

187

Works Cited

223

Index

233

vii

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Series Foreword

The Children’s Literature and Culture series is dedicated to promoting original research in children’s literature, children’s culture, and childhood studies. We use the term “children” in the broadest sense, spanning from earliest childhood up through adolescence. The already capacious term “culture” encompasses media (radio, fi lm, television, video games, blogs, websites, social networking sites), material culture (toys, games, products), acculturation (processes of socialization), and of course literature, including all types of crossover works. Since children’s literature is defined by its audience, this series seeks to foster scholarship on the full range of children’s literature’s many genres and subgenres: fairy tales, folk tales, comics, graphic novels, picture books, novels, poetry, didactic tales, nonsense, fantasy, realism, mystery, horror, fan fiction, and others. Founded by Jack Zipes in 1994, Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture is the longest-running series devoted to the study of children’s literature and culture from a national and international perspective. In 2011, expanding its focus to include childhood studies, the series also seeks to explore the legal, historical, and philosophical conditions of different childhoods. An advocate for scholarship from around the globe, the series recognizes innovation and encourages interdisciplinarity. In Zipes’ words, “the goal of the Children’s Literature and Culture series is to enhance research in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world.” Philip Nel

ix

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Acknowledgments “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” —William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

It wasn’t until I was a fourth-year undergraduate that I first encountered William Faulkner’s famous statement about the stubborn, haunting presence of the past. Nevertheless, I first began to share Faulkner’s vision of the past—admittedly, in an inarticulate, rudimentary fashion—when, as a ten-year-old, I first read Judy Blume’s brilliant but sadly underappreciated children’s novel, Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself. Blume’s novel spoke to me—and, indeed, continues to speak to me—in ways that few works of literature, Faulkner’s included, have been able to do. In Blume’s eponymous protagonist, I perceived an uncanny image of my own childhood self: vulnerable yet inquisitive, impressionable yet daring, and, most of all, haunted by a traumatic past I could never fully understand, even despite my most valiant attempts to do so. Like Blume’s Sally, I spent my childhood lurking in corners, desperately attempting to glean enough intelligence from the grown-up conversations I overheard for some explanation of what happened. Moreover, like Sally, I realized that my life was not entirely my own, but rather profoundly shaped by those born before me—even by people I had never met. Now, nearly three decades after my initial exposure to Blume’s novel, I continue to struggle, just as her heroine does, with a past-that-is-notpast. Even now, like Blume’s protagonist, I continue to cobble together stories that might offer me some explanation of this past, and of my indebtedness to it. Ultimately, then, this book is simply another attempt to rearticulate a well-worn but profoundly intimate story. I realize, of course, that if I have been able to reflect upon and retell this story, I have many to thank for this opportunity. This project began as a dissertation I wrote at the University of Pittsburgh, where I was fortunate enough to be supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship. While at Pitt, I was advised by the incomparable Valerie Krips, who continues to be not only a brilliant mentor but also a dear friend. The members of my graduate committee—John Beverley, Troy Boone, and Adam Lowenstein—each presented me with questions that continue to haunt my work. I am indebted, too, to Lina Insana (in whose graduate seminar this project began to blossom), xi

xii • Acknowledgments Ronald A. T. Judy (who taught me what it means to be a naïve reader), and Katerina Dowbenko (who reminded me, at just the right moments, of why I was embarking on this project in the first place). I am grateful as well to William Davis and Alison Dray-Novey, my undergraduate advisors at the College of Notre Dame, who first recognized the urgency of my desire for story-telling I consider my employment at the University of Florida (UF) to be a stroke of tremendous fortune. Indeed, I am grateful to the University for awarding me with two separate summer faculty grants, as well as a third-year course release, without which I could not have completed this manuscript. I can hardly express my gratitude to Kenneth Kidd, who has been not only an inspiring mentor but a warm and supportive chair of my department. I am thankful as well to John Leavey, who, as former chair of the English department at UF, initially expressed confidence in my potential. I am grateful, too, to Pamela Gilbert—also a former chair of my department—for her warm support and scholarly example. I am indebted to Judith W. Page, who, as my faculty mentor, has guided me generously through my first years at UF. I have been fortunate enough to work with John Cech, a veteran in the field of children’s literature. Donald Ault, my editor at ImageText, has supported me generously during my first years at UF. Malini Johar Schueller has held me to high and exacting standards since the day I first set foot on UF’s campus, and I am particularly grateful to her for the reading recommendations she has given me regarding American and post-colonial studies. Likewise, I am also thankful to Brandon Kershner, Peter Rudnytsky, and Maureen Turim for the guidance they offered me throughout the process of this manuscript’s production. Marsha Bryant—my “dorm-mate”—helped me navigate the obstacle course that is the publication process. Melissa Davis, Janet Moore, and Jeri White were the first persons to welcome me to UF, and they continue to show me heroic patience. Indeed, all of the faculty and staff members in the UF English department have helped make my experience in Gainesville a happy and productive one. Moreover, I am grateful to the graduate students who have challenged me and whose work has sustained me—namely, Maik Arets, Patricia Auxier, NaToya Faughnder, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Emily Glosser, Kendra Holmes, Marilisa Jiménez-Garcia, Michele Lee, Yen Loh, Anuja Madan, Emily McCann, Emily Murphy, Mariko Turk, and Casey Wilson. The multi-talented and ever-gracious Emily Sneeden, who spent hours with me sorting through family photographs, designed my cover. My University Scholars Program mentee, Olivia Ordonez, continues to be a witty and inspiring interlocutor. My undergraduate mentee, Laura Grossman, helped me bring the technical aspects of this manuscript into coherent form. Finally, this work has been enriched by my friendship with my former student, Ofri Katz: surely, Ofri knows the story I tell here as well as I do. Certainly, I have been sustained by the relationships I have forged through the Children’s Literature Association. I feel especially fortunate, for example, to consider Marah Gubar my colleague, not the least because

Acknowledgments • xiii she was initially one of my most supportive mentors at the University of Pittsburgh. Adrienne Kertzer graciously replied to my request for constructive criticism of this manuscript, and I am very grateful for the challenges she offered me. Likewise, I am grateful to June Cummins, whose reading of my work on Blume has broadened my critical horizons. Marek Oziewicz has remained a supportive colleague and friend. I am thankful as well to Michelle Abate, Richard Flynn, A. Robin Hoffman, Angela Hubler, Anna Redcay, Lee Talley, Alexandra Valint, and Karin Westman. I will continue to consider Nathalie Op De Beeck my academic “big sister,” especially because she came of (intellectual) age before me under Valerie Krips’s close watch. Kerry Mockler deserves a particular round of thanks for the support she has given me in the past few years. I owe many thanks as well to Philip Nel, who, as the editor of this series, expressed initial confidence in my project. My editors Julie Ganz, Elizabeth Levine, Catherine Tung, Michael Watters, and Andrew Weckenmann have shown me not only kindness but also infinite patience. Finally, I am indebted to my friends and family. I wrote a good deal of this manuscript in the home of my friend Hans Slujter, and I cannot begin to thank him for the support he gave me during my stay in the Netherlands. My mental map of Pittsburgh will forever bear the memory of my late friend, John Surrett. Anita Anantharam, Laurie Gries and Jodi Schorb have been my junior faculty allies. Apollo Amoko, Dan Brown, Dave Christian, Francesca Marinaro, Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Mirielle Perrotte, Leah Rosenberg, John Wiehl, and the members of my book group not only have sustained me through this process but also have helped make Gainesville feel like home. I cannot imagine completing this book without Poushali Bhadury’s good cheer, Nora Infante’s wisdom, or Shay MacKay’s enduring friendship. My dear friends, Anustup Basu, Manisha Basu, and Kirsten Strayer, have offered me not only intellectual guidance but also unconditional support; indeed, I consider them my surrogate family. I am indebted, too, to Emilio Delvalle Escalante, whose friendship—and whose own scholarly work on memory—inspired me during the writing of this manuscript. Throughout the composition of this project, Nancy Ulanowicz and Ralph and Mary Dwan demonstrated a generosity that I can only hope to show others. Alyosha, Carmen, Lola, and Patrick have enriched my life. Finally, I am grateful to my siblings, Peter and Vera, who have always been my strongest allies. I dedicate this book to my parents, Robert and Marijka Ulanowicz, to whom I owe everything. I also dedicate this book to the memory of my grandparents, Edward and Mary Ulanowicz and Jaroslaw and Joanna Chmilewsky—to them, vichnaja pamjat’, eternal memory.

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Introduction The Ghost Image

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Enlightenment philosopher John Locke encourages parents of good breeding to preserve the child’s “tender mind from all impressions and notions of spirits and goblins or any fearful apprehensions of the dark” (103). The child, Locke maintains, is especially vulnerable to the “indiscretion of servants, whose usual method it is to awe children and keep them in subjection by telling them of Raw Head and Bloody Bones and such other names as carry with them the ideas of some thing terribly hurtful” (103–104, emphasis in original). Indeed, he argues, tales of the supernatural have the potential to scar a child for life: according to Locke, such stories inspire in children “bugbear thoughts” that become so entrenched within their “tender minds” that such thoughts are “not easily, if ever, to be got out again” (104). If the child is to encounter stories, Locke continues, he should do so on his own through an engagement with printed texts—preferably the Bible or translations of Aesop’s fables—which enhance, rather than threaten, the pupil’s developing rational faculties. Locke’s warning against the harmful effects of fantastical stories on children, which was founded upon his notion of the child’s mind as a tabula rasa, or blank slate, would have a considerable impact on the emergence and development of the institution of Western children’s literature in the eighteenth century. Early children’s books such as Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749) and John Newbery’s The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765) subscribed faithfully to the program of rationalist pedagogy outlined by Locke and attempted to sway “tender minds” away from the corrupt influence of “old wives tales”; indeed, one of Locke’s literary acolytes, the children’s writer Maria Edgeworth, approved of the practice of physically excising objectionable content from children’s reading material1 (Townshend 24). Even today, more than three centuries after the publication of Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke’s admonition against the harmful effects of fantastical 1

2 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature stories resounds in the efforts made by parents, educators, and FCC regulators to monitor books, fi lms, television programs, and video games deemed objectionable or otherwise harmful to the child’s healthy development. And yet, the efforts of Locke and his contemporary followers notwithstanding, children’s literature has become a veritable repository for chilling tales of the supernatural. From Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) to Roald Dahl’s The Witches (1983), and from L. Frank Baum’s Oz books to R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, the most memorable works of Western children’s literature have titillated young people and their guardians alike with images of the monstrous and the uncanny. Today, as the likes of Harry Potter and Bella Swan hold sway over bestseller lists, it has become nearly impossible to engage with children’s literature without considering its Gothic and fantastical dimensions. Contemporary children’s literature has also become preoccupied with other, much more terrifying and tangibly felt specters. The past half-century has given rise to what Kenneth Kidd has called the “children’s literature of atrocity,” a form of narrative devoted to evoking the ghostly memories of such twentieth- and early twenty-first-century historical events as Auschwitz, the Gulag, Hiroshima, and the terrorist attacks of September 11 (162). The terrors that these texts attempt to represent are far more horrifying than the noxious bogies that Locke and his followers so disparaged—and, what is more, they cannot be explained away by any rationalist discourse. Their haunting images of concentration camps, battle-ravaged landscapes, and nuclear fallout disrupt the very categories and concepts that Locke and his fellow humanists sought to promulgate: they challenge narratives of historical progress, individual reason, and utopian uses of science and technology. Moreover, these narratives make little effort to shelter children from the horrors of the past; on the contrary, as Kidd observes, “there seems to be a consensus that children’s literature is the most rather than the least appropriate literary form for trauma work” (161, emphasis in original). In this way, the “children’s literature of atrocity” marks a dramatic departure from the protective ideals of Locke and his scissor-wielding acolytes. Whereas once educators and children’s authors warned parents against exposing their children to any material that might permanently traumatize them, contemporary children’s books—and the educational, psychological, and marketing apparatuses which attend and support them—now practically insist that young people be subjected to disturbing stories of the past. Indeed, as Kidd argues, it is “almost as if we now expect reading about trauma to be traumatic itself—as if we think that children can’t otherwise comprehend atrocity” (162). Thus, now, perhaps more than ever, children’s literature is a decidedly haunted form, obsessed as it is with ghosts who refuse to be tucked away in neat happy endings. Within the past decade, much critical attention has been paid to the representational strategies employed by authors to communicate “difficult” or “delicate” topics to ostensibly sensitive young readers. Journals such as Children’s Literature and The Lion and the Unicorn have dedicated entire issues to

Introduction • 3 engaging the political, aesthetic, and psychological implications of traumatic themes in juvenile fiction.2 Scholars working within the field have been especially attuned to the ways in which works of children’s literature have sought to depict specific traumatic historical events according to the conventions of realism, even as they simultaneously acknowledge the ultimate impossibility of fully conveying the horror of such events. A great number of these historical critiques of children’s atrocity literature have addressed representations of the Holocaust, specifically, not the least because a significant percentage of trauma-themed children’s books—ranging from Doris Orgel’s The Devil in Vienna (1978) to Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars (1989) to Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2006)—take as their subject the Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities. In the past decade, scholars such as Hamida Bosmajian, Adrienne Kertzer, and Lydia Kokkola have focused on such representations of the Holocaust in order to consider the problematic ways that literature for young people tends to simplify and ascribe meaning to an extraordinarily complex and ultimately ineffable event.3 More recently, critics within the field have theorized the underlying cultural conditions that allow for the emergence of Holocaust- and other atrocity-themed books for young people. Kidd, for example, posits the rise of popular psychoanalytic discourse as one possible explanation for the proliferation of trauma-writing in children’s literature, arguing that children’s books concerned with atrocity take a distinctly “bibliotherapeutic” approach to both their subject matter and their readers4 (170). Drawing on Kidd’s arguments, Eric Tribunella argues that narratives of trauma produced within the U.S. serve a disciplinary function, insofar as they expose a largely sheltered, middle-class readership to circumstances they might not initially imagine or anticipate, and thus encourage “solemnity and soberness” in juvenile readers (xxiv). According to Tribunella, it “seems that American children’s and young adult (YA) literature works as a literary rod to discipline child readers, to threaten them into subjection, and to show them the unpleasant realities of life and the consequences of defying the rules and norms of American culture” (xxiii). Nevertheless, very few of the studies of the developing “children’s literature of atrocity” have focused specifically on the crucial role that memory plays in these books’ engagement with the haunting past. Admittedly, key works of children’s literature criticism—Bosmajian’s and Kertzer’s in particular— have attended to the ways in which cultural memory of events such as the Holocaust have influenced their representation in juvenile fiction. And yet, few critical works within the field have considered how contemporary works of children’s literature might allow scholars to trace shifting notions and practices of memory that have developed in the wake of what Samantha Power has called the “age of genocide.”5 If, as I have argued above, children’s literature has come to imagine itself as a medium through which the unruly ghosts of the historical past might be channeled, then on what concepts of memory does it rely in order to satisfy and justify its objectives? How, and why, does it

4 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature imagine its child characters—as well as its juvenile audience—as ideal recipients of traumatic memories? Finally, if the “children’s literature of atrocity” is a relatively new phenomenon, then how might its development coincide with equally newly emerging theories of memory? In studying the coincidence of the “children’s literature of atrocity” and recent theories of memory, this book addresses the ways in which books for young readers seek to represent—and, in some cases, attempt to produce— second-generation memory. This is a form of collective memory that involves an individual’s conscious incorporation of her elders’ memories of a traumatic past within her own mnemonic repertoire. Insofar as second-generation memory involves an individual’s internalization and subsequent narrative reinterpretation of her elders’ remembered past, it is profoundly related to what Maurice Halbwachs, in his landmark study On Collective Memory (1925), calls “the memory of the family” (54). Such memory develops within structures of kinship; as such, it involves an individual’s identification with, and internalization of, stories and habits that circulate within the family unit. Moreover, it is produced not solely by “personal feelings but by rules and customs” that traditionally characterize pre-existing kinship relations (55). Likewise, this order of memory may be influenced by other collective mnemonic structures, such as those that develop within and subsequently bind together religious groups or diasporic communities. Such memory involves an individual’s affirmation of, and sense of participation in, a given demographic’s shared narrative of its past. What distinguishes second-generation memory from these other forms of collective memory, however, is the degree to which it is characterized by a profound self-awareness. Unlike other forms of collective memory, which Halbwachs and other scholars of memory6 argue are more-or-less unconsciously performed or inhabited, second-generation memory involves an individual’s conscious recognition of the ways in which her present circumstances have been mediated and shaped by past events that she herself did not directly experience. The bearer of second-generation memory is mindful of the ways in which the stories she has heard, the traditions in which she has participated, and the verbal and non-verbal dynamics of her relationship with members of an older generation have all profoundly shaped her own narrative of self. Consequently, she regards the memories of those closest to her as part of her inheritance and, as such, profoundly intertwined with her own personal relationship to the past. In this way, she re-members others’ past experiences just as she would her own. That is, she not only incorporates others’ memories into her own mnemonic repertoire but creatively, albeit respectfully, edits them in order to construct a meaningful interpretation of her own relationship to both the past and the present. Second-generation memory, then, is palimpsestic. Like a scroll or page on which one might detect multiple layers of inscription, this order of memory involves the explicitly evident commingling of generations of memory.

Introduction • 5 Moreover, just as a palimpsest is characterized by a clearly legible recent inscription that nevertheless blends with less discernible past inscriptions, second-generation memory places into clearest relief an individual’s interpretation of both her present and her elders’ past even as it exposes the traces of earlier memories that inform and motivate such an interpretation. Indeed, I prefer the term “second-generation memory” to previously articulated formulations of vicarious or inherited memory precisely because this term captures such memory’s inherently palimpsestic character. For this reason, I use the term “second-generation” figuratively rather than literally in order to signal a recent expression of memory—a production or “generation” of memory—that exists in a contingent, “second” relationship to earlier articulations of the past. Indeed, the subtitle of this book—Ghost Images—refers to second-generation memory. The expression “ghost image” is a term used in photography to refer to a visual palimpsest: it designates two or more photographic images that are superimposed upon one another (more often than not, accidentally), and whose coincidence on photographic paper produces an eerie effect on the viewer. The photographic ghost image is thus an appropriate metaphor for second-generation memory, which involves the merging of images of the past with those of the immediately experienced present—and, not unlike the uncanny photographic print, unsettles conventional notions of space, temporality, and identity. Crucially, moreover, the ghost image implies coexistence. Although one exposure in a ghost image might be more immediately visible than another—just as one inscription on a palimpsestic page or scroll might be more recognizable than others—the very character of such a photographic print depends upon the commingling or interpenetration of multiple exposures. Likewise, the simultaneous expression of different and occasionally conflicting images of the past becomes an essential attribute of secondgeneration memory. Finally, the photographic ghost image—unlike, say, an ancient palimpsestic scroll—is the (by)product of mechanical reproduction. It is developed, either accidentally or intentionally, through chemical (and most recently, digital) processes enabled by specific modes of technology. Second-generation memory too is profoundly influenced by technological forms: it involves an individual’s exposure, as it were, not only to family stories and quotidian interactions but to mechanically reproduced texts such as books, photographs, fi lms, television programs, Internet sources, and even video games, all of which mediate and shape her relationship to an unexperienced but personally significant past. In this way, second-generation memory calls to attention to the extent to which all memory involves process. Just as the accidental character of the ghost image places into relief the fact that photographs are not merely exact copies of reality but rather images subjected to processes of technological reproduction that involve mediation and contingency, second-generation memory calls to awareness the culturally mediated nature of memory itself.

6 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature Second-Generation Memory and Children’s Literature Identified in other critical contexts as “postmemory” (Marianne Hirsch), “prosthetic memory” (Alison Landsberg), “belated witness” (Michael Levine), and “second-generation witness” (Alan Berger), this form of inherited or vicarious memory has been of considerable interest to scholars who theorize an order of memory that is not predicated upon direct experience. Curiously, however, although many of these critics have paid particularly close attention to the representation of second-generation memory within narratives of childhood produced by and for adults, very few have studied the depiction of such memory in texts written specifically for children. Such a lapse in attention might be ascribed to the still-contested status of children’s literature in literary and cultural studies: although the scholarly field of children’s literature has earned institutional acceptance and respect within the larger critical arena in the past quarter-century, books for young people nevertheless may not appear “serious” or “complex” enough to critics who wish to explore the memory of grave historical events. Nevertheless, juvenile literature is the ideal venue for the representation of second-generation memory. Indeed, the metaphor of the ghost image applies as much to children’s literature as it does to second-generation memory. Like the ghost image—and like other forms of literature—children’s books are mechanically reproduced texts that demonstrate the blending and clashing of culturally and historically contingent values and concepts. Moreover, children’s literature is a profoundly intergenerational form—and thus a profoundly haunted one—and, as such, it most provocatively represents secondgeneration memory through both its content and its form. As the narrative devices employed by such “classical” works of children’s literature such as Peter Pan (1906) and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) make clear, juvenile fiction is meant to be shared by members of different generations. By design, these texts not only imagine an adult reader and child listener but also facilitate dialogue between adult readers and child audiences.7 Furthermore, by virtue of the audience it addresses, children’s literature is committed to bearing the vestigial traces of the past into an uncertain and potentially volatile present. As Marah Gubar has observed, the child’s entrance into the world is always “belated.” Young people, she argues, “are born into a world in which stories about who they are (and what they should become) are already in circulation” (6). The work of children’s literature, then, involves aligning the young reader’s consciousness with pre-existing ideological structures that not only might grant him coherent subjectivity but ensure the survival of potentially imperiled social formations—a task that necessarily involves foisting traces of the past onto the young reader’s immediate present. Thus, even the most sober and rational of children’s books, such as those advocated by Locke and his acolytes, make visible—or spectral—the stubborn insistence of the past within the present. They betray the lingering desires and anxieties of

Introduction • 7 grown-ups who have extended their hands, wraith-like, in an attempt to mold children in their own fleeting images. In this way, the very form of children’s literature is conducive to the representation of second-generation memory, which likewise depends upon one generation’s reception and internalization of its elders’ lived past.8 Crucially, however, children’s books also afford young readers the opportunity to resist and reformulate the narratives given them, and thus to re-conceive the past in ways that their forebears may not have intended or anticipated. Indeed, as Gubar argues in her study of Golden Age children’s literature, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors often took a “strikingly nuanced position, acknowledging the pervasive and potentially coercive power of adult influence while nevertheless entertaining the possibility that children can be enabled and inspired by their inevitable inheritance” (5). Moreover, she maintains, these writers were open to the “idea that young people have the power to exploit and capitalize on the resources of adult culture (rather than being subjugated and oppressed)” (5). The relationship between the child and the text—not unlike the relationship between a child and his elders—is never a one-way street. Rather, such relationships are characterized by collaboration as well as by conflicts of interpretative power. Thus, just as the photographic ghost image makes visible both the commingling of and the tension between two or more different images, children’s literature—like second-generation memory—dramatizes the (often uneasy) relationship between generational perspectives and modes of perception.

Second-Generation Memory and (Post-)Memory In order to study how, precisely, children’s literature functions as a ghost image—and how, in turn, its negotiation of the present and the past renders it particularly conducive to the representation of second-generation memory—it is crucial to trace the development of this concept itself within a critical genealogy and thus to demonstrate its palimpsestic character. Scholars within the fields of memory, trauma, and Holocaust studies have coined various terms to address the order of vicarious memory that I here call second-generation memory. Perhaps the most oft-cited and widely recognized of these formulations is Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory.” Indeed, Hirsch’s theory of postmemory has received particular notice in studies of children’s literature (e.g., those authored by Bosmajian and Kertzer9); it is also the one that has significantly influenced my own articulation of second-generation memory. According to Hirsch, postmemory “characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (Family Frames 22). Postmemory, Hirsch maintains, is “distinguished from memory

8 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection”; it is, moreover, a “powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because it is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (22). Hirsch’s formulation of postmemory is foundational for my own investigation of second-generation memory not only because of the arguments it advances but also because of the questions it leaves open and the theoretical points of debate it invites. For example, although Hirsch’s elaboration of this order of memory is convincing and indeed ground-breaking, the precise term she uses to identify it—“postmemory”—is problematic. The prefi x “post-” before the term “memory” implies that belatedness, or “post-ness,” belongs uniquely to vicarious memory and is not shared by the memory of immediately or personally experienced events. And yet, as Maurice Halbwachs argues in his foundational study of collective memory, all memory, including the memory of the most intimately experienced events, exists at a critical remove from the past: memory cannot “preserve” the past within itself, because the past it seeks to capture has already escaped (40). Rather, memory is a function of the imagination. Formulated in the aftermath of an unrepeatable past, memory can only reconstruct, or re-imagine, what can never be fully present again. Existing at a necessary remove from its referent, memory is—to rehearse a tired academic phrase—“always already” belated. Moreover, because memories become coherent (and, in effect, memorable) only once they are placed into narrative form, their narrative structures attest to the discourses and values that are dominant within the society of which their bearer is a part.10 The term postmemory is therefore redundant: insofar as it is representational, retrospective, mediated, and belated, memory is itself inherently “post-.” The term postmemory is additionally problematic insofar as it shares in what Anne McClintock has identified as an “almost ritualistic ubiquity of ‘post-’ words in current culture” (e.g., “post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-cold war, post-marxism, post-apartheid, post-Soviet, post-Ford, post-feminism, post-national, post-historic, even post-contemporary”) (85). As McClintock argues, these “‘post-’ words” (86) suggest the transcendence, if not the foreclosure, of the critical terms they modify.11 Ella Shohat makes a similar claim in her essay “Notes on the Postcolonial” (1992) when she argues that the attachment of the freighted prefi x “post-” to the term “colonial” implies that colonialism is now a matter of the past, in a way that undermines “colonialism’s economic, political, and cultural deformative traces in the present”12 (105). To be sure, Hirsch admits that she proposes the term “postmemory” with “some hesitation, conscious that the prefi x ‘post’ could imply that we are beyond memory” (22). In her essay “The Generation of Postmemory” (2008), she maintains that her own use of the prefi x suggests not so much a transcendence of memory as it does an “uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture” (106). And yet, despite this qualification, the term “post-,” which was already in heavy circulation before Hirsch’s critical

Introduction • 9 adoption of it, continues to be associated in scholarly discourse with beyondness or atemporality. Indeed, Shohat explains that, because the “ ‘post-’ in ‘post-colonial’ suggests ‘after’ the demise of colonialism, it is imbued, quite apart from its users’ intentions, with an ambiguous spatio-temporality” (102, my emphasis). Likewise, the “post-” in “postmemory” similarly suggests, despite Hirsch’s intentions, an “ambiguous spatio-temporality” that undercuts the provocative argument she proposes—namely, that memory may be vicariously experienced within specific intergenerational and culturally and historically contingent contexts. To dispense with “ambiguous spatio-temporality” and to emphasize “repetition with difference,” I offer the term “second-generation memory” as a critical corrective to the term “postmemory.” I prefer this term, first and foremost, because it involves the word “generation”—a term that carries with it associations that rival and challenge those implied by the term “post-.” Unlike the prefi x “post-,” the term “generation” suggests a specific, historically and materially bound demographic that, although it may appear or develop subsequent to past formations, necessarily arises from and is shaped by those past formations. The term “generation” applies not only to a specific demographic but also to the delimited period of time in which this demographic arises and develops. Moreover, the term “generation” implies a certain succession or genealogy. After all, in order for one generation to emerge and develop—say, in the course of twenty to thirty years—it necessarily must emerge from and be fostered by an earlier, preceding group of people born and living in an earlier time; in turn, it must give way to another, subsequently formed population. The term “generation,” in other words, implies a certain relationality, insofar as it demarcates a certain demographic with respect to groups that precede and follow it. Of course, as Alan B. Spitzer argues in his essay “The Historical Problem of Generations” (1973), conventional as well as scholarly definitions of this term are more “slippery” and “ambiguous” than they might initially appear, not the least because a generation cannot be adequately determined solely on the basis of age (1354). According to Spitzer, generations are bound together not only by accidents of birth but also by particular historical events that influence their members’ behaviors, attitudes, and values. A generation may be distinguished, he argues, by groups “of coevals [who] are stamped by some collective experience that permanently distinguishes them from other age groups as they move from time” (1385). Generations are therefore as marked by historical contingency as they are by age. That said, this sense of historical contingency—and the emerging affective and ideological responses that such contingency makes possible—lends the term “second-generation memory” a specificity that the more open-ended term “postmemory” lacks. That is, unlike the term postmemory which implies—even despite its “users’ intentions”—a nebulous beyond, the term second-generation memory implies a particular “collective experience” situated within parameters of time and space.

10 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature My more capacious redefinition of the term “second-generation” does (perhaps problematically) depart from the specific historical meanings that other critics—including Alan Berger and even Hirsch herself13 —have given it. As Susan Rubin Suleiman notes, the term “second-generation” pertains specifically to those individuals “born the immediate years after the [Second World] war, [who] are children of Jews who survived the Holocaust in Europe” (277). Suleiman adds, moreover, that, “strictly speaking, it is to this second generation that Marianne Hirsch’s term ‘postmemory’ applies”: Hirsch’s term, that is, implies a sense of “belatedness” that is the “most common shared experience” of the second generation, strictly defined (277). My own understanding of the term “second-generation”—or indeed, “second-generation memory”—is admittedly broader than the one outlined by the scholars cited above. I use this term not only to refer to the vicarious memories of children of Holocaust survivors—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—but also to discuss those formulated by children of other historical traumas such as the Armenian genocide of 1915–1917 and the events of 11 September 2001.14 Moreover, I use this term not only to refer specifically to children of trauma survivors but also to consider other demographics and generations whose subjectivities and memories have been dramatically influenced by a previous and only vicariously experienced historical event: child survivors who barely remember their experiences of persecution (Irena Klepfisz’s poem, “Bashert”); grandchildren of survivors (Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s YA novel The Hunger); and those who have no biological connection to survivors, but who nonetheless draw on their exposure to cultural artifacts in order to improvise genealogical ties to members of previous generations (Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary). By offering these readings, I do not intend to elide the differences between, say, a parent–child relationship or a grandparent–grandchild relationship. Nevertheless, I use the working term, “second-generation memory” in a broader sense in order to gesture to intergenerational encounters and to the production of memory that such encounters enable. Indeed, the texts I consider in this study have in common not so much the representation of a strictly defi ned generation as a mutual investment in new, historically and culturally contingent interpretations of formerly articulated memories. Moreover, as works of literature aimed primarily at juvenile audiences, they share the objective of imprinting memories of the recent and traumatic historical past onto the consciousness of a new demographic—or in effect “generation”—of readers. In this way, literary representations of second-generation memory may be evaluated not so much in terms of the specific, chronologically bound generations they represent as they may be considered with respect to their mutual literary strategies and concerns. As Susan Rubin Suleiman argues in her study of the “1.5 generation”—or “child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of the Jews” (277, emphasis in original)—the defi nition

Introduction • 11 of specific generations is informed not only by pre-existing sociological categories but, more crucially, by literary analysis.15 According to Suleiman, the question of generational difference can be sustained by an attentiveness to the “kind of work on language and thought that produces the most complex understandings of self and world, both on the part of the writer and on that of the readers” (201). Citing the works of such authors and child-survivors as Aharon Appelfeld, Imre Kertész, and Elie Wiesel, Suleiman argues that, although such writings are “highly individualized,” they “bear ‘family resemblances’ in tone, genre, and emotional or narrative content that place them in significant dialogue with each other” (292). It is such an attention to literary “family resemblances” that informs my own analysis of texts I consider representative of narratives of second-generation memory written for young audiences. To be sure, each of the children’s books I consider is “highly individualized,” not only because each depicts different historical traumas but also because every one of these texts features protagonists—or addresses readers—whose relationships to first-hand witnesses exist at various removes. Nevertheless, all of the texts I consider offer perspectives that imply a new interpretation of previously remembered circumstances. Moreover, and perhaps most crucially, because each of these texts may be identified as works of children’s literature, they share certain generic commonalities; likewise, they are all mutually invested in imparting variously mediated images of the past to a next, or “second,” generation. Furthermore, the word “generation” refers not only to a genealogical order but is synonymous as well with notions of “production” or “creation.” In this respect, the term “second-generation memory” implies a later or “secondary” production—a re-creation—of a previously articulated and collectively shared memory. In other words, the term second-generation memory does not merely apply in a literal sense to the memory experienced by a particular demographic—specifically, the immediate progeny of survivors—but also to the processes of memory that operate in response to a recollected event. For this reason, even the vicarious memories posited by grandchildren of survivors or those memories posited by individuals with no immediate, biological connection to survivors might be considered “second-generation” in that they offer a contingent, supplementary, or in effect “secondary” interpretation or reformulation of previously articulated memories. Children’s literature is especially well suited to the representation of such memory, because—like second-generation memory itself—it depends upon the reiteration and reinterpretation of previously articulated memories with respect to a new generation of readers. Second-generation memory, although it draws upon and is shaped by the memories a previous generation, nevertheless cannot exactly replicate these originally posited memories. Rather, it re-imagines or re-formulates these memories from within the new and distinct material, cultural, and historical conditions in which its bearer is located. On the one hand, this new itera-

12 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature tion illuminates the extent to which images of the past survive within, or in effect haunt, present consciousness: indeed, such memory is posited either in response to previously articulated testimonies or to the bodily or behavioral traces of trauma that a younger person perceives and reflects upon. On the other hand, however, the historically and culturally contingent character of second-generation memory places into relief the ways in which images of the past are necessarily reformulated with respect to the conditions in which its bearer is located. That is, the circumstances in which an individual places herself into relation to traumatic experiences dramatically affect the ways in which she interprets and imagines the past she has inherited. Put simply, then, the term “second-generation memory”—not unlike Shohat’s own preferred term, “neo-colonial”—suggests “repetition with difference” (107). This sense of a repetition with difference further distinguishes my own formulation of second-generation memory from Hirsch’s formulation of postmemory, which overlooks the possibility that specific literary forms such as children’s literature that depict vicariously experienced memory are as much invested in possibilities immanent within the present and the future as they are “dominated by” narratives of the past. According to Hirsch, bearers of postmemory are “dominated by narratives that preceded their birth”; moreover, their “own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of previous generations” (Family Frames 22, my emphasis). Hirsch’s use of the term “dominated” suggests that the bearer of what she calls postmemory exercises little agency in her confrontation with an elder’s traumatic past. However, the logic of domination that motivates Hirsch’s defi nition allows little room for the kinds of resistance and improvisation that characterize inter-generational relationships. Moreover, Hirsch’s contention that a later generation’s “belated stories” are “evacuated by the stories of the previous generation” further forecloses the possibility of a later generation’s creative investment in the past. The term “evacuates,” in this context, suggests that something that once existed and that may once have been significant—here, a younger generation’s “belated stories” and such stories’ development within a culturally and historically contingent context—are ultimately nullified by previously articulated narratives of the past. In this respect, Hirsch’s formulation of postmemory refuses—or, in effect, “evacuates”—historical and cultural contingency. That is, her formulation suggests that an elder’s memory is so dominant that it preempts or even eviscerates a younger person’s recognition of his own particular situation in time and space. Unlike “postmemory,” which implies not only “beyond-ness” but also an evacuation and therefore absence, “second-generation memory” suggests presence and collaboration. The term “generation,” as I have argued above, connotes a degree of production and improvisation. Moreover, the modifier “second,” which signals a contingent reiteration, suggests that the creative act of memory might recur within new circumstances. Indeed, many of the literary texts I analyze in this book—such as Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself

Introduction • 13 and Zlata’s Diary—offer particularly striking depictions of the ways in which second-generation memory is as much shaped by an individual’s consciousness of her own immediate circumstances and subject position as it is by stories and artifacts from her elders’ past. In the former text, the protagonist’s second-generation memory of the Holocaust is shaped not only by family photographs, documentaries, and the bits of information her parents divulge about her cousin’s death in Dachau, but also by classical Hollywood narratives and the everyday interactions Sally entertains within her suburban America neighborhoods. Indeed, Blume’s novel is so provocative—provocative enough to prompt indignant responses from children’s book critics—because it does not de-emphasize the immediate context in which its protagonist is situated but rather insists that this context mediates and shapes her encounter with the European past. Likewise, key entries in Filipović’s diary make clear that its young author becomes invested in Anne Frank’s experiences of the Holocaust only once she, Filipović, reflects upon them in light of her survival of the siege of Sarajevo during the early 1990s. To be sure, Filipović remains attentive to the differences between her own historical and cultural context and that of Frank’s. However, despite the differences she observes—or perhaps precisely because of them—the Bosnian diarist is able to engage with Anne Frank’s legacy in a rich and profound way. That is, Filipović is able to qualify the instances of “ethnic cleansing” that she witnesses on a daily basis only once she is able to consider these episodes into relation to earlier historical moments of racially motivated violence; in doing so, she appeals to the memory of her literary predecessor, Anne Frank. As both Blume’s novel and Filipović’s diary suggest, the “stories” of the bearer of second-generation memory, historically or temporally belated although they might be, are never marginal or inconsequential; certainly, they are not “evacuated” by the past. On the contrary, they represent newly generated perspectives of both the past and the present. Indeed, not unlike photographic ghost images, they represent the coexistence of, and relationship between, two temporal or mnemonic orders rather than the dominance of one over another. Moreover, these texts achieve expression through not only through their content but their audience: as works aimed primarily at child audiences, they encourage younger readers to re-conceptualize their own relation to a lived past. By prompting their audience to perceive uncanny associations between the past and the present, they potentially allow for their readers’ engagement with historical structures of injustice that survive within the present.

Second-Generation Memory, Collective Memory, and the Ethical Turn Even as second-generation memory might be considered a creative re-interpretation of previously articulated narratives of the past, it might also be acknowledged as a specific form of collective memory. Involving as it does the imaginative re-construction of, and personal investment in, others’ direct

14 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature experiences, such memory exhibits precisely those characteristics that theorists such as Halbwachs ascribe to collective memory. According to Halbwachs, all memories ultimately derive from collective sources, insofar as the “memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories” (40). Precisely because individual memories arise within specific social contexts or “frameworks”—and because such memories are formulated in response to “questions which others have asked us, or that we suppose they could have asked us” (38)—individual memories carry within them the needs and desires of a larger collective. Of course, most individuals would not admit, or even consider, their own memory to be anything other than an “individual faculty” (Connerton 1), not the least because dominant Western narratives of memory and the self depend upon Cartesian notions of the atomic, self-cogitating individual. However, as Paul Connerton argues in How Societies Remember (1989), collective memory depends precisely upon individuals’ unconscious participation in its processes; that is, it is sustained through individuals’ radically embodied repetition of cultural standards and desires. Collective memory, Connerton argues, is “sedimented, or amassed, in the body” through “incorporating” and “inscribing” practices that are frequently performed but hardly ever recognized on a conscious level (72–73). For instance, the Westerner who observes certain table manners by sitting upright at table or by holding a knife and fork in a conventionally appropriate fashion seldom reflects on how and why she does so—and if she does, she generally recalls only the training given to her by her immediate elders. Rarely does such an individual consider, however, that her dinner-time rituals are an expression of collective class memory: that is, an individual seldom considers how her quotidian habits repeat and thus memorialize the exertions of an Enlightenment-era rising middle class which adopted the peculiar affectations of the aristocracy in order to perform its equality to such a leisured class (84). Likewise, the person who casually observes a religious or secular holiday—say, by exchanging gifts on Christmas or Hannukah, launching fireworks on U.S. Independence Day, or building bonfires on Guy Fawkes Day—may not consciously reflect upon how her participation in this ritual might reaffirm a collectively shared memory of a foundational event. Nevertheless, as Connerton argues, an individual’s very participation in such a ceremonial ritual allows for the perpetuation of the collective memory it marks; in effect, such participation constitutes a “narrative made flesh” (47). Collective memory, then, involves a “mnemonics of the body” that depends upon the “masking” of its original narrative sources; it depends, that is, as much on uncritical participation in collective processes as it does on their mindful or pious observance (74). It stands to reason, then, that very few individuals are consciously aware of the socially shared sources to which they appeal in order to recollect certain events; likewise, very few are cognizant of the ways in which they draw the memories of others into their own recollections and habits. In contrast, bearers of second-generation memory are those people who consciously recognize

Introduction • 15 the extent to which their own, individual memories are shaped by the social contexts they inhabit and by the actions and recollections of those with whom they regularly interact. The bearer of second-generation memory recognizes, in effect, that her life is not entirely her own—that the very possibility of narrating her own past, and thus articulating her own present identity, is contingent upon the ways in which others’ recollections and practices have indelibly shaped her. Thus, second-generation memory differs from other forms of collective memory—say, the memory of a social class or a family or a nation—by virtue of its self-aware or self-reflexive character. The development of such a self-reflexive form of collective memory is not innate: that is, it is not necessarily the product of an inborn sensitive disposition, nor is it the spontaneous product of “genius.” Rather, it is often provoked by an individual’s exposure to others’ accounts of traumatic, or otherwise extraordinary, experiences that unsettle that individual’s complacent sense of entitlement to the subject position she occupies. The child of concentration camp survivors is profoundly aware of the fact that she might not exist if the material circumstances and series of events that her elders encountered had varied to even the slightest degree. Consequently, she may become particularly attentive to the narratives her elders offer—or, in some cases, decline to offer—of their experiences of survival, because such narratives might ultimately justify, or place into relief, the possibility of her own existence. In effect, the bearer of second-generation memory consciously incorporates the memory of her elders as if her life depends upon it—because, in some sense, it does. We can grasp this sense of self-awareness and indebtedness in the words of the renowned children’s author, the late Maurice Sendak. Referring to the European relatives whose deaths in the Holocaust continually haunted his childhood imaginings, Sendak famously stated that his “burden is living for those who didn’t”16 Indeed, Sendak’s exquisitely detailed picture books, which often feature child characters who experience abandonment, terror, and profound vulnerability, literally illustrate his empathy with and sense of indebtedness to those who, like his European relatives, experienced the ultimate form of persecution.17 The burden that Sendak assumed recurs in contemporary children’s books which depict young people who live “for those who didn’t.” Indeed, the existential questions that such a burden invites are often incorporated into children’s texts that depict the uneasy process of coming-of-age. Lois Lowry’s award-winning children’s fantasy novel The Giver, for example, offers a figurative representation of Sendak’s professed burden, insofar as it depicts a protagonist whose initiation into young adulthood coincides with his willing acceptance of an older person’s troubling memories. Likewise, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s YA novel The Hunger involves a protagonist whose entrance into womanhood is marked not only by her acceptance of her bodily maturation but also by her recognition of her forebears’ experience of the Armenian genocide. These texts, like other second-generation-themed texts written for young people, suggest that the process of “coming into one’s own” is not limited to solitary

16 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature acts of self-affirmation. Rather, they imply that, in some cases—especially those marked by a traumatic family history—the coming-of-age process may involve the act of living with, and for, the memory of others. Insofar as they are concerned with the recognition and assumption of others’ burdens, novels such as The Giver and The Hunger suggest that second-generation memory involves an ethical dimension. They imply that such memory incorporates obligation to and responsibility for others. As Judith Butler argues in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), the self does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, any articulation of selfhood, or of the fi rst-person “I,” depends necessarily on the preexistence of a “you” to whom such an enunciation is addressed. Moreover, the “very terms by which we make of ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others are not of our making” but instead derive from socially symbolic systems and relationships that preceded our existence (21). The recognition of the (pre-)existence of others to whom the self is radically vulnerable—an awareness that Butler qualifies as ethical—is certainly a dimension of the self-reflexive experience of second-generation memory. Indeed, Sendak’s statement of “living for those who didn’t”—as well as those works of contemporary children’s literature that variously represent such a profession—reaffi rm an understanding of selfhood that is profoundly dependent upon the experiences and memories of others. Moreover, second-generation memory involves an ethical component not only because its bearer is attuned to her vulnerability to others, but also because her awareness of such vulnerability often in turn prompts her to recognize her responsibility to and for others. As Alan L. Berger argues in his literary study Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (1997), children of Jewish Holocaust survivors who have reflected upon their parents’ harrowing experiences are often motivated to “contribute toward the achievement of tikkun olam, something for the ‘good of the world’” 18 (18). Cognizant of the fact that their elders’ experiences were not simply isolated incidences but rather experiences of larger structural injustices whose consequences reverberate within their own lives, such “second-generation witnesses,” as Berger calls them, actively work toward transforming such structures. He cites the active role played by second-generation Holocaust witnesses in laboring “on behalf of Jews from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopian Jewry” (25). Moreover, Berger considers how literary depictions of second-generation witness call for the rectification of structures of injustice, exploring how Lev Raphael’s short story “Caravans,” which addresses not only the Holocaust but the Stonewall riots of 1969, draws on a second-generation perspective in order to posit an association between Nazi anti-Semitism and contemporary acts of homophobia19 (117). According to Berger, then, literary accounts second-generation witness or memory20 place into relief the need for continual ethical and political engagement, insofar as they feature protagonists who acknowledge their obligation to others whose travails might resemble those of their elders’.

Introduction • 17 Second-Generation Memory and Childhood Perception Berger’s study of the ethical and political potential of second-generation witness is based primarily on the literary accounts of adult children of survivors. I build on and depart from Berger’s study, however, by correlating the development of second-generation memory and the particular ethical orientation that childhood modes of perception make possible. Although the examples that Berger cites involve the second-generation memory of grown children, nearly all of these texts suggest their protagonists’ vicarious memories were prompted by early childhood experiences that occurred before these individuals had a more extensive understanding of their elders’ encounters with trauma and the historical context in which such encounters took place. Second-generation memory is distinctive, that is, not only because it is profoundly self-reflexive and because such self-reflexivity makes possible a certain ethical turn, but also because it preserves a mode of pre-rational perception characteristic of childhood. To the extent that my study of second-generation memory is concerned with childhood perception, it is significantly informed by the writings of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. In the past two decades, Benjamin’s oeuvre has enjoyed a certain renaissance in the fields of cultural and critical studies, not the least because his reflections on language, modernity, and theology have informed the work of scholars intent upon revisiting and critiquing Enlightenment humanism. Few, however, have considered Benjamin’s interest in childhood perception—a cognitive faculty which he believed held revolutionary potential. As Benjamin argues throughout his many essays, children have an ability to think and act in ways that their “rational” adult counterparts have forgotten. Young people, he maintains, have not yet learned to divorce reflection from spontaneous action; thus, they constantly must be reminded by their guardians to “look but not touch.” Moreover, children not only see surprising correspondences between otherwise unrelated objects, but seek to perform such correspondences. In this way, as Benjamin argues in his essay “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933), the “child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher, but also a windmill and a train” (720). The child, that is, perceives relationships not only between herself and other people, but also between herself and inanimate objects; in this way, she breaches the subject– object divide otherwise reinforced by Western pedagogy. Moreover, by imagining herself as a “shopkeeper or teacher” or as a “windmill and a train,” the child performs the relationships she perceives: her trespass of pre-ordained Western binaries is as much embodied as it is cognitive. It is this capacity for analogical perception and mimetic play that predisposes the child toward second-generation memory, which itself depends upon the perception of unlikely associations and the ability to inhabit radically different perspectives. If grown children, such as those whose stories Berger analyzes, have the ability to empathize radically with their elders—

18 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature and in turn with others whose sufferings resemble those of their elders—it is because they have been able to preserve a manner of perception that allows them to think of others as existing in association with them, rather than as categorically separated from them. Because the bearer of secondgeneration memory, like the young child, perceives an intimate correspondence between “I” and “you”—a correspondence that, through the process of socialization often becomes gradually supplanted by Cartesian notions of the distinctive, cogitating self and Western myths of individualism—she is in turn able to perceive others’ memories and experiences as intimately tied to her own. Likewise, she is able to perceive the past not as a linear, unbroken chain of events, as Enlightenment notions of history would have it, but rather as a phenomenon that survives in both the active recollection and the unconscious habits of those closest to her. Moreover, and perhaps most crucially, she is able to inhabit or embody the relationships she imagines. Indeed, each of the texts that I analyze throughout the course of this book depicts a child’s (or a child-figure’s) embodied and affective relationship to the past. In turn, each of these texts suggests that such a sensuous affi liation is potentially available to adult cognition as much as it is evidenced within childhood modes of perception. Insofar as it involves the transgression of ostensibly stable identities or subject–object relationships, second-generation memory can be considered a radically disruptive form. It unsettles the distinctions between “present” and “past,” “self” and “other,” and “mind” and “body.” Paradoxically, perhaps, it also calls into the question the very category on which it is founded: the family. Both second-generation memory and collective memory “enframe, modify, and recast” individual recollection in relation to ties of kinship, affective bonds, and narratives of inheritance (Halbwachs 62). Second-generation memory, however, also has the potential to develop within circumstances that are conventionally perceived as extra-familial, but that the individual bearer of memory herself might nevertheless perceive as part of her personal legacy. Precisely because second-generation memory is a particularly imaginative, improvisational, and associative order of memory, it may articulate familial relationships that prevailing social norms do not regard as sanctioned or legitimate. As I argue in my third chapter on Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary, the bearer of second-generation memory may be impelled by her particular circumstances to forge an intimate connection to another’s past that is based not on direct family ties but rather on discursive relationships. That is, if second-generation memory is initially formed by the child’s proximity to others’ recollections, it may just as well be prompted by accounts provided by accessible cultural artifacts as it is by near-and-dear family members. In turn, if the pre- or proto-rational child has not yet learned to distinguish between externally mediated sources and those that arise from within her own family, she may come to incorporate the intelligence offered by such artifacts as part of her own genealogical legacy.

Introduction • 19 Second-Generation Memory, Mass Media, and the Child Reader Indeed, cultural critics have become particularly attentive to the ways in which emerging forms of media make possible new experiences of self and memory. According to Alison Landsberg, for example, the proliferation of the visual media makes possible a new order of memory, which she terms “prosthetic memory.” Prosthetic memory, Landsberg argues, “emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum” (2). Prosthetic memories, she maintains, are “derived from engagement with mediated representation (seeing a fi lm, visiting a museum, watching a television miniseries)” (20). According to Landsberg’s formulation, once audiences actively engage with artifacts that represent unexperienced past events, they incorporate them into their mnemonic repertoires much as an organic body incorporates artificial limbs (20). Not unlike prosthetic limbs, such memories are “worn on the body”: they are “sensuous memories produced by an experience of mass-mediated representations” (20, emphasis in original). To be sure, Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory coincides strikingly with my own theory of second-generation memory, because both her formulation and my own involve the subject’s internalization of events experienced vicariously through others’ recollections as well as through mass mediated representations of traumatic events.21 My formulation departs from Landsberg’s, however, in my emphasis on the “generational” aspect of the memory we mutually seek to analyze. That is, my own notion of second-generation memory involves the individual’s perception of the past specifically through networks of kinship or through her self-emplotment within larger genealogical narratives. For example, my reading of Zlata’s Diary argues that its teenaged narrator’s ostensibly “prosthetic” incorporation of the memory of Anne Frank is effected through improvised notions of kinship and literary genealogical ties. My investigation departs from Landsberg’s, moreover, insofar as it resists regarding vicariously experienced memory in the largely positive or even utopian manner that Landsberg’s study appears to do. In the introduction to her study, Landsberg argues that prosthetic memory is “neither inherently progressive nor inherently reactionary, but it is powerful” (3). Nevertheless, most of her case studies—for example, her analysis of John Singleton’s film Rosewood (1996), which I discuss in my fourth chapter—suggest the liberating potential of prosthetic memory.22 Indeed, Landsberg’s thesis relies upon her conviction that, in the “best cases, prosthetic memories can produce empathy and thereby enable a person to establish a political connection with someone from a different class, race, or ethnic position” (48). What Landsberg’s study generally does not take into account, however, is that “best cases” are often, and unfortunately, complemented by “worst cases.” Her study neglects the possibility that artifacts of prosthetic memory might operate—to cite Shohat once more—“quite apart

20 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature from their users’ [or producers’] intentions.” For example, as Landsberg argues in the fourth chapter of her study, programs constructed by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum can “teach ethical thinking, generate empathy, and thereby reconfigure a person’s worldview” (138). Certainly, a powerful museum exhibit such as this one has the potential to generate intimate and ethical responses to the traumatic past, but this does not mean that such potential will be realized. Indeed, during my own visits to this museum, I have observed, with considerable dismay, tourists who pass through its harrowing exhibits with the same degree of vague interest with which they regard artifacts at the National Portrait Gallery or the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.23 Moreover, if the 2009 shooting incident at this same museum is any indication, a mass medium such as a museum exhibit may not be powerful enough to engage individuals’ empathy.24 Indeed, in a case such as this one—in which a professed Holocaust-denier shot an African-American museum guard—such a memorial could just as well be a site in which racially motivated hate crimes are repeated rather than preempted. Likewise, although it may be tempting to believe that exposing young readers to texts such as Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl might facilitate their ethical development, there is no guarantee that each reader will reach the same sophisticated conclusions regarding the relationship between past and present structures of injustice that Zlata Filipović does in her Sarajevo diary.25 Indeed, as multiple efforts to ban Frank’s diary in the U.S. should make clear, a cultural or literary text may be interpreted in ways that those who promulgate it do not foresee or desire.26 If, as Landsberg argues, artifacts of mass culture might be regarded as mnemonic prostheses, it should be admitted that such prostheses have the potential in effect to carry their hosts in directions that their producers may not have intended or that teachers, scholars, or curators might not have anticipated.27 Thus, although I perceive certain correspondences between Landsberg’s formulation of prosthetic memory and my own articulation of second-generation memory, I nevertheless take issue with her evaluation of the implications or consequences of such incorporated memory. Like Landsberg, I identify key texts that envision an order of memory that involves an individual’s identification with others in a manner that disrupts conventional, linear narratives of the past; moreover, I also evaluate the extent to which these texts imagine the ethical or political potential of such memory and the mode of perception that it involves. Unlike Landsberg, however, I resist making defi nitive claims about how audiences might internalize or respond to such representations. In other words, my study considers only the ways cultural texts—fictional and nonfictional sources alike—represent or contribute to the conceptualization of what I call second-generation memory. I refrain, however, from studying how such memory is experienced by human subjects who exist beyond the parameters of culturally produced texts or how its representations are received by actual readers; such investigations might be better performed by psychologists or reader-response critics, respectively.

Introduction • 21 By restricting my study of second-generation memory to its representation in literature—specifically, children’s literature—I acknowledge that, like any other text, a children’s book is subject to interpretation by readers who approach them from myriad subject positions and cultural contexts. Young readers are as capable as their elders of resisting or reformulating the narratives given them; indeed, precisely because children have not yet been completely sutured within pre-existing ideological formations and discourses, they may be more likely than their adult counterparts to interpret a literary text in a way that its producer may not have intended.28 It is important, therefore, to resist over-determined conclusions about the effects of such texts on actual juvenile audiences. Indeed, one of the most common, and most problematic, assumptions about children’s literature is that it imparts “life lessons” that are easily and unconsciously internalized by young readers. Such conventional assumptions rest on the belief that child readers are little more than inert receptacles of knowledge or indoctrination rather than thinking or acting subjects in their own right. Moreover, such assumptions overlook the literary richness and complexity of children’s literature by considering it in merely pragmatic or pedagogical terms—terms that are not often applied to “adult” or “general” literature.29 It is important, in other words, to regard children’s texts on their own literary and historically specific terms, rather than to focus entirely on their pedagogical or pragmatic objectives or to arrive at easy or over-determined conclusions regarding actual child readers’ responses to these aims. In the final analysis, it may be impossible to project just how (or even whether) actual child readers will respond to a text’s depiction of the traumatic past. The degree to which a given text might provoke an affi liative relationship to the past depends radically upon the precise context in which a reader receives it. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to assess the degree to which readers are actually transformed by the texts they apprehend.

Second-Generation Memory and the [Re-]Productive Imagination This is certainly not to say, of course, that it is unnecessary to consider how texts produced within specific historical or cultural moments attempt to provoke specific responses from their readers. All literary texts, whether they are intended for child or adult audiences, deploy specific narrative and rhetorical strategies in order orient their readers and to solicit certain desired reactions. Although it is difficult to assess whether literary texts actually or practically succeed in their aims, it is nevertheless possible—and necessary—to consider their immediate, and often conflicting, investments through an analysis of their internal logic and their historical moment of production. Indeed, such analysis can place into relief the degree to which such texts might potentially, if not actually, engage readers’ sympathy or resistance. Moreover, such analysis affords one the opportunity of gauging the extent to which specific texts

22 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature reaffirm and/or challenge dominant cultural narratives—and how, therefore, their participation in and/or resistance to such narratives affects their construction of their imagined audience. It is especially important to consider how second-generation-themed children’s books imagine and construct their audiences because such texts often aim not only to represent such memory but to produce it as well. These books are often the first sources representing historical trauma that young people encounter; moreover, the images and stories these texts depict are potentially powerful enough to remain entrenched in readers’ memories and to shape their historical and ethical perspectives. Indeed, this is what the authors of these books, as well as the librarians and educators who introduce them to children, ultimately desire. Books such as Lowry’s Number the Stars, for example, are often included in elementary and middle school curricula on the Holocaust; likewise, educators and publishers regularly produce lists of books that might supplement lessons on key historical periods and events. Students are encouraged to identify with the protagonists of these novels; in fact, these texts’ authors’ notes and appended reading questions prompt the reader to evaluate the characters’ experiences and decisions and to pursue more reading on the historical moment the texts depict. The ostensible objective of such books, and of the precise ways they are deployed in pedagogical settings, is not only to expose children to past instances of injustice but also to provoke in them an affective relationship to the past; in turn, such narratives aim to foster in young readers certain ethical and political sensibilities. As idealistic and well intentioned as these attempts may be, however, they are nevertheless problematic. Indeed, as I argue in my analysis of Mordecai Gerstein’s September 11–themed picture book, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (2003), texts produced for young readers are often so complex, and so mediated by multiple and often conflicting ideological perspectives, that it is difficult or even inadvisable to identify definitively just what their so-called “lessons” about the past might be. In most cases, children’s texts that aim to represent, and in some cases produce, second-generation memory are characterized by a profound ambivalence. On the one hand, they seek to represent, and in turn provoke, a new or “second” interpretation of the past. That is, by offering readers scenarios in which characters empathize with their elders in such a way that arrive at startlingly new visions of the past and the present, these texts challenge audiences to reassess their received historical knowledge and to occupy perspectives that previously might have seemed foreign to them. On the other hand, however, such second-generation themed books—like all literary works—necessarily draw into their narratives ideological perspectives and investments immanent with their moment of production, including those that reaffirm rather than contest conventional orientations to the past and present. Thus, even those books that offer apparently radical appeals for social transformation may also involve traditional plots and modes of characterization that are more conservative than they are progressive or transformative. For example,

Introduction • 23 Holocaust-themed children’s books tend to draw on Western myths of individualism in their depiction of the heroic feats of single individuals. Consequently, as both Bosmajian and Kertzer have argued,30 such books tend to privilege the stories of exceptional survivors even as they downplay the struggles of those who did not survive; likewise, such narratives might overlook the existence of institutional structures that permitted the banal complicity of perpetrators. Moreover, the so-called children’s literature of atrocity often neglects the transformative potential of collective action by focusing instead on individual heroics; in this way, it not only overlooks historical instances of collective resistance but side-steps the question of how present structures of injustice might be most productively transformed. Finally, as I demonstrate in my fourth and fifth chapters—on Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s The Hunger (1999) and Mordecai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (2003), respectively— certain works of children’s atrocity literature remain problematically wedded to myths of nationhood. That is, particular works of children’s literature frame their depictions of second-generation memory within larger narratives that uncritically reaffirm dominant national myths—for example, Canadian multiculturalism or American exceptionalism. Consequently, insofar as these texts attempt to provoke readers’ affective relationships to a traumatic past, they simultaneously circumscribe such relationships by envisioning them as developing within certain state- or institutionally bound parameters. If we consider the conservative or ideologically re-affirmative character of many representations of the past in children’s literature, we have to concede that the imaginative and mnemonic investment in the past represented and in turn prompted by such works may be merely reproductive rather than radically productive or transformative. As Paul Ricoeur argues, the productive imagination involves the “apperception, the sudden view, of a new predicative pertinence” (122) that “open[s] up and unfold[s] new dimensions of reality” rather than merely reproducing formerly existing ones (124). The reproductive imagination, however, merely reproduces or reaffi rms conventionally held modes of thinking and seeing, thus foreclosing the possibility of perceiving and engaging with new ideas and modes of relation. Initially, it may be tempting to characterize representations of second-generation memory as effects of the productive imagination, insofar as they depict new and profoundly intimate relationships to an unlived past. Nevertheless, the extent to which many works of juvenile fiction ultimately reaffirm rather than question or critique cultural myths or institutions suggests that the images of second-generation memory they advance are not as radical or transformative as they first appear. A major question that motivates this study, then, is whether or not the narratives of second-generation memory offered by children’s literature are truly productive. Although second-generation memory itself has the potential to offer a new production of formerly articulated visions of the past, it remains questionable as to whether its representation within children’s literature captures or transmits its radical promise.

24 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature Chapter Overviews The chapters that follow offer case studies of significant representations of second-generation memory in children’s texts published in the last quarter of the twentieth century—an era that, not coincidentally, witnessed the emergence of both children’s literature and memory/trauma studies31 as institutionally sanctioned disciplines within the larger field of literary and cultural studies. In each chapter, I posit a key text as a vehicle through which to think about and elaborate critical aspects of second-generation memory—for example, its crucial relation to childhood, its development within both familial and extra-familial contexts, its development within a specific historical era dominated by different forms of media, and its relation to different collective contexts including diasporic communities and nation. Although each of these case studies considers a different facet of second-generation memory, all of them are motivated by my particular interest in the productive potential of such memory and the extent to which children’s literature might enable or foreclose such potential. My first two chapters, on Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself, analyze how works of children’s literature imagine the juvenile bearer of second-generation memory as a potentially radical agent. The second set of chapters, however—on Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary and Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s The Hunger— address the ways in which such a radical vision is undercut or compromised by texts’ appeals to such traditional Western ideals as the Romantic child, individualism, and the modern nation-state. The concluding chapter, on Mordecai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, studies the ways in which children’s texts might negotiate—or, as it were, “walk the line” between—conflicting radical and conservative representations of secondgeneration memory. Chapter 1, “Seeing Beyond: Memory, Forgetting, and Ethics in Lois Lowry’s The Giver,” elaborates in further detail the key characteristics of secondgeneration memory that I have outlined above. Lowry’s novel, I argue, lends itself particularly well to the study of second-generation memory not only because its central theme involves the tension between memory and forgetting but also because its generic classification as a post-apocalyptic fable invites figurative or conceptual readings. The relationship between the novel’s protagonist, Jonas, and his mentor, the Giver, may be interpreted as a representation of present-day intergenerational dynamics. Moreover, the ritual through which the Giver literally hands over his memories to Jonas depicts allegorically the various means by which the bearer of second-generation memory inherits an unexperienced past. Lowry’s depiction of this ritual gestures not only to the development of second-generation memory within an intimate familial context but to its mediation by other, extra-familial sources such as fi lm and television. The Giver is additionally significant insofar as it suggests that second-generation memory might prompt an individual’s participation

Introduction • 25 in collective modes of resistance and change. Although Lowry’s novel is conventionally interpreted as a conservative paean to American myths of individualism, I argue that it offers instead a vision of the collective transformation of structures of injustice. The novel concludes, after all, with Jonas’s attempt to return the repressed memories he has inherited from his mentor to his community with the hope that their reclamation might inspire cooperative change. Thus, Lowry’s novel posits the bearer of second-generation memory as, in effect, a “giver” who draws on his intimate relationship with the past to inform and mobilize others in the pursuit of justice. Nevertheless, its ambiguous conclusion leaves open the question of whether such collective change is, in fact, possible. My second chapter, “Sitting Shivah: Mourning and Performance in Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself,” accounts further for the ways in which juvenile fiction imagines the child-bearer of second-generation memory as an agent of change. Blume’s novel, which depicts its eponymous heroine’s profound identification with a cousin killed in Dachau, suggests that the child is uniquely capable of fostering a mimetic relationship with the past and thus is capable of perceiving uncanny resemblances between past and present structures of injustice. Unlike her ostensibly more “rational” adult counterparts, Blume’s protagonist, Sally, neglects categorical distinctions between past and present and fiction and reality: she engages, for example, in extravagant, Hollywood-inspired fantasies in which she imagines herself in the position of her murdered cousin, Lila. As irrational and morbid as these fantasies might initially appear, however, they permit Sally to identify with victims of anti-Semitism and, in turn, to empathize with those affected by racial violence in her present-day U.S. Blume’s novel therefore vindicates the imaginative, mediated, and ostensibly naïve or childlike character of secondgeneration memory, implying that the empathy it engenders might in turn prompt the interrogation of socially constructed categories or circumstances that others rationalize as natural. If Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself implies that second-generation memory is as influenced by cultural sources like fi lm as it is by familial relationships, Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary demonstrates the extent to which cultural artifacts alone might mediate second-generation memory. My third chapter, “Anne Frank’s ‘Own True Heir’: Intertextuality and the Intergenerational in Zlata’s Diary,” studies how the autobiographical account of a (pre-) adolescent survivor of the 1992–1996 siege of Sarajevo is influenced significantly by the narrative structure, rhetoric, and literary style of an earlier juvenile war diary, Anne Frank’s posthumously published The Diary of a Young Girl (1947). The narrator of Zlata’s Diary does not obscure her debt to an earlier war-time child diarist; rather, she openly admits it and indeed legitimizes her narrative voice by positing herself as Anne Frank’s literary heir. By constructing a genealogy that links her generically, although not biologically, to a member of an earlier European generation, Zlata locates a position of authority from which

26 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature she might evaluate her war-time circumstances. Zlata’s Diary, I argue, offers us a problematic depiction of second-generation memory. On the one hand, its representation of the processes by which an individual absorbs and re-inscribes the (textually based) memories of another gestures toward how that individual might reflect upon vicariously experienced memories to critique her own, present circumstances. On the other hand, however, Filipović’s text demonstrates the extent to which the experience and subsequent depiction of second-generation memory might be mediated by discourses that compromise its radical potential. Zlata’s memory of her literary predecessor is significantly informed, for example, by traditional, Romantic notions of childhood that conceive of the child as innocent and helpless—images of childhood that undercut the very notions of agency on which Filipović and Frank both insist. Moreover, Filipović’s diary, much like Frank’s own text, is edited by adults whose relatively conservative notions of childhood, gender, and social change impel them, whether consciously or unconsciously, to repress the more radical implications of these works. The role of adult, and more generally ideological, mediation in the representation of childhood experiences is a significant theme in my fourth chapter, “‘The Past Is a Foreign Country’: The Individual, Diaspora, and Nation in Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s The Hunger.” This chapter is focused on a YA “problem novel” which depicts the process by which its protagonist, a Canadian teenager named Paula, resolves her eating disorder by traveling in time to experience the “real hunger” faced by her grandmother, a survivor of the Armenian genocide of 1915–1917. Like other YA problem novels, Skrypuch’s novel follows a narrative pattern established in the earlier, nineteenth-century problem novel. That is, it imagines that larger systemic problems might be resolved through individual, rather than collective, interventions and modifications. For example, it depicts Paula’s experience of, and subsequent recovery from, anorexia as a matter of personal choice rather than as a consequence of larger, more systemically structured notions of gender and body. Unlike most YA problem novels, however, it imagines that such an individual intervention might be facilitated precisely by a vicarious experience of the past. By adopting the memories of her great-aunt and grandmother, Paula realizes that her own concerns with body image are trivial once compared with their survival of the Armenian genocide, and thus chooses to reform out of a sense of obligation to her comparatively more put-upon elders. Thus, unlike the texts considered in the preceding chapters, The Hunger suggests that the vicarious memory past is instrumental or instructive only insofar as it effects individual, rather than collective, change. Moreover, even when The Hunger is considered more abstractly, as the allegory of more wide-ranging cultural themes, its depiction of second-generation memory might still be regarded as serving more-or-less conservative interests, insofar as this novel reaffirms rather than questions myths of nationhood. Paula’s emaciated body, I argue, may be read as a metonymical representation

Introduction • 27 of the Canadian body-politic, which cultural critics such as Margaret Atwood and Stanley Fogel diagnosed, during the 1970s and ’80s, precisely as “anorectic” and culturally impoverished. In turn, Skrypuch’s “solution” to her protagonist’s anorexia uncannily mirrors ideological “solutions” to Canadian crises of identity offered by both cultural critics and official state discourse. The protagonist of The Hunger may enjoy physical convalescence only once she draws sustenance from a pre-immigration past that, traumatic although it might be, is nevertheless figured as more rich and substantial than the anonymous, suburban present she currently inhabits. Likewise, according to conventional and state-supported narratives, Canadian national identity is in effect bloodless and amorphous without the cultural infusion granted by its various diasporic populations. Ultimately, then, Skrypuch’s novel, insofar as it is read alongside coterminously articulated critiques of Canadian identity, allegorically serves to reaffirm, rather than to interrogate, reigning ideological notions of national identity. Such a reaffirmation of state-supported ideals of nationhood in turn situates Skrypuch’s representation of second-generation memory within a conservative, rather than a radical, narrative framework. The critical relationship between national ideology and second-generation memory significantly informs my concluding chapter, on Mordecai Gerstein’s, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (2003). Published in the aftermath of the events of September 11, Gerstein’s picture book depicts what it deems a “happier moment” of U.S. history when the iconic Towers were still intact and yet-impervious to terrorist plots—so much so, in fact, that their very existence dared a French adventure-seeker to perform a tight-rope walk between them. Although the concluding pages of Gerstein’s text admit that the fabled Twin Towers are now “gone” (32), the majority of its content works to repress the memory of their destruction—as well as the ideological motives behind both their erection and demolishment—in order to privilege instead a more “innocent” episode in their relatively brief history. Insofar as it was published at least in part for the benefit of young readers with no or little immediate memory of the events of September 11, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers might be read as an attempt to produce a second-generation memory characterized by nostalgic visions of a purportedly innocent, pre-“War on Terror” American past. Read against the grain, however, Gerstein’s book might as well be interpreted as a critique of the very national myths it seems to espouse. By depicting the adventures of a foreign protagonist who, not unlike a terrorist, illegally gains entry into and makes a spectacle of a cherished American icon, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers troubles boundaries between “insiders” and “outsiders” that ostensibly have been fi xed by narratives of U.S. history. Thus, if Gerstein’s text may be read as an attempt to produce secondgeneration memory, the memory it ultimately creates is ambivalent and subject to interpretation and interrogation. Indeed, as I conclude, second-generation memory itself is neither inherently “radical” nor “conservative.” Rather, as Gerstein’s text demonstrates, it involves a mode of perception that potentially

28 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature allows for—but certainly does not guarantee—the recognition of mnemonic associations that may (or may not) prompt transformative action. To put this differently—and to cite Walter Benjamin’s essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), which significantly informs this study—second-generation memory allows the possibility of “seiz[ing] hold of an image of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger” (255).

Chapter One “Seeing Beyond” Memory, Forgetting, and Ethics in Lois Lowry’s The Giver

If there is one book that has rivaled Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the most frequently taught literary text in the American schoolroom, it may be Lois Lowry’s dystopic children’s novel, The Giver. Published in 1993, this story of a boy’s act resistance against a futuristic totalitarian society became an instant bestseller; soon thereafter, it collected a number of literary prizes, including the Newbery Medal and the American Library Association’s prize for the best book for young adults of that year. Praised by reviewers and educators for the directness and simplicity of its style and the richness of its characterization, The Giver soon became a main staple in middle school reading curricula, where it has remained a solid presence (Hipple and Maupin 40–41). Decades after its publication, readers continue to find Lowry’s depiction of a dystopic society especially convincing, praising the manner in which her vision of this brave new world “forces us to question values taken for granted and to reexamine our beliefs” (Bushman 80). The novel has also garnered a great deal of attention from scholars of children’s literature, who both praise and question its political significance. Indeed, like many complex and particularly memorable children’s novels (including the aforementioned Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), The Giver has been subject to intense scholarly debate. On the one hand, readers like Carrie Hintz have praised the manner in which it “seriously portray[s] dissent for younger audiences and make[s] it clear that young people should be integrated into political life” (263). On the other hand, more skeptical readers like Susan Stewart have argued that it “fails to address alterity, reinforces cultural continuity, and actually diminishes opportunities to think in terms of difference because of its overriding humanist impetus” (26). Although its implications may remain 29

30 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature contested, The Giver’s persistent presence within scholarly conversation, as well as its continued insertion into various teaching curricula,1 has assured its sustained popularity. In fact, since its publication, Lowry’s novel has been named one of the 100 best books for children, and it has inspired art exhibitions, stage adaptations, and even a Tai Chi ballet (Silvey 147).2 If, nearly two decades after its publication, The Giver has continued to grip young and older readers alike, this may be because it addresses a topic that particularly intrigues the contemporary Western imagination: the question of memory. After all, the novel depicts a totalitarian society which derives its power precisely from the near-obliteration of collective memory—and its denouement involves its protagonist’s scandalous dissemination of memories that were intended by the community to remain secret. Not insignificantly, The Giver’s publication was coterminous with greater cultural efforts to simultaneously archive and disseminate the memories of dying generations. It may not be entirely coincidental, for example, that Lowry’s novel was published in the same year that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC first opened its doors with the express purpose of reinserting into the collective consciousness the memory of one of the bitterest moments in human history. Nor is it insignificant that, in the twenty-odd years preceding The Giver’s publication, literary and fi lmic works—ranging from Alex Haley’s Roots and its 1977 television adaptation to Roland Joffé’s fi lm The Killing Fields (1984) to Steven Spielberg’s more recent fi lm Schindler’s List (1993)—strove to impress upon contemporary audiences the necessity of remembering traumatic historical events and injustices that they might otherwise just as soon forget. Although these works (and other similar dramas) were intended for the mass consumption of audiences from various racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds, and although their historical settings were often unfamiliar to contemporary readers or spectators, they nevertheless strove to elicit deeply personal responses from discrete individuals. Clearly, these texts were successful in their endeavor. For example, the television adaptation of Roots not only reached viewers from around the globe, but also motivated many to construct their own family genealogies. Likewise, The Killing Fields and Schindler’s List inspired great interest in the Cambodian genocide and the Holocaust, respectively—even in those whose family members were not affected by these historical traumas. Coincident with these new literary and fi lmic depictions of mass trauma was the emergence of the slogan, “Never Again,” which, although it was initially coined to further Holocaust remembrance, has since been adopted by survivors of other instances of mass trauma, as well as by protestors of civil and human rights abuses. If this slogan has become something of a cliché—and one whose warning unfortunately is not often heeded—even its well-worn use testifies to a new and urgent cultural trend of acknowledging the traumatic past and internalizing its lessons. It is not surprising, then, that The Giver should be published and widely acclaimed at the precise moment this movement toward remembrance began to reach its

“Seeing Beyond” • 31 peak. Indeed, Lowry’s story of a single boy’s defiance of an amnesiac, totalitarian society might even be read as an allegorical illustration of Milan Kundera’s oft-cited statement3 that the “struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (4). It is not surprising, as well, that The Giver should join the ranks of scores of children’s novels published with the intention of impressing upon the minds of young people the value of remembering the traumatic past. In fact, Lowry’s fantastical story of resistance was immediately preceded by her first Newberyaward winning novel, Number the Stars (1989), which depicts a Danish girl’s attempt to protect her Jewish best friend from her Nazi oppressors. Number the Stars itself added to an increasingly growing list of children’s books seeking to teach children about the Holocaust—a list that includes such renowned titles as Doris Orgel’s The Devil in Vienna (1978) and Jane Yolen’s much-celebrated The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988). Moreover, other children’s texts, such as Eleanor Coerr’s Sadoko and the Thousand Paper Cranes (1977), Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe (1987), Adam Bagdasarian’s Forgotten Fire (2000), have sought to kindle the memory of such traumatic historical events as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalinist efforts at “dekulakization,” and the Armenian genocide, respectively. Like contemporaneous texts intended for adult audiences, these children’s books have not shied away from confronting their readers with depictions of a violent past, nor have they refrained from insisting upon readers’ responsibility to commit to memory their difficult subjects. In this way, The Giver, whose fabulous, futuristic setting nevertheless uncannily resembles sites of actual, historical traumas—ranging from Nazi Germany to Stalinist-era Soviet Union to even the McCarthy-era U.S.rearticulates a plea for collective remembrance of major catastrophes that is already familiar to young readers. However, even as The Giver reiterates a general call for remembrance, it also gives expression to a certain cultural anxiety about memory’s shadowy twin, forgetting. Indeed, as Kundera’s maxim makes clear, the will to remember past injustices always entails a struggle against forgetting—a struggle whose outcome is as ambiguous as that of a solitary individual’s quest to resist power. By now, it has become commonplace to argue that, in an information age driven by a collective desire for the newest stories and the most novel experiences, the past is steadily being swept away into the dustbin of history. For example, in a meditation upon Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus,” Walter Benjamin imagines the “angel of history” as a figure helplessly blown into the future by the “storm” of “progress,” thwarted in his desire to redeem and “make whole” the “wreckage” of the past (“Theses” 257–258). More recently, French historian Pierre Nora has argued that memory has been overtaken by an “acceleration of history”; additionally, he has maintained that we “speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left” (7). Moreover, contemporary scholars have warned that even attempts to resuscitate the past do not necessarily guarantee its survival within the present. For example, in her

32 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature study of Holocaust poetry, Susan Gubar makes the counterintuitive claim that “the Holocaust is dying” even as historians, artists, writers, fi lmmakers, and witnesses try to keep its memory alive (1). According to Gubar, the “dying” of the Holocaust is evident not only in the inevitable aging of its very youngest witnesses, but in the proliferation of “TV programs and bestselling novels, fictionalized biographies and popularized fi lms” that “jeopardize . . . that history by commodifying or fetishizing events that continue to recede further from view” (5). Given the warnings of Benjamin, Nora, and Gubar—whose respective writings on the past are each motivated by different and often conflicting theoretical and political concerns4 —one might well wonder whether contemporary Western society bears a greater resemblance to Lowry’s amnesiac community than might be desired. Like this society, which makes occasional, superficial appeals to the past only in an effort to inoculate itself against it, our own appears to relegate memories of the traumatic past to easily consumable but ultimately extrinsic narratives. Thus, although readers often cite the ambiguity surrounding the survival of the novel’s protagonist as one of the most fascinating aspects of Lowry’s novel, it may be the survival of memory itself that constitutes the text’s most intriguing theme. At the heart of this novel is one of the most pressing questions of the latter century: is it possible, in contemporary Western society, to sustain the memory of the past, or has our culture instead become one of forgetting? To complicate this question further, The Giver introduces the problem of second-generation memory. Initially, its protagonist, Jonas, is as ignorant of the past as are his fellow community members. However, once Jonas is chosen to become the protégé of a mysterious stranger he knows only as the Giver, he becomes privy to secrets of the past that were once withheld from him. As the Giver gradually bestows upon Jonas the repressed memories of the community, Lowry’s young protagonist finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish these shared memories from those that constitute his own, personal mnemonic repertoire. Moreover, he becomes gradually more impatient with his fellow citizens’ profound ignorance of the past, especially when he recognizes that their ignorance allows them to sustain an unjust system of power. Although the setting of Lowry’s novel is clearly fabulous, its depiction of a child’s inheritance of unexperienced memories nevertheless bears a striking resemblance to accounts of actual, living children who claim to have assimilated their living forebears’ memories of past traumas. Jonas’s story, it turns out, is not unlike those narratives offered by children of Holocaust survivors or descendants of victims of racial hate crimes in America. Thus, inasmuch as The Giver has come to be considered as an allegory of twentieth-century instances of repression and resistance, it may also be read as a fable of secondgeneration memory. As a fable of second-generation memory, Lowry’s novel provides insight into the processes by which this order of memory functions. Not only does

“Seeing Beyond” • 33 its development of Jonas’s relationship with the Giver delineate the necessarily intergenerational aspect of second-generation memory, but its depiction of this relationship as an intimate and radically physical one—the Giver may only transmit his memories to Jonas through a process of laying-on-ofhands—also suggests that this phenomenon is as viscerally felt as it is intellectually experienced. Moreover, and perhaps most crucially, by situating its protagonist within a fantastical community whose crisis of memory uncannily resembles that of our own contemporary moment, The Giver suggests that second-generation memory is at once a consequence of and a possible response to this present crisis. On the one hand, the novel illustrates Nora’s claim that, in the wake of the disappearance of “lived” collective memory, individuals take upon themselves the duty to bear the memory of a past that once was communally shared. On the other hand, however, it posits that these same individuals occupy an ethical position that prompts them to return memory to the collective in such a way that fosters social change.

Memory against Forgetting As Michael Levy argues, the setting of The Giver may be characterized as an “ambiguous utopia” (52). At the outset of the novel, Jonas’s community appears attractive: indeed, it is reminiscent of earlier (and equally problematic) visions of utopia, including Plato’s Republic.5 However, as the narrative progresses, this society is gradually revealed to be dark and suspect. If the Community—whose generic name is always ominously capitalized within the narrative—does not immediately appear to be threatening, this may be because, as Levy notes, it is “enormously seductive” (52). In this alternate world, conflicts of gender, race, ethnicity, and class appear to have been overcome. For example, Jonas’s mother confidently assumes her responsibilities as a judge, a role that traditionally has been considered a male occupation, even as his father is content with nurturing infants in the community’s nursery. Although Jonas’s neighbors bear such ethnically marked names as Andrei, Michiko, Roberto, and Fiona, there appears to be no ethnic or racial strife between any individuals or groups residing in the Community. Domestic strife is happily missing as well: families reunite for daily meals to discuss their dreams and anxieties and to exchange the news of the day. What may be most attractive about this society, however—and especially so for Lowry’s pre-adolescent and adolescent readers—is that no pressure is placed on the Community’s children to discern their vocations, because a group of Elders assigns jobs to each according to his or her scrupulously observed abilities. However, if the reader is initially seduced by this apparently utopian community, she soon learns that it is not what it appears to be. Jonas’s parents might well take on non-traditional gender roles in their respective professions, but gender inequality still persists. Just as in Margaret Atwood’s dys-

34 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature topic novel The Handmaid’s Tale6 (1985), the Community’s population is sustained by the conscription of young girls to serve as birth mothers; once they have fulfi lled their obligations, which are clearly viewed as unenviable by their fellow citizens, these mothers are separated from their offspring and sold into hard labor. Similarly, as healthily multicultural as the Community might initially appear, it is gradually revealed to be oppressively homogenous: despite the international flavor of the citizens’ names, all are all white and all are committed to a prevailing ideology of “Sameness”7 (94–95). Even the idyllic character of family life is ultimately a sham, as marital relationships are revealed to be perfunctory and unerotic and as family conversations are exposed as scripted exchanges performed for the benefit of the Big Brother– like Community elders who listen in through two-way intercoms. The most troubling aspect of this ambiguously utopian society, however, is its utter lack of memory. Certainly, the Community has something that resembles a history, as Jonas’s mother makes clear when she tells him that there exists a “Hall of Open Records” where citizens “could go . . . if we wanted to” (17). Indeed, it even possesses something that resembles a collective short-term memory: for example, during an annual ceremony marking older children’s rite of passage into adulthood, citizens are fond of discussing earlier ceremonies or remarking upon the past foibles of their now-rehabilitated youth. However, this collective memory, such that it is, is ultimately myopic. Jonas’s fellow citizens are totally unconcerned by the question of how their society was founded in the first place or what conflicts or struggles might have preceded and in fact given rise to their present state. Initially, even this arrangement is strangely seductive, because the possibility of a lack of deep collective memory promises a life untroubled by knowledge of war, famine, genocide, and other undesirable experiences. As Lowry’s narrative takes pains to demonstrate, however, such willed amnesia comes at a dreadful cost. Precisely because Jonas’s Community happily refrains from delving into its past, it remains equally uncritical of its present condition, which involves a program of eugenics, the systematic practice of euthanasia, and the maintenance of a subtly tyrannical oligarchy. In case this point might be lost on readers, Lowry’s narrative drives it home by revealing that the Community’s voluntary ignorance of the past has resulted in its members’ inability to see colors. As in Gary Ross’s 1998 fi lm Pleasantville, the trope of communal color-blindness here signals a superficial and uncritical world-view.8 Like other dystopian novels—for example, M. T. Anderson’s National Book Award–winning young adult (YA) novel Feed (2004)—The Giver draws on contemporary anxieties in order to complicate its setting and plot.9 Indeed, Lowry’s vision of a community without memory is strikingly consonant with Pierre Nora’s argument that Western society has steadily lost its capacity for collective memory. Memory, Nora argues, has been all but obliterated by an “acceleration of history” (8). If there is still a will to preserve the past within the present, Nora maintains, it is articulated through a profoundly historical,

“Seeing Beyond” • 35 rather than mnemonic, sensibility: history treats the past as though it “is no longer” and thus subjects traces of the past to highly systematized processes of analysis, criticism, and quantification, as though the past were a cadaver to be probed and dissected10 (8). History condemns the past to enclosed, private spaces such as classrooms or museums—or, as it were, to seldom-visited Halls of Open Records such as the one found in Jonas’s Community—and, in so doing, it gradually removes the past from collective consciousness. “History’s goal and ambition,” Nora continues, “is not to exalt but to annihilate what has in reality taken place” (9). In the wake of such a clinical “annihilation,” memory—or what Nora calls the “lived experience” of the past within the present—can no longer thrive. It is hardly possible, he explains, for large collectives to share gestures and habits that continually bind them to, and remind them of, a commonly shared past. If “true,” spontaneous memory still exists, Nora posits, it does so only in small and increasingly isolated pockets of society, such as Orthodox Jewish communities in which quotidian reflexive rituals marry the ancient past to an “eternal present” (8). Although Nora’s grim diagnosis of memory’s fate is more widely appreciated in his native France, where it inspired a three-volume study of French memory commissioned by then-Prime Minister Francois Mitterand, other, similar, evaluations of the current condition of memory may be more readily recognizable to American audiences. For example, in his popular study of electronic culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), Neil Postman argues that the continuous stream of news stories on television and radio (and now, on the Internet) renders individual reports indistinguishable from one another. According to Postman, television—and especially broadcast news—allows for a “now . . . this” mode of consciousness in which information is disseminated in small, discrete fragments followed by other, quite unrelated fragments, so that “events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events” and “all assumptions of coherence have vanished” (110). Such a prevailing dynamic, he argues, not only makes possible a culture of forgetfulness but also enables the paralysis of viewers’ critical capacities. Contemporary audiences—and, one might add, contemporary users of the Internet—are suspended in an eternal present, albeit one that is nearly evacuated of memory. Similarly, Barbie Zelizer argues that even practices intended to sustain the past within collective memory ultimately result in its swift forgetting. In her study of mechanically reproduced images of atrocity, Zelizer argues that photographs accompanied only by vague captions, or fi lm or video footage supplemented with a narrator’s two-minute voiceover, lend their interpretation to an all-too-easy universalization of human suffering: consequently, otherwise distinct historical events, such as “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia or the massacres in Rwanda, become casually compared without careful attention to the specific circumstances in which they occurred. As Zelizer argues, this leads

36 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature to the depoliticization—and ultimately, to the forgetting—of the very events these images represent: Boosted by a lingering belief that “extreme situations are somehow more revealing of the human condition,” the resonance of the past generates numerous second-generation titles related to atrocity: the Vietnamese village of My Lai earned comparison with Lidice, the Czech village destroyed by the Germans in 1942; atrocities in Cambodia of the 70’s merited the title “Auschwitz of Asia,” while mass slaughter in East Timor became “another Cambodia”; El Salvadorean guerillas were called the “Pol Pot Left”; and brutality in Burundi earned the nation the nickname of “the next Rwanda.” The continuum of terror is ongoing, and it sometimes even works backwards, as when the New York Times proclaimed that Cambodia offered terror “Before Rwanda, Before Bosnia,” or Pol Pot was called “Cambodia’s Sadaam.” (204–205) According to Zelizer, then, the overwhelming volume of published historical documents depletes, rather than enriches, knowledge of the past, because such documents begin to be viewed as easily interchangeable representations of otherwise specific events.11 Given this general obfuscation of the past, it is not difficult to see why many would resign themselves to forgetting it—just as Jonas’s Community clearly does. Of course, Lowry’s plot depends upon the survival of memory within a larger culture of forgetting, and to this end the narrative introduces Jonas’s mysterious mentor, the Giver. To the Community, the Giver is better known as the Receiver, and it is he who occupies its most revered position. The Giver/Receiver is charged with the responsibility of bearing the “memories of the whole world” (77). It is he, and only he, who remembers “all that goes beyond—all that is Elsewhere—and all that goes back, and back, and back,” so that whereas his fellow citizens live a life of blissful ignorance, he must “re-experience [memories] again and again” (78). Like the mythical Atlas, the Giver is literally bowed down by the weight of the world. The burden of the memories he carries has aged him pre-maturely; indeed, there are times when he is so overpowered by the past he continually re-lives that he cannot bear the company of others. Nevertheless, the Giver insists that his responsibility endows him with a “wisdom” that earns him the deepest respect of his fellow citizens (78). Indeed, on the rare occasions when the Community faces an emergency or experiences a conflict, his counsel is highly privileged, because he alone may make decisions based on his knowledge of the past. For example, he relates to Jonas how, when citizens of the Community petitioned the Council of Elders to impose higher quotas on birth mothers, he decided against this measure because his vast store of memory allowed him to correlate spikes in population rates with depletion of resources (111). Thus, the Giver’s position is at once a symbolic and a pragmatic one: it assures the masses that memory has not entirely disappeared, surviving as it

“Seeing Beyond” • 37 does within the person of a trustworthy elder, even as it allows for the consolidation of power within a single individual. In a certain respect, then, the Giver’s position resembles what Nora calls a lieu de mémoire, or a “site of memory.” According to Nora, lieux de mémoire are “fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it” (12). Such sites of memory are often material objects or places, such as monuments or historical parks, which mark or contain memories that are otherwise forgotten in the ebb and flow of everyday life. In the U.S., for example, lieux de memoire take the shape of places like colonial Williamsburg or monuments to veterans of foreign wars, to which tourists flock in a voluntary effort to remember what they would have otherwise forgotten. Likewise, sites of memory are demarcated moments of time, such as national holidays or observed moments of silence, that permit the temporary recognition of an otherwise unacknowledged past. Unlike “true” or “lived” memory, which perpetually resides within collective consciousness and is spontaneously expressed in everyday habits, discourse, and gestures, sites of memory are the result of a voluntary and deliberate effort to recall an increasingly distant past. Paradoxically, however, sites of memory are borne of forgetting: in demarcating a space or time in which the past must be recognized, they attest to the fact that, on the whole, the past is not at all regarded in daily life. Like votive candles or prayer flags, sites of memory promise to memorialize personages and events that ordinary people would just as soon forget as they tend to their quotidian business. In a sense, then, the Giver is himself a site of memory. If the Community’s citizens shared a deeply ingrained sense of the past, the Giver’s position would be entirely unnecessary: decisions could be made through an appeal to a collective knowledge of the past, rather than through the consultation of one privileged and erudite member. As it is, however, the Community’s collective amnesia depends upon the relegation of memory to a stable source, where it might be protected and conserved—even accorded a great amount of respect—but never fully engaged. Theoretically, Jonas’s neighbors could consult the Giver (in fact, he has a receptionist whose job it is to book his appointments), but evidently they choose not to, assured as they are that the Giver can just as well do their remembering for them. Like tourists who casually amble through the U.S. National Mall or pedestrians who pass by an overgrown war memorial on their way to work, the members of the Community are satisfied to know simply that an entity exists to recall the past for them, as if by proxy.

“The Capacity to See Beyond” It is precisely to this position of communally sanctioned receptacle of memory that Jonas is ultimately called. The Giver, who struggles under the weight of

38 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature the past and yearns for the peaceful years of retirement accorded to his peers, requests a young protégé to whom he might impart his store of memories. Acknowledging his request, the Council of Elders settles upon Jonas as the ideal candidate for the position of Receiver of Memory. During the annual ceremony of twelve-year-olds’ initiation into adulthood, Jonas is publicly informed that he has been assigned the auspicious duty of inheriting and safeguarding the Community’s memories. Although the elders are quick to praise Jonas for the many admirable personal characteristics which they believe have earned him election to this unique position, they are also careful to warn him that his duties will bring him “pain of a magnitude that none of us can comprehend because it is beyond our experience” (63). Thus warned, Jonas begins his tutelage under the Giver. In accepting this vocation, Lowry’s protagonist not only takes on a role that is similar to what Nora calls a lieu de mémoire, but also begins to occupy a subject position of one who bears second-generation memory. That is, like the Giver himself, Jonas is called to internalize others’ memories as though they were his own. As the narrative makes clear, Jonas is not arbitrarily chosen for this position: he is already (unwittingly) qualified to hold it. When they announce Jonas’s nomination for the position of Receiver, the Council of Elders claim that they have done so because they are convinced of his “intelligence,” “integrity,” “courage,” and “wisdom” (62). However, they soon make clear that their decision is especially determined by their confidence in Jonas’s “Capacity to See Beyond” (63). Although Jonas is initially confounded by this latter assessment of his gifts, he quickly realizes that the strange capacity to which the elders refer is his rare ability to occasionally see in color. Indeed, just as soon as the Chief Elder informs both Jonas and the assembled audience of this baffling “Capacity,” Jonas momentarily sees the faces in the crowd transformed from dull grey to a mysterious pink.12 Recognizing this brief vision as an adequate confirmation of his elders’ confidence in him, Jonas acquiesces to the duties of his new assignment. Initially, this passage in Lowry’s text may seem problematic. Indeed, as Kenneth Kidd argues, moments such as this one render The Giver a “classic story of the chosen child, nearly always a boy,” whose “exceptionality” allows him to become a “savior figure” (179). In this way, Lowry’s novel appears to reaffi rm traditional Western values of individualism in such a way that it becomes “easy to miss the critique of heroic individualism central to the book” (179). Moreover, if one considers The Giver an allegory of second-generation memory, then it is tempting to conclude that such an order of memory can only be conceived of as an extraordinary and radically essential gift available only to a chosen few. However, a close reading of the introductory passages of the novel suggests that Jonas’s apparently extraordinary ability to see the present infused with the colors of the past ultimately derives from his exercise of a critical capacity that is potentially available to any of his fellow citizens.

“Seeing Beyond” • 39 When, for example, the reader fi rst encounters Lowry’s protagonist, he is attempting to identify his feelings about the upcoming initiation ceremony, during which he will be assigned his profession. Initially, he believes that he is frightened, but he quickly revises this assessment once he recalls an instance when he had felt a truly “palpable, stomach-sinking terror” that was stronger than the mere apprehension he currently feels (3). This fear, Jonas recalls, was instigated by the sudden appearance of “an unidentified aircraft that had overflown the community twice” (1). At first, all of Jonas’s neighbors—“adults as well as children”—are frightened by this sight, because they know that planes are forbidden to fly over their community (1). However, the citizens’ fear is soon allayed when a familiar voice, presumably that of a Council Elder, announces through the neighborhood loudspeakers that the plane had simply taken a wrong turn, and that its pilot will be swiftly “released,” or executed. Presumably, Jonas’s fellow citizens allow this moment to lapse into forgetting, as is their habit. Jonas, however, does not forget. He does not know any more than his neighbors the intentions of the overflying pilot: the plane might well have been lost, as the loudspeaker voice maintains, but, given the ominous tone of the narrative, its fl ight could just as well have been part of a secret or revolutionary mission. What Jonas does know is that this event indeed occurred; consequently, he continues to reflect upon the circumstances surrounding it, comparing his reaction to it to his responses to other events such as the upcoming ceremony. Jonas’s analysis of this singular event suggests that he is well practiced in studying the relationships between otherwise disparate and apparently unrelated phenomena, and it is arguably this capacity for critical thought that allows him to “see beyond” what is immediately apparent to his neighbors. Conceivably, any of the Community’s citizens could be just as attentive as Jonas is to their present circumstances, and any of these citizens might analyze, as Jonas does, the operations of their society and their own positions within it. However, they simply prefer not to, presumably because they derive a sense of security from believing that their present condition is stable, immutable, and ultimately the only correct way of being. Only Jonas trusts the intuition, potentially equally available to all of his neighbors, that his present situation is much more complex than it might initially appear. Thus, only Jonas may begin to perceive, if only in small flashes, fragments of the past that survive within—and indeed make possible—his present circumstances. In this way, Jonas’s story is strikingly similar to that of Helen Epstein, a daughter of Holocaust survivors who, in her book Children of the Holocaust (1979), recounts her experience of second-generation memory.13 Not unlike Jonas, the young Epstein sees images of the past in sudden flashes superimposed upon her own perceptions. A New York subway becomes for her a “train of cattle cars on its way to Poland” and a quiet classroom is transformed into the site of a Nazi invasion:

40 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature In school, when I had finished up a test before time was up or was daydreaming on my way home, the safe world fell away and I saw things I knew no little girl should see. Blood and shattered glass. Piles of skeletons and blackened barbed wire with bits of flesh stuck to it the way flies stick to walls after they are swatted dead. Hills of suitcases, mountains of children’s shoes. Whips, pistols, boots, knives, and needles. (9) It would be easy to assume that the young Epstein sees these troubling visions—visions that demonstrate a ghost image–like blending of the present with the past—because her parents have related to her their experiences of persecution. However, Epstein’s home is as shrouded in silence as Jonas’s Community is. Epstein knows only that her family suffered at the hands of “Germans who were very bad” (47). Her mother generally meets Epstein’s questions with consternation and even fear: My mother did not know how to answer me. How did other parents explain? Why did this child never stop asking questions? One after the other: Who put the number on your arm? Why do you keep it? Why won’t it come off? Did it hurt when they put it on? Why doesn’t Daddy have one? (47) Exhausted by her daughter’s questions, Epstein’s mother begins to respond to them only with silence: her eyes, the author writes, were “so deep with secrets that they seemed to have no bottom when you looked into them” (47). Consternated by both her parents’ stoicism, Epstein cannot help but probe it, marking the behaviors that rise up from her parents’ silence and that afford some evidence of the traumatic events that made her parents the way they are. She notes, for example, that her father is obsessively attentive to his children’s dietary habits and that he eats his dinner as though, at any minute, it might be forcibly taken away from him; she observes as well that her mother is prone to nervous attacks for which she must take a cocktail of prescription medicines. The most mundane features of domestic life are colored by conflicts that cannot be ameliorated by even the most careful acts of negotiation and that seem to Epstein to be radically opposed to the quotidian practices of “other mothers” and “other fathers” (63). Moreover, her parents’ constitution—her father’s “rage” (47) and her mother’s “intentsity” (151)—seem to her to be markedly different from the behaviors of “other parents”; her recognition of such difference thus impels her to judge them relative to others.14 Moreover, she begins to consult sources outside her immediate nuclear family, tracing her genealogy, interviewing survivors who are more willing to speak to their experiences, and referring to books and films about the Holocaust in order to identify the camps to which her parents were probably deported and to understand the conditions that they met upon their arrival. In this way, she begins to piece together a narrative of her family’s

“Seeing Beyond” • 41 past—and in this way, visions of this past begin to arise, ghost-like, into her everyday consciousness. What is particularly interesting about Epstein’s narrative is that she, like Jonas, recognizes the past within the present whereas those immediately surrounding her do not. Her brothers, she explains, are comparatively unaffected by their family’s memory; indeed, it is only as adults learning of their sister’s interest and extensive research that her siblings begin “for the first time to ask my mother questions about our grandparents, the relatives we never knew, and exactly where and how our parents survived the war” (345). Obviously, Epstein’s brothers have grown up in the same household as she has, and have been exposed as much as she has to her parents’ perplexing and sometimes violent behaviors. They have grown up in the same diasporic community as Epstein, in which they ostensibly have met the same Holocaust survivors and have been exposed to witness testimonies. Finally, they too are a part of a Jewish tradition that values the preservation and reenactment of the past which, as Ellen Handler-Spitz argues, encourages the development of an “autobiographical self” that “blends with the history of a people and provides a framework for the interpretation of one’s acts” (42). In short, Epstein’s brothers share with her the same cultural memory.15 Yet Epstein’s experience differs from that of her brothers insofar as she has been interpellated by the silence that structures her domestic situation and insofar as she links the significance of this silence to the communities in which she has been placed. In other words, Epstein consciously recognizes the ways in which she has been situated within a certain subject position by the actions, discourses, and silences that constitute her domestic life. Thus, she acknowledges that her own practices and language implicitly bear the traces of the elusive past that itself has made possible her family’s specific set of relations. Epstein’s account places Lowry’s characterization of Jonas and his “capacity” into further relief. Both Lowry’s fictional text and Epstein’s autobiographical account suggest that second-generation memory is not an exceptional gift, but rather merely the result of a critical awareness of, and intense curiosity about, one’s immediate context. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, both texts imply that such memory is constituted by the individual’s recognition that she is indelibly marked by the specific cultural moment into which she has been born. Thus, her desire to know herself is inextricably tied to her desire to know the complex events that have given rise to the present moment to which she is bound. In this way, the bearer of second-generation memory truly “sees beyond,” if only because she (or he) cannot rest content with accepting her present state of affairs as simply natural or pre-determined. Moreover, insofar as she is on some level aware that the past is continually threatened by forgetting, she takes upon herself the duty of safeguarding the past, thus inserting herself within the problematic position of a living site of memory.

42 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature The Embrace of Memory Although both Lowry’s and Epstein’s texts suggest that second-generation memory is not an innate gift but rather the product of a critical capacity that any person might potentially exercise, they nevertheless imply that such a critical capacity is primarily engaged in the context of intimate relationships. Epstein explains, for example, that her profound interest in the Holocaust and its legacy was first ignited by her troubled but nevertheless close relationship with her parents. Likewise, The Giver dramatizes the ways in which Jonas’s fledgling investment in, and critique of, the past is fostered by his relationship with the Giver—the man who becomes his surrogate father. Crucially, both Epstein’s non-fictional text and Lowry’s fantasy novel both insinuate that second-generation memory develops within the context of physical and psychological intimacy. Immediately after Jonas is named the new Receiver of Memory, he is given a list of instructions to follow. Although this list addresses certain perfunctory matters, such as where and when he must meet his new mentor, it also makes some astonishing allowances. Jonas learns, for example, that he is no longer obligated to confess his dreams to his family unit;he is permitted to lie; and he may “ask any question of any citizen,” no matter how rude or direct his questioning may seem (68). Although Jonas is most surprised by the permission he has been granted to lie—after all, the Community holds great stock in truth-telling and precision of language—it is his new-found freedom to ask questions that best serves him in his tutelage under the Giver. At last, Jonas may give expression to the questions and doubts that he has for so long repressed—and the Giver, whose special position allows him to obstruct the Council’s efforts at eavesdropping, is all too eager to answer his young charge. For example, Jonas learns that the over-flying plane he once saw was, in fact, lost, but that the Giver had advised the Council not to shoot it down, because he was able to remember “when people had destroyed others in haste, in fear, and had brought about their own destruction” (112). What is most dramatic about Jonas’s relationship with the Giver, however, is the ritual they observe as the elder imparts his memories to his protégé. In order for the Giver to relieve himself of a memory and pass it on to Jonas, he must place his hands on the Jonas’s bare back as the boy lies motionless and face-down on a bed. In this moment of physical intimacy, the Giver passes a memory through his hands and into Jonas’s body, so that the boy begins to re-live the experience his mentor has chosen for him. For example, when the Giver wishes Jonas to experience the memory of snow, Jonas feels “the sharp intake of air” and “cold air swirling around his entire body” (80). Likewise, when the Giver decides that Jonas is prepared to understand war, Jonas feels the piercing pain of a bullet embedded in “ragged flesh and splintery bone” (119). Even after the Giver removes his hands and summons Jonas back to the present, the boy feels the lingering traces of the given memory, and because he

“Seeing Beyond” • 43 is forbidden to take medication for “any illness or injury related to [his] training,” he often suffers even after he is free to return home (68). Although the ritual in which Jonas and the Giver participate seems fantastical, it is ultimately not so far removed from the process by which the survivor of a trauma delivers testimony to a trusted interlocutor. As Dori Laub argues in his study of testimony (co-written with Shoshana Felman),16 a survivor may only bear witness to a traumatic event once he has identified a listener to whom he may address his narrative. “Massive trauma,” Laub explains, “precludes its registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction” (57). For this reason, the survivor must begin to re-narrativize the circumstances of the event at which he was present, but of which he was not fully cognizant at the moment. For this endeavor to succeed, the witness requires the presence of a listener who may receive his testimony. This listener assists the witness in reconstructing the event by asking questions or simply by serving as a calm and steady presence at a moment of psychic upheaval; in doing so, the listener aids the witness in bearing forth a narrative and thus a fuller knowledge of the event. The listener, Laub argues, is not merely a passive observer but an active participant in the creation of witness: he “is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo” and it is on him that the event “comes to be inscribed” (57). Laub’s contention that the traumatic event becomes “inscribed” upon the listener suggests both a permanent marking and the consequent pain that comes with such searing. Indeed, he argues that “through his very listening, [the interlocutor] comes to partially experience trauma in himself” (57). Although the listener, like a good analyst, must preserve some degree of distance from the witness in order to enable the witness’s full delivery of testimony, he nevertheless silently “partakes of the struggle of the victim with the memories and residues of his or her traumatic past” as he “comes to feel the bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread and conflicts that the trauma victim feels” (58). Laub is careful to point out that the listener does not become the victim: the interlocutor “preserves his own separate place, position and perspective” as he listens to the witness, simultaneously marking both the words and silences of the speaker and his own reactions (58). As the official title of his position suggests, Jonas serves as a listener to or “receiver” of memory—and like Laub’s interlocutor, he becomes radically marked by the memories the Giver has transferred to him. If the elaborate process by which the Giver manages such a transfer seems fantastical, it is nevertheless a useful metaphor for the psychic drama manifested in the exchange between the witness and his interlocutor. Once the Giver has imparted a memory to Jonas—or once he has, in effect, borne witness to an event in the presence of his interlocutor—Jonas responds on both an intellectual and visceral level. He is not merely a passive receptacle, but an active participant in the testimonial process, precisely because he has made himself vulnerable to the “bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread and conflicts” that accompany

44 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature the memory that has been imparted to him. Indeed, Jonas’s physical position—prone and exposed, prepared to submit to whatever demonstration of power his elder might force upon him—communicates the degree to which the listener is made subject to the memories he receives. Through this position of subjection and vulnerability, Jonas allows the Giver to infl ict upon him his long-repressed memories, thus making possible a belated but nonetheless necessary act of witness. As his reaction to the shared memory of battle makes clear, Jonas is profoundly scarred by the memories his elder imparts to him, just as Laub insists the receiver of witness is indelibly marked by the narrative he receives. However, like Laub’s interlocutor, who “preserves his own separate place,” Jonas never confuses his position with the Giver’s: he never imagines that he has somehow become the Giver, but rather experiences his mentor’s experiences analogically, as though they were his own. Nevertheless, the dynamics that characterize Jonas’s relationship with the Giver are in many ways substantially different from the dynamics Laub observes between the witness and the listener. Laub, a psychoanalyst, writes specifically about the relationship that develops between an analyst and his patient, or between a trained interviewer and the survivor who volunteers her narrative to an archival project (such as the Yale Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies in which Laub was significantly involved). What Laub’s study does not address, however, are the dynamics that characterize the relationship between a witness and a listener who are already tied together by previously existing bonds of intimacy and affection. His study does not address, for example, a situation such as that of Helen Epstein, who daily negotiates the silences (and sporadic acts of witness) of her own mother. Although Laub’s study attends to the relationship that develops between a witness and an individual who attempts to occupy an initial position of relative impartiality, it stops short of assessing the much different—if not far more complex—set of relations that characterize the sharing of memory between members of separate, but nevertheless closely bonded, generations. His study thus begs the question: what if the listener cannot simply serve as a “blank screen” to the other’s witness—as Laub insists the interlocutor should be (57)—precisely because her intimate bond with a survivor precedes her reception of his testimony? It is here, as elsewhere, that Lowry’s narrative provides a useful rubric through which to think through this question of memory and testimony. When Jonas is first conscripted to the duty of “receiving” the Giver’s memories, he is not particularly impressed. After all, in his previous years of community service, he has already dutifully listened to stories related by residents of the House of the Old—some of which he has found “interesting,” and some of which he has found utterly unremarkable (77). However, Jonas’s reaction to the Giver’s own memories is radically different than his response to the nursing home residents with whom he was only casually acquainted: in this instance, he replies to memories of the past not only with “interest” but with active and authentic engagement. Indeed, Jonas becomes so involved

“Seeing Beyond” • 45 in receiving his elder’s memories that he is literally transported by them— and, not insignificantly, his increased willingness to take on new memories is directly proportional to his acceptance of the Giver as a surrogate father. Thus, Lowry’s narrative suggests that the exchange of memory that occurs between two intimately related individuals is a highly productive one, rather than one that obstructs the passage of witness to its imputed destination, the willfully detached third party. In this way, although the ritual of memory-exchange the pair observes usefully demonstrates the level of vulnerability a listener must assume in order to receive witness, it also speaks to the trust, intimacy, and affection that make possible the transfer of one generation’s memory to the next. If this ritual has an undeniably erotic dimension—indeed, Kidd notes that Lowry’s novel depends on a vision of “man-boy love” (180)—then such erotic undertones may suggest a temporary collapse in the strict boundaries between the self and the other that occur in the moment of witness.17 Certainly, Laub, who insists that the witness and the listener must scrupulously observe their separate positions, would warn against such a collapse, especially because it would violate the time-honored and mutually beneficial distance between the analyst and the analysand. However, in the exchange that occurs between two already-related and intimately connected individuals, such a collapse may not only be inevitable, but ethically productive. In her study of ethics, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Judith Butler argues against the Enlightenment notion of the self as an “interior subject, closed upon myself, solipsistic, posing questions of myself alone” (32). Rather, she favors a notion of the self that is, from the start, social and relational in character. The individual, Butler argues, can only assert herself as such through the address of another, who asks her to give an account of herself through the simple question, “Who are you?” (31). Without the presence of another (if only implied or imagined) the individual cannot make herself “recognizable and understandable”; she cannot construct a comprehensible narrative account of her life without an other there to receive it (37). “If I have lost the conditions of address,” Butler explains, “then I have lost ‘myself’” (32). Here, the Cartesian notion of the self as a singular, atomic unit that is capable of preserving its distance from other, mutually independent selves begins to founder. According to Butler, any notion of “me” or “I” is always already bound up with a recognition of a constituting “you” from whom the “I” can never completely extricate itself. Moreover, as Butler argues, the individual’s account of herself always occurs within a preexisting field of discursive norms: the “very terms by which we make of ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others,” Butler maintains, “are not of our making” (21). Rather, our “singular” stories are contingent upon a constitutive social context (21). After all, an individual’s ability to make her autobiographical narrative intelligible to another depends upon her recourse to language and socially sanctioned modes of

46 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature address—both of which necessarily precede her attempt of self-articulation. For example, to identify oneself as a “woman” or a “lawyer” or an “Argentinean” is to ally oneself with pre-existing institutions or cultural norms which carry with them polyvalent, negotiable, and socially inscribed meanings—meanings which the subject internalizes and comes to misrecognize as essential, and which are in turn are available to the interpretation of the addressee of one’s self-account. Even when the individual “is not at one with moral norms” (or, indeed, tries to transgress them) she is still situated in relation to them. In such a case, Butler maintains, “the subject must deliberate upon these norms, and that part of deliberation will entail a critical understanding of their social genesis and meaning” (8). To be sure, Butler’s study of the relational foundations of the self resonates clearly with Laub’s study of the testimonial process, insofar as it reaffirms Laub’s observation that witness can only be delivered in the presence of an interlocutor who both affects and is affected by the ensuing narrative. However, Butler’s analysis may be especially crucial to an appreciation of the dynamics and insights that develop as a result of the witness given by a member of an older generation to a family member or an otherwise intimately related listener. On the one hand, the younger person elicits (either directly or indirectly) a narrative from her elder, thus making possible the conditions necessary to the delivery of testimony. On the other hand, the elder’s witness prompts in the younger person new and potentially transformational insights about her own selfhood and contemporary external reality. If the interlocutor listens carefully and critically, she begins to recognize the testimony offered to her is not only a singular story of a reified past, but is a significant, albeit ultimately unknowable, component in her own life story. After all, the struggles and decisions that marked the course of the witness’s own development led to the circumstances in which the younger person was born and eventually came into consciousness. Thus, in taking in her elder’s witness, the younger interlocutor learns of the “state of affairs to which she could not have been present” but that nevertheless have contributed to the inauguration of her own selfhood (Butler 37). Moreover, the listener comes to realize that even the non-narrative aspects of the witness’s life—the witness’s tics, her neuroses, her displays of affection—are the traces of habits formed in reaction to past circumstances, habits which the listener herself unconsciously has learned to respond to or incorporate in the course of her own quotidian life. Having recognized that her own life is implicated within that of her elder, the listener comes to terms with the fact that her life is in fact not entirely her own: she is compelled to admit that her notion of selfhood is contingent upon others’ experiences and that others’ experiences have radically shaped the contours of her own. If one subscribes to the Enlightenment notion of the self as an atomic and purely enclosed entity, then the ritual of memory-exchange depicted within The Giver will seem simply fantastical, bereft of any productive implica-

“Seeing Beyond” • 47 tions in contemporary reality. Moreover, even a non-fictional account of second-generation memory, such as Helen Epstein’s documentation of her childhood visions of concentration camps, will seem at best the product of an overactive and morbid imagination and at worst the consequence of an inauthentic appropriation of others’ rightful experiences. However, if one takes into consideration Butler’s argument that the self is always already constituted by its relation to others, then both Lowry’s fictional narrative and Epstein’s autobiographical account prompt a reevaluation of the conventional notions of both experience and memory. Although it is clearly impossible for an individual to have been physically present at an event her elder experienced far before the time of her birth, it is nonetheless not impossible for her to claim that experience as part of her own. After all, the material and psychological consequences of that experience continue to reverberate, like the aftershocks of an earthquake, in her own present life, sounding in the words, gestures, and decisions of the elder who has been consigned to her care. Or, to put it differently, the designated heir to memory is constantly haunted by the past, which, although it appears only dimly and ghost-like in the turns of phrase she recalls or the gestures she re-enacts, nevertheless shapes the contours of her perceptions and thus delimits the boundaries of her own experiences. The listener’s memory, which informs the account she gives of herself, is always constituted by and thus inextricable from the memory of the other, just as her sense of selfhood is bound to the selfhood and desires of the other. No doubt, this is the condition of every human being, because, according to Butler’s formulation, the human subject is constituted by her vulnerability to others and her primary impressionability within the circumstances into which she has been born. However, the recognition of this condition is especially available to the one who is continually exposed, in the most intimate and quotidian of contexts, to the persistent reemergence of the past within her present circumstances. The bearer of second-generation memory knows, perhaps like none other, that the boundaries that demarcate the distance between herself and the other are not impervious and are in fact easily transgressed. Indeed, if she has spent her childhood—a particularly vulnerable stage of life—in an environment in which traces of the past continually reemerge in conversations, everyday interactions, and family confl icts, she is particularly aware of her subjection to others and their traumatic pasts. Ultimately, this may be why the quasi-incestuous physical union dramatized in the Giver’s and Jonas’s ritual of memory-exchange appears so provocative and even taboo. In this particular passage of Lowry’s novel, the previously respected boundaries that shore up the “self ” and the “other” give way to the recognition that one individual’s experiences and memories are profoundly interconnected with that of another. The embrace in which Jonas and the Giver engage is the embrace of secondgeneration memory itself.

48 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature “With Skin and Hair” As important as this aspect of intergenerational embrace might be to the development of second-generation memory, it is by no means the only factor in its emergence. After all, as Epstein admits in her autobiographical account, her ability to see the past superimposed upon the present—to “see beyond,” as Lowry’s narrative would have it—is as much the consequence of her recourse to fi lm and photography as it is to her relationships with survivors. Thus, if second-generation memory—like the contemporary and apparently unrelated trend of general cultural forgetting—appears to be something of recent phenomenon, this might be because, ironically, it is informed by the very same structures that make possible a lapse in collective memory: that is, the visual media. What is especially interesting about the ritual of memory reception observed by Jonas and the Giver is the particular mode of consciousness Jonas inhabits while he is participating in it. When, for example, Jonas receives the memory of sledding down a hill, he is aware of existing at once in the past and the present: One part of his consciousness knew that he was still lying there, on the bed, in the Annex room. Yet another, separate part of his being was upright now, in a sitting position, and beneath him he could feel that he was not on the soft decorated bed at all, but rather seated on a flat, hard surface. His hands now held (though at the same time they were motionless at his side) a rough, damp rope. (81) Here, Jonas’s experience of memory is strikingly similar to a spectator’s experience of fi lm. On the one hand, he is conscious of his immediate, physical surroundings. On the other hand, he is aware that he has projected himself onto another reality whose visual imagery is so powerful it becomes physically perceptible. Like the filmgoer, he is, as Siegfried Kracauer argues, seized “‘with skin and hair’” as “the material elements that present themselves in fi lm directly stimulate the material layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physiological substance” (Hansen 458, emphasis in original). That is, like an audience member’s response to a fi lm, Jonas’s reaction to the visual stimuli he receives is directly and bodily engaged. Lowry’s depiction of the ritual of memory-exchange thus serves as a metaphor for the far more familiar ritual of movie-going, and in this way it suggests that second-generation memory is enhanced not only through interpersonal relationships but through an engagement with mechanically reproduced forms of art such as fi lm. Certainly, as both Susan Gubar and Barbie Zelizer have observed, the visual media, especially fi lm and photography, have the potential to romanticize, trivialize, and otherwise reify the past in such a way that encourages forgetting. Not insignificantly, however, both scholars accede

“Seeing Beyond” • 49 to Walter Benjamin’s argument that “art in the age of mechanical reproduction” may also have the opposite potential of awakening the senses to the exigencies of both the past and the present. Like later scholars, Benjamin was concerned by fi lm’s potential to desensitize viewers to both the struggles of the past and the exigencies of the present. Indeed, as a German Jew living during the rise of Nazi fascism (and ultimately dying as a result of it), he was particularly attentive to fi lm’s capacity to aestheticize politics and glorify war (“Art in the Age” 242). Nevertheless, he was equally suspicious of arguments, such as those made by the critic Georges Duhamel, that insisted that fi lm is merely “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries” (239). In his oft-cited 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin maintains that criticisms of fi lm such as those made by Duhamel are flawed because they privilege individual, original works of art—whose value is determined by the “aura” of their uniqueness and their proximity to their creative genius—to those that have been multiply reproduced and thus stripped of the aura of originality (222–223). According to Benjamin, the former view of “auratic” art such as painting privileges works that are ritually separated from the spaces of quotidian life and whose experience is therefore a private one, consistent with the reigning bourgeois ideology that privileges isolated interior life. In Benjamin’s view, however, fi lm is best suited for collective, rather than individual, experience, precisely because it is mechanically reproduced and thus, unlike painting, can be appreciated by large numbers of people simultaneously in various locales. It is this collective experience, Benjamin argues, that allows film to school the senses of the masses, making possible their ultimate mobilization rather than their desensitization. To drive this point home, Benjamin gives the example of architecture. Buildings, he writes, “are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and perception—or rather, by touch and sight” (240). It would be impossible, he suggests, to appreciate fully a structure simply by looking at it, as a tourist does when she stands rapt before a famous building. Rather, the “appropriation” of a building comes about just as much by using it in an “incidental fashion” as it does by merely contemplating it from a distance (240). In other words, one can only “take in” a building only gradually over an extended period of time during which one becomes intimately and physically aware of its every corner and archway—that is, only after having developed habits of interacting with it on a tactile level. This is crucial, according to Benjamin, because “the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation” (240). It is cinema’s potential to distract its collective viewers, Benjamin writes, which allows for the formation of habits that may be appropriate to the solution of the “tasks” presented to the collective at “turning points of history”—

50 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature for the “distracted person, too, can form habits” (240). In other words, the cinema gradually trains the tactile senses as it does the optical ones. Through its use of such devices as slow-motion and still frames, fi lm allows audiences not only to see but to feel ordinary events it might otherwise take for granted, and thus to respond to these quotidian gestures in new, and potentially revolutionary ways. “The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine,” Benjamin writes, “yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods” until these mundane processes are demonstrated for us in painstaking detail through the machinations of fi lm (237). In this way, fi lm is not unlike a surgeon who cuts below the surface of what is normally perceived and interacts with what was once hidden from sight: the surgeon, Benjamin explains, “diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs” (233). Here, Benjamin’s likening of the camera to the surgeon’s hand is not a mere literary flourish. The camera’s “penetration” into reality that is not ordinarily perceived by the “naked eye” breaches taboos and enacts a certain violence (as the surgeon’s hand certainly does) that is viscerally felt by the audience (236). In turn, the audience is gradually trained, through its habitual exposure to fi lm, to see and thus interact with perceived reality in startling new ways. Drawing on Benjamin’s contention that fi lm makes possible new modes of perception and ways of inhabiting the world, Alison Landsberg argues that the cinema has made possible new ways of remembering as well. It is not insignificant, Landsberg explains, that the emergence of fi lm as a popular form of art and entertainment within the U.S. coincided with one of the largest waves of immigration in the nation’s history. At the very moment in which immigrant communities struggled to preserve and contain within themselves the memory of the “homeland” (a process that, as Landsberg notes, was “never uncomplicated”) fi lm continued to expand its horizons, taking as its subject the narratives and experiences of an increasingly multicultural society (2). As a result, memories that had once remained “private” or specific to self-enclosed communities became available to the public in such a way that allowed audiences around the country to see from the perspective of those from whom they had formerly remained distanced or estranged. “Through the technology of mass culture,” Landsberg argues, “it has become possible for these memories to be acquired by anyone, regardless of skin color, ethnic background, or biology” (2). Thus, fi lm has allowed played an enormous part in “encouraging people to feel connected to, while recognizing the alterity of, the ‘other’” (9). Landsberg identifies these formerly private memories that made public for mass consumption as “prosthetic memories.” Prosthetic memories, she explains, “originate outside a person’s lived experience and yet are taken on and worn by that person through mass cultural technologies of memory”; they

“Seeing Beyond” • 51 “‘speak’ to the individual in a personal way as if they were actually memories of lived events” (19, emphasis added). Such memories, she continues, are neither purely individual nor entirely collective but emerge at the interface of individual and collective experience. They are privately felt public memories that develop after an encounter with a mass cultural representation of the past, when new images and ideas come into contact with a person’s own archive of experience. (19) Not unlike a prosthetic limb, these mass-produced memories of initially private experience “mark a trauma,” especially insofar as they make explicitly evident the gaps in “organically” shared memory within contemporary globalized culture (20). At the same time, however, these prosthetic memories, much like artificial limbs, enable new and profoundly “sensuous” experiences that enable viewers to see and to feel from the perspective of another—even as they recognize that their experience is a radically mediated one that forbids the wholesale appropriation of the other’s perspective. Thus, if Benjamin insists that fi lm opens up the “optical unconscious” in ways that engender politically productive ways of inhabiting the world, Landsberg adds to this account by maintaining that the cinema expands the viewer’s mnemonic repertoire in ways that enable valuable ethical practices. To support her argument for fi lm’s prosthetic potential, Landsberg analyzes John Singleton’s 1996 fi lm Rosewood, which dramatizes the 1922 burning of a prosperous African-American town in Florida by racist citizens of a neighboring white town. What is especially significant about this fi lm, Landsberg argues, is that it re-tells this nearly forgotten historical episode almost entirely from the perspective of the African-American citizens of this besieged town. African-Americans, she points out, are “privileged with point-of-view shots”; moreover, on a narratological level, “not the storming lynch mobs but the quest to save the black children of Rosewood moves the story forward” (106–107). In this way, audiences, black and white alike, are called to take on the memory of Rosewood’s youngest citizens (on whose sworn testimony the fi lm was based) and thus to imaginatively inhabit the perspective of those most oppressed by the bigotry endemic within the Jim Crow–era South. The fi lm is most valuable, Landsberg continues, in its address of white spectators, who “must, in effect, look at the world through black eyes” (106). By aligning the perspective of white viewers with the citizens of a prosperous AfricanAmerican town, Rosewood defeats any pre-conceived notions these spectators might have had about the relative self-sufficiency of early twentieth-century black communities; thus, according to Landsberg, Singleton “is attempting to defamiliarize whiteness, to make it and not blackness seem ‘other’” (106). Moreover, by prompting white viewers to feel the fear and loss instantiated by the violent destruction of the town with which they have been made familiar, the fi lm calls them to be aware of historical injustices about which they might

52 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature have been complacent, if not ignorant. This perspective is granted to white spectators, Landsberg continues, not so that they might uncritically appropriate it, but rather so that they may “see through the reified, naturalized structures of societal and institutionalized racism” (107). That is, the fi lm grants this perspective to white viewers so that they may see, as it were with new eyes, the structures of injustice and hatred that continue to marginalize minorities within their contemporary moment. The memory offered by this fi lm is thus prosthetic in two ways: not only does it permit white (and indeed, black) viewers the simulated experience of an unexperienced past, but it does so in order to mobilize them. It is precisely this opening up of new sights, perspectives, and sensations that so affects Jonas as he succumbs to the power of the Giver’s steady hand. Like a fi lmgoer, Jonas absorbs the shock of the images paraded before him, and, in so doing, his perception of his present world steadily begins to change. Like Epstein, whose screening of documentaries and close inspection of Holocaust-era photographs allows her to recover a traumatic past from which her parents have tried to protect her, Jonas’s “screening” of memories permits him new insights into his own family’s past and the cultural conditions that have structured it. For example, once he is exposed to a domestic Christmas scene whose atmosphere is permeated by what Jonas discovers is love, the boy grows increasingly attentive to how his own family is structured. Through his observations, Jonas concludes that the Community’s practice of assigning disparate individuals to nuclear “family units” has come at the cost of eliminating the extended family and its affective bonds, thereby destroying as well potentially deep-rooted memorial traditions. Jonas’s experience of transmitted memories eventually becomes so profound that his own habits and practices begin to change. No longer can he accept his former play-mates’ games of “war” as recreational past-times, because his cinematic visions of the past have exposed him to the deadly structure that underlies their casual and ignorant re-enactment. Moreover, he can no longer accept the Community’s standard practice of “releasing” elderly people and underweight infants, because his received memories of war and death have exposed this practice as what it truly is: programmatic and state-sanctioned euthanasia. Thus, his cinematic memories constitute a prosthesis on which, in effect, he can take a stand—and upon which he ultimately relies to escape his repressive community. Consequently, even as Jonas’s intimate connection to the past is initiated by his interactions with his surrogate father, it is enriched and in effect mobilized by the prosthetic character of mass media. Indeed, as Marianne Hirsch argues, “even the most intimate familial knowledge of the past is mediated by broadly available public images and narratives” (“The Generation of Postmemory” 112, emphasis in original). Lowry’s novel demonstrates Hirsch’s argument by featuring a protagonist whose inherited and vicariously experienced memory is forged simultaneously by kinship and by mass-circulated images.

“Seeing Beyond” • 53 Memory, Prophecy, and the Ethical Turn Of course, Jonas’s experience of such multiply mediated second-generation memory comes at a considerable cost. His close relationship with the Giver causes him to be isolated from his friends and family, because he increasingly spends more time in the old man’s sequestered abode than he does in the Community’s public spaces. Moreover, the memories he has received from the Giver begin to weigh him down just as a new and yet unwieldy prosthesis might; consequently, his changed countenance under their heavy burden earns him the suspicion of his ignorant neighbors. After having castigated his friends for their naïve game of “war,” Jonas becomes alienated from those with whom he once shared a contented childhood. Moreover, once Jonas identifies the practice of “release” as the banal evil of state-supported murder, he grows distant from his father, who, as a “nurturer” of newborn infants, also euthanizes and casually disposes of underweight babies.18 Progressively estranged from his community, Jonas more and more begins to resemble his elderly mentor, who, in his hermit-like state, is daily occupied by the melancholic rehearsal of bitter memories. It is not difficult, then, to see why readers like Kenneth Kidd would argue that the “critique of heroic individualism” central to Lowry’s novel is potentially occluded by its apparent dependence upon the traditional figure of the sacrificial child (179). Like the starved child in Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” or the battered and neglected child at the center of the “Mutiny” chapter in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov,19 Jonas appears to occupy the position of the child whose suffering ensures the happiness of his community. And yet, as Kidd’s own reading of the text suggests, The Giver ultimately constitutes a critique, rather than a reaffi rmation, of this tired trope. In the fi nal analysis, Lowry’s novel suggests that memory, and the pain it necessarily involves, must be collectively shared rather than individually felt—and, in this way, it articulates a “project of ratifying the political sphere against privatization and the banalization of trauma” (Kidd 179). In making such a radical claim, The Giver implies that the bearer of second-generation memory plays an important role in the return of memory, and his interpretation thereof, to collective consciousness. Rather than feeling obliged to internalize memory, and thus preserve its sanctity within a privatized, domestic context, the bearer of second-generation memory is called to sharing his inherited memory—and the social critique such memory has motivated—within a larger, public sphere in a way that calls for radical social change. When Jonas becomes acquainted with the terrible procedure that the Community disguises with the euphemistic term, “release,” he is enraged. Not only does he realize that his foster-brother, an underweight baby named Gabriel, is in danger of being killed, but he recognizes that his own community, which so forcefully condemns acts of dissimulation, derives its own power from

54 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature obscuring the truth of such injustices. Initially, Jonas is convinced that he may “change nothing” about this specific practice and about the Community’s unjust structure more generally (135). His feelings of powerlessness are echoed by the Giver, who admits that he has been too paralyzed by feelings of anger and fear to effect any change. However, when the boy and his mentor acknowledge each other’s mutual feelings of rage and distrust, their initial bond expands through their newfound sense of solidarity. Together, the Giver and his protégé hatch a plan of resistance. Cognizant of the fact that a Receiver’s sudden absence brings about the return of repressed memories upon the Community—a lesson the Giver painfully learned when his daughter, the former Receiver, committed suicide after inheriting only a few sorrowful memories—the pair decides that Jonas should flee his native land, thus forcing his memories back on his fellow citizens. Their hope is that, once these citizens find themselves repossessed of their community’s long-isolated memories, they might find within themselves the strength to critique their own practices just as Jonas and his mentor have done. The pair hopes as well that the Community, once repossessed of its collective memories and thus made cognizant of the ways that past structures of injustice survive within the present, might change such practices in ways that Jonas and the Giver cannot do on their own. It may be noted, at this point, that Lowry’s hero is aptly named: indeed, Jonas bears a striking resemblance to Jonah, the Biblical prophet called by God to convert the apostate city of Nineveh. Like his ancient Hebrew counterpart, Jonas is initially unwilling to take up his own calling, convinced as he is that he will surely be destroyed by those who resist him and clearly outnumber him. If Jonas’s reluctance does not land him in the belly of a whale, it nevertheless keeps him in a state of abjection—and it is only when he, like Jonah, finally resolves to carry out his task that he is released from his crippling melancholia. Although Lowry’s novel never explicitly indicates whether Jonas triumphs in his endeavor to return his community’s memories, its subtle allusion to the story of Jonah—who, in fact, did successfully convert Nineveh—suggests that his efforts are not in vain. Through its subtle allusion to the story of Jonah, The Giver ascribes something of a prophetic role to the bearer of second-generation memory. According to conventional wisdom—which is significantly informed by Hellenic representations of the Oracle—the prophet is one who prognosticates the imminent, pre-determined future. However, in the ancient Hebrew tradition, from which the story of Jonah emerged, the prophet is one who reads the immanent present, rather than the preordained future. That is to say, the Hebrew prophet might be likened to the social critic who interprets past and present social conditions and who draws on his interpretation to imagine the possible future events that might transpire as a result of these conditions. In foreseeing these contingencies, the prophet calls his contemporaries to act correspondently: he summons them to behave in such a manner that might usher in a better

“Seeing Beyond” • 55 future or thwart a more tragic one. Although, in the ancient Hebrew (and later, the Christian) imagination, the prophet is aided in his vision by divine inspiration, he can never definitively foretell the future: indeed, this is why Jonah becomes angry with God when God ultimately withholds his wrath from Nineveh, thus nullifying Jonah’s threats to that city20 (4:1). The prophet’s power rests, therefore, not so much in his prognostication of an imminent future as it does in his critique of past and present conditions; moreover, his authority is constituted by his ability to make his contemporaries aware of the implications of his insights.21 It is this capacity of the prophet to draw on his insight into the past and the present in order to enable his fellows to act against dire future contingencies that Lowry’s allegory of second-generation memory develops in its depiction of Jonas. The novel suggests that, like a prophet, the bearer of second-generation memory might impart to his contemporaries a vision that is not entirely his own; furthermore, it implies that he might do so with the purpose of enacting radical social change. Admittedly, the term “prophet” may seem antiquated in our own, increasingly secular, age—and perhaps the strange ring it may leave in our ears underscores the dramatic lapse in collective, involuntary memory which Pierre Nora discusses. In any case, if it is difficult to associate Jonas with the traditional figure of the prophet, then Lowry’s use of the term “giver” may provide a more accessible metaphor for the role her novel envisions for the bearer of second-generation memory. Although the title of her novel is generally understood to refer to Jonas’s elderly mentor—an association that is encouraged by the book’s cover illustration of a wizened, bearded man—it may just as well refer to Jonas himself. Jonas, who has for so long internalized the memories that have been offered to him, ultimately re-externalizes them, generously giving them back to a community that desperately needs to feel the burden of the past if it is ever to change. Thus, Lowry’s novel resists positing the bearer of second-generation memory as a mere container of memory, and instead suggests that his position is a profoundly ethical and political one. This individual, the novel suggests, cannot squander his inheritance of memory by keeping it to himself, but rather must share it publicly with others—and in such a way that he encourages others to see that the past’s dubious legacy within the present demands collective redress. Certainly, the twin givers in Lowry’s novel do not lack for counterparts in our contemporary moment. The fi lm director John Singleton, for example, may not yet have been born when angry mobs descended upon the town of Rosewood, but his intimate acquaintance with this story prompted him to share it with mass audiences with the hope that it might grant them a new perspective from which to perceive contemporary acts of racism. Likewise, as Alan Berger observes, the coming-of-age of many children of Holocaust survivors was accompanied by their active engagement in the civil rights movement, as well as their efforts to give refuge to such marginalized groups as Soviet Jews and Cambodian “boat people.” “Ethically,” Berger writes, “acts

56 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature that enhance the dignity and self-respect of individuals also comprise the response of the second generation to their Holocaust legacy” (27). Moreover, poets, whose position in our contemporary society might be most akin to that of the traditional role of prophet, have also worked to return intimately held inherited memories to the public with the aim of reengaging their readers’ ethical and political vision. For example, the prophetic role of second-generation memory is particularly demonstrated in Irena Klepfisz’s poem “Bashert,”22 whose speaker meditates on the aftermath of the Holocaust. Technically, both Klepfisz and her speaker are members of what Susan Rubin Suleiman calls the “1.5 generation” or “child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of the Jews” (277, emphasis in original). Indeed, the first part of Klepfisz’s poem depicts her speaker’s early childhood experiences of hiding in Nazi-occupied Poland, protected by peasants who raise her as Catholic in order to thwart authorities’ suspicions about her Jewish identity. Nevertheless, Klepfisz’s poem might be read as an expression of second-generation memory because it is concerned, in part, with piecing together a narrative of the speaker’s father, who died in the Warsaw Uprising on the day of her birth, as well as that of her mother, who, at age thirty found herself in “complete isolation” in the wake of war and genocide (394). Moreover, and more crucially, her poem might be read figuratively as an expression of second-generation memory insofar as it offers a new iteration of others’ immediately experienced memories that interprets them in such a way that it offers an original perspective not only on the past but also on the present and future. Reflecting on the fate of those who, unlike herself, did not escape the violence of the ghettos or the crematories of the concentration camps, she proclaims, “I do not shun this legacy. I claim it as mine whenever I see the photographs of nameless people” (403). Ironically gesturing toward an ethnic stereotype used by anti-Semites to characterize their Jewish victims, the speaker designates herself as “a keeper of accounts” as she begins to catalogue the names and stories of those who perished. Although “Bashert” mourns an irrecoverable past and directly situates its speaker as an heir to its legacy, it is also mindful of the present. In the poem’s second section, titled “Chicago, 1964: I am walking home after midnight,” Klepfisz’s speaker describes the urban landscape of America, the “alien” country in which she has resided for most of her life (396). Klepfisz’s speaker is painfully aware that the historical moment in which she now lives is markedly different from her native, once war-torn, Poland; indeed, she later emphasizes that the temporal gulf that exists between her past and her present is as wide as the distance between two continents. Nevertheless, she longs “to become like the water between two land masses that will never touch” and to “become like salt water, to establish the connection” between two different historical and cultural realities (399). In one fleeting moment, she discovers this connection in the improbable setting of urban Chicago, where, for an instant, she

“Seeing Beyond” • 57 perceives the “Holocaust without smoke” (398). Observing, as though for the first time, the poverty of inner city Chicago, she perceives a “life obliterated around me of those I barely noticed. A life unmarked, unrecorded. A silent mass migration. Relocation. Common rubble in the streets” (398). Later in the poem, Klepfisz’s speaker once again relates this sense of convergence when she describes her admission of her Jewish identity to a minority student in the English night-class she teaches in Brooklyn: when the student tacitly recognizes their shared otherness, “in that moment two vast land masses touch” (401). As Susan Gubar notes, Klepfisz is careful not to conflate her experience with that of her student, just as she is mindful to preserve the historical and cultural specificities of Second World War-era Poland and contemporary United States. Nevertheless, she establishes “analogies between Jews and people of color” and between the Warsaw ghetto and the American ghetto, thus inviting her reader to reflect upon the political implications of these analogies (79). That is, she calls her readers to be attentive to the material and dehumanizing effects of structural racism. Indeed, Klepfisz offers her readers what in effect could be characterized as a verbal ghost image: she presents an image of a familiar scene from the present superimposed onto a more distant scene from the past, thus inviting the reader to see them as both mutually distinguishable but nevertheless interrelated. Like Epstein, Singleton and, indeed, Lowry’s hero Jonas, Klepfisz’s selfdesignation as an heir to the legacy of an unexperienced past has long enabled her to see its resonance in the present. However, much like these other figures, Klepfisz is not satisfied to keep her perceptions to herself. By first exposing her American audience to a European past they might find strange and otherwise outside their own range of experience, Klepfisz then reminds them of more familiar scenes: the “incessant grinding down of lines for stamps, for jobs, for a place to sleep in, of a death stretched imperceptibly over a lifetime” (398). Thus, she sets the groundwork for a shock of recognition: even if the Holocaust has ended, the structures of injustice that made it possible still remain in our contemporary moment. As her poem suggests, any authentic cry of “Never Again” must necessarily be accompanied by an active response to new, but uncannily similar, instances of racism, disenfranchisement, and persecution. If Klepfisz’s poem is especially effective, it may be because it draws on second-generation memory: it simultaneously draws upon and reformulates an earlier generation’s memories of the past in order to represent this past and its resonance within the present. Klepfisz’s representation of second-generation memory is an effect of what Paul Ricoeur, following Kant, calls the “productive imagination.” Imagination, according to Ricoeur, is “reproductive” when it merely replicates an already existing reality, or when it simply reiterates pre-existing ideological notions or sets of relation. Imagination is “productive,” however, when it becomes the “apperception, the sudden view, of a new predicative pertinence” (122)—that is, it is productive in its capacity to “open up and unfold new dimensions

58 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature of reality” rather than merely reproducing formerly existing ones (124). In its potential to “redescribe” reality (124), the productive imagination creates a “shock”23 (121). The difference between the reproductive and productive imagination might be demonstrated through the difference between, on the one hand, the fi lms Gubar insists “commodify” and “fetishize” the Holocaust, and, on the other hand, a poem such as Klepfisz’s. In the former case, reified visions of the past, as well as the affective but nonetheless distancing responses they solicit, are simply reproduced through the use of familiar narratives and tropes. In the case of the latter, however, the sudden and surprising coalescence of two otherwise disparate images (here, Second World War–era Poland and contemporary Chicago) shock the reader into perceiving reality anew, and thus re-orienting herself vis-à-vis this newly discovered reality. Indeed, as Ricoeur argues, the productive imagination has significant ethical implications. The productive imagination, he argues, is the “schematism belonging to the constitution of intersubjectivity in analogical apperception” (128). Analogy, he explains, involves the “transcendental principle establishing the other as another self like myself, a self like my self”: it allows, in other words, for an individual to recognize that, like himself, his “contemporaries,” “predecessors,” and “successors” all share the ability to identify as “I” (128 emphasis in original). What occurs, then, is the “genesis of new connections” (121). The “task of the productive imagination,” Ricoeur continues, “is, in particular to keep alive all sorts of mediations which make up historical ties and, among these, institutions which objectify the social link and increasingly transform the ‘us’ into ‘them’” (128). Moreover, its task is to “fight against [the] terrifying entropy in human relations” and to create new bonds and connections in the face of growing distances and objectifications (129). This, ultimately, is what Klepfisz’s poem does: it links what Gubar diagnoses as an increasingly distant past event to contemporary conditions, drawing new ties between “contemporaries” and “predecessors” (and, by extension, “successors”) while still acknowledging the mutual uniqueness of different historical moments. The productive imagination of second-generation poets like Klepfisz is ultimately what Lowry’s novel allegorizes and promulgates. That is, The Giver demonstrates how the perception of the past and its representation (here, Jonas’s return of long-repressed memories) “shocks” a complacent and long-reproduced set of relations. In so doing, it allows for potentially productive new ways of perceiving reality and establishing ethical ties. Moreover, far from extolling individual heroism or unrewarded personal sacrifice—tropes that may be associated with the reproductive imagination—The Giver actually advocates the individual’s productive reinsertion into the collective and his return of memories to a public space where they should rightfully exist. If an individual should feel a particular bond to the past, the novel implies, this bond is only productive insofar as it is communicated to others, and in such a way that it is simultaneously felt along with a commitment to the present. Thus, if Lowry’s novel initially posits second-generation memory as a consequence of an age of for-

“Seeing Beyond” • 59 getting—characterized by an “acceleration of history” that impels individuals to privately and discretely internalize the past—it ends by suggesting that such memory might ensure the redemption of a shared memory deeply rooted in the gestures and perceptions of the present.

Ambiguous Futures One would be remiss, of course, to neglect the provocative conclusion of Lowry’s novel. Although Jonas and the Giver initially concoct an apparently airtight plan to return Jonas’s memories to the Community, complications in the plot inevitably ensue. Jonas, learning of Gabriel’s imminently scheduled release, steals the infant away and departs from the Community before the escape-plan is finally solidified. Sustaining Gabriel with his own memories of warmth and peace, Jonas succeeds in passing through the tightly controlled borders of the Community and reaching the fabled land of Elsewhere, where memory and fully engaged perceptions remain intact. However, the conclusion of the novel is ambiguous. On the one hand, Jonas thinks he hears music rising from the “place he had left”—a sound that confirms the Community’s reception of previously unfelt sensations (180). On the other hand, the omniscient narrator intercedes to suggest that “perhaps [the music] was only an echo,” thus introducing the possibility not only that Jonas’s memories have not been received, but also that Jonas himself has succumbed to a peaceful but futile death. Lowry’s conclusion is surely a puzzling one; certainly, it is one that has preoccupied countless readers. However, it is also something of a misleading one. By enticing readers to focus solely on Jonas’s questionable fate, and thus to debate the relative success of his individual effort, the conclusion draws attention away from the novel’s more pressing implications. The question ultimately posed by Lowry’s novel is not whether Jonas, the individual, survives, but rather whether the potential promised by second-generation memory may be fulfi lled. That is, her conclusion invites readers to question whether Jonas’s critical engagement with the present and the past, once it is communicated to his fellow citizens, will actually be heeded by them. Certainly, this is a question that haunts Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), which the author composed immediately before his escape from Vichy France and his ultimate apprehension on the Spanish border by Nazi agents. In this piece, Benjamin argues that the “past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (255). The past, he argues, can never be captured by monumental and totalizing narratives; it is not a static phenomenon that can be in effect pinned down by explanatory historical narratives. Rather, he maintains, the past exists in fleeting images that resurface only occasionally in quotidian exchanges or in mechanically reproduced cultural artifacts such as photography and fi lm. Consequently, the past can only be perceived in sudden “flashes”

60 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature by those who are attentive to its transitory appearance within and incorporation by present exchanges and artifacts. Lowry’s narrative, which itself depicts an ambiguous escape, implies that the bearer of second-generation memory, who is particularly able to “seize hold of an image of the past which flashes up” within the present, is particularly capable of communicating the past’s survival in a manner that provokes radical collective change. Moreover, it echoes Benjamin’s final arguments by suggesting that the past Jonas has heretofore carried within him might resound within the cultural traces he has left behind—here, specifically, through the formerly proscribed form of music. Nevertheless, it is important to heed the warning that is inscribed in both Benjamin’s essay and Lowry’s later novel. According to Benjamin, “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (255). That is, insofar as the past may be recognized only through fleeting images or delicate traces—such as, for example, Klepfisz’s subtle analogy between Second World War-era Poland and twentieth-century United States—it may just as easily be overlooked or ignored. Likewise, as Lowry’s ambiguous conclusion implies, there is always a danger that the potentially revolutionary vision enabled by second-generation memory will go unheeded by a public that so misrecognizes the present as “how things have always been” (and thus should continue to be) that it casually ignores pleas to perceive the past’s bitter legacy within the present. Indeed, the narratives of second-generation memory I will presently discuss each perform, in their own ways, the ambiguous conclusion of Lowry’s novel. Although each of these texts suggest new possibilities of seeing both the past and the present anew, and in intimate relationship with one another, each implies the possibility that this fleeting vision might “disappear irretrievably.” For instance, although such texts as Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s The Hunger, and Mordecai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers all offer provocative visions of the survival of the past within, and urgent supplication to, the present, their depiction of second-generation memory is obscured by their appeal to conservative views of childhood and nation. Likewise, Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself, although it presents a truly remarkable image of the past’s creative representation in a child’s negotiation of narrative and performance, has been sadly disregarded—even disavowed—by readers and critics alike. It is thus to Blume’s productively imaginative work, and its long-overlooked implications, that I now turn.

Chapter Two Sitting Shivah Mourning and Performance in Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself

1

Long before Lois Lowry’s The Giver was published to great critical acclaim, Judy Blume’s own narrative of second-generation memory, Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself (1977), met considerably chillier responses from reviewers. Of course, Blume’s previous books, including Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) and Forever (1975), similarly endured negative critical reviews, mostly in response to their frank and, to many reviewers, obsessive treatment of such topics as menstruation, masturbation, and pre-marital sex. What most provoked reviewers of Sally, however, was not its representation of sexual awakening or its depiction of (pre-)adolescent angst, but rather its startling and occasionally graphic references to the Holocaust. Overwhelmingly, critics were repulsed by the central conflict of Blume’s novel, which involves its ten-year-old protagonist’s obsession with and fantasies about the atrocities suffered by Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Such treatment of the Holocaust, reviewers agreed, was “unnecessarily violent in its expression” (Haas 59), “trivialized by poor taste and unnecessarily ghoulish fantasies” (Weeks 112), and “neither credible nor humorous” (Stein 809). Not insignificantly, reviews of both The Giver and Sally tended to focus not so much on the literary merits of the respective texts but rather on their treatment of apparently “difficult” or “controversial” themes. Ironically, although The Giver was generally praised for its depiction of a totalitarian society that sanctions violence and all but does away with sex, Blume’s relatively tame suburban coming-of-age novel was condemned for its treatment of these same themes of violence and repression. It might be tempting to suppose that the differences between critics’ responses to these two novels might be due to dissimilar cultural and historical attitudes toward the Holocaust and 61

62 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature the consequences of fascism more generally. Blume’s novel, published in the 1970s, was written during a period in which grisly images of the Nazi genocide were just beginning to re-enter American public consciousness.2 By contrast, Lowry’s depiction of a quasi-fascist state was published in 1993, when the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum symbolically marked America’s acceptance of Shoah within its collective imagination. Thus, it might be argued that readers of The Giver were comparatively more prepared to receive images of atrocity than were Blume’s readers. As convincing as this explanation might initially seem, however, it does not adequately explain the vehemence with which critics dismissed Blume’s novel. In fact, not only did children’s novels depicting the Holocaust proliferate during the 1970s, but they were also generally praised rather than condemned for their inclusion of graphic imagery. For example, in 1977—the year of Sally’s publication—children’s author Eric Kimmel had already published an article in which he catalogued Holocaust texts written for children, ranking them according to what he perceived to be their general effectiveness “in terms of presenting the profound evil of the Holocaust” (Baer 383). Significantly, the single book Kimmel found most “effective” in its representation of the event was Marietta Moskin’s I Am Rosemarie (1973), a novel which, of all those Kimmel considers, most directly portrays life and death in the concentration camps (383). A year later, critics acclaimed Doris Orgel’s The Devil in Vienna (1978), applauding its skillfulness in providing a “graphic documentary picture of the intrusion of Nazism into Vienna and of the following years of harassment and brutality” (Haviland 70). A decade later, reviewers generally praised Lois Lowry’s first Newbery Award–winning book Number the Stars (1989)—in which a Christian girl aids the Danish resistance by helping her Jewish best friend—although, significantly, a critic for the New York Times Book Review noted that the “book fails to offer . . . any sense of horror that is the alternative if the Johannsens’ efforts to save Ellen and her family fail” (Milton 32). This sense of “horror” was clearly felt, however, by readers of Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988), whose penultimate chapter involves its protagonist’s entrance into a gas chamber, and whose publication was closely followed by its reception of the National Jewish Book Award. Given these readers’ responses to the graphic Holocaust imagery (or lack thereof) contained within children’s novels, it appears as though the general consensus is that such imagery is a necessary component in representations of the event. A “good” or “effective” Holocaust novel, by these critics’ standards, should shock or otherwise disturb its young reader. Blume’s novel, however, appears to be an exception to this generally upheld standard: far from being praised for containing necessarily shocking imagery, its allusions to the genocide—which, indeed, are truly jarring—were explicitly condemned as “unnecessary.” Although this discrepancy may initially seem surprising, it may be readily explained upon an analysis of the context in which such imagery occurs.

Sitting Shivah • 63 Unlike Blume’s novel, which is set in the postwar U.S. (partly in suburban New Jersey, partly in beachfront Miami), the aforementioned novels are all set primarily in Second World War-era Europe. Thus, in obedience to the conventions of historical realism, they aim toward creating the most detailed and historically verifiable portrayal of events which precipitated on European soil.3 Their objective, in other words, is to represent events “as they really happened.”4 For example, Number the Stars includes an author’s note in which Lowry explains the process by which she shaped her characters and plot, noting that this process was informed both by her conversations with fi rst-hand witnesses to the Holocaust and by her extensive research of the Danish resistance. Likewise, The Devil’s Arithmetic, although it follows a fantastical timetravel device (its author is best known as a children’s fantasy writer), similarly contains an author’s note—titled “What Is True about This Book”—in which Yolen accounts for documentary evidence on which she based her portrayal of the concentration camp her time-traveling heroine visits. Blume’s novel, however, makes no attempt to “get the facts straight”: rather than providing its reader with a comprehensive introduction to the historical conditions in which the Holocaust took place, it instead alludes to the genocide only through sporadic fantasy sequences. In the course of the novel, Sally indiscriminately blends graphic Holocaust imagery into backyard games or daydreams inspired by Hollywood movies, in which the event’s European setting is undifferentiated from the protagonist’s American home. (Dachau, in Sally’s fantasies, is located next to a Rexall’s drugstore.) No doubt it was the novel’s liberal blending of graphic Holocaust imagery into whimsical fantasy sequences—with the attendant implication that the details of an historical event of such enormity could be adapted into mere child’s play—that so offended Blume’s critics. Seen from this perspective, the novel’s use of the Holocaust appears irreverent, if not blasphemous. Moreover, the reviewers, who were most likely predisposed toward Blume’s characteristically unorthodox approaches to childhood sexuality, were taken aback by the novel’s protagonist. Rather than learning lessons of friendship and ethical obligation (as do the heroines of Orgel, Lowry, and Yolen), Sally instead appears to extract a certain sexual pleasure in imagining Hitler’s victimization of the Jews. In turn, these differing responses to 1970s-era Holocaust-themed books might place into relief the reasons why Lowry’s later, second-generationthemed novel The Giver was granted a certain degree of approbation denied to Blume’s text. Not only was The Giver’s reception bolstered by critics’ former acquaintance with Lowry’s Newbery Award–winning Number the Stars, but its very setting and genre might have predisposed readers to its harrowing subject matter in ways that Blume’s own novel could not. That is, reviewers might have found the violent content within Lowry’s narrative palatable or otherwise acceptable because of its fantastical, utopian setting. Jonas’s society is, after all, a utopia, and as such it exists, strictly speaking, “nowhere” at all. Although one might certainly draw parallels between Jonas’s world and our

64 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature own, one might just as well comfort oneself with the assurance that Jonas’s “Society” is ultimately fictional. By comparison, Blume’s own novel seems much more threatening, not only because it addresses an actual historical event—the Holocaust—but also because it insists that the continuing reverberations of this event might be felt in a setting that may be more familiar to contemporary American readers. Blume’s novel grants the reader no easy assurance that he might effortlessly wake up from the nightmares of history. It may be useful, then, to consider the apparently indiscriminate blending of realism and fantasy at work within Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself from a perspective that looks beyond the novel’s mere shock value or exploitative potential. A closer reading of this text suggests that Blume’s heterodox combination of reality and fantasy, as well as her representation of the Shoah from within a contemporary American setting, do not in fact detract from the integrity of Holocaust memory, but rather place into relief the imaginative practices necessary to its survival. Such a reading allows, moreover, for the possibility that the Holocaust fantasies depicted within Blume’s novel, far from being “trivial” or “in poor taste,” instead play a pivotal role in Sally’s subtle exposition of the ways in which individuals approach an ultimately ineffable historical event and attempt to mourn the loss it has incurred. Indeed, far from being mere whimsical or frivolous play, Sally’s various Holocaust games and fantasies are in fact work. That is, these episodes represent the ways in which an individual comes to terms with an event she hardly understands, but which she nevertheless realizes plays a significant role in her own self-narration and genealogical emplotment. Moreover, Sally’s games (and the narrative processes such games imply) signal a unique mode of perception celebrated by Walter Benjamin, whose various writings privilege the child’s associative thinking and bodily engagement with abstract concepts. Ultimately, Sally’s games and fantasies allow her to recognize—in ways her adult counterparts cannot—uncanny resemblances between past and present structures of injustice.

The War-Game and the Photograph: Approaching the Event Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself, like many of Blume’s other novels, is a coming-of-age story. In the course of the novel, which is set primarily in 1947, Sally moves with her family from her native New Jersey town to a Florida beach city, which functions as the site in which she discovers for and by herself certain facts of life which had previously remained mysterious. For example, as the novel progresses, the protagonist comes to discover the secrets of sexuality, religious difference, and American racial intolerance. However, it is the secret of the Holocaust that remains most mysterious and intriguing to Sally, and therefore it is that subject with which she is most preoccupied. The reader learns, in the novel’s prologue, that Sally has received some—albeit scanty— information about the Holocaust from her mother. As Sally and her mother

Sitting Shivah • 65 walk to the beach to join the celebration of the Allied victory, Sally complains of a stomach-ache and a sore throat, but her mother responds by ordering her to ignore these symptoms and to think of the possible happy endings afforded by the victory. Now that the war is over, Mrs. Freedman explains, she might be able to locate her Aunt Rose and cousin Lila—Sally’s great-aunt and cousin once-removed—who have been “sent away by Hitler” (9). When Sally ingenuously suggests that their family members might be in New Jersey, her mother responds only by saying that the family members are “far away . . . somewhere in Europe” (9). This first conversation between Sally and her mother establishes a pattern which most of their subsequent conversations follow: Sally asks a battery of more or less simple questions of clarification—the answers to which she hopes to gather together in an attempt to understand the object of inquiry—and her mother responds impatiently, yet not without affection, by offering brief, matter-of-fact answers. The guardedness of Mrs. Freedman’s replies to Sally’s questions communicates something of her unwillingness to dwell on the subject of recent events in Europe, an unwillingness that may be born of her own lack of information vis-à-vis these events, or her inclination to protect her young daughter from those gruesome stories which she does know. It is obvious that she has already shared with her daughter some of the basic facts of the Holocaust and her family’s victimization by it—Sally already knows, for example, that Tante Rose and Lila have been “sent away” by Hitler—but the euphemistic phrase “sent away,” which Sally unselfconsciously repeats, betrays Mrs. Freedman’s reluctance to discuss the details of ghettoization, deportation, and extermination. Furthermore, Sally’s naïve suggestion that her great-aunt and cousin may be in the U.S. implies gaps in her received knowledge, gaps that are underscored by the frequent ellipses in the text. As the novel progresses, however, the reader learns that Sally has not only been able to fi ll in some of the gaps left open by her protective mother, but is also able to intuit why she so desires to engage with them in the first place. This becomes especially clear in a passage in which Sally and her friends gather in her backyard for role-playing games. When a friend proposes to play a game of “Love and Romance,” Sally suggests that they play “War” instead. The group has obviously played this war-game before. For instance, Sally’s friend Alice announces that she is “sick of playing War” because she “always end[s] up playing Hitler”—to which Sally responds that she herself could not possibly play Hitler because she is Jewish (28). When it seems as though her group cannot agree upon a suitable game to play, Sally presents a third alternative: a fantasy she calls “Concentration Camp” (28). In preparation for this game, Sally casts two of her friends in the roles of Lila and Tante Rose; then, she instructs her third friend, whom she has placed into the role of a camp guard, to hand a bar of “pretend soap to Tante Rose and Lila and tell them to go to the showers” (29). When her playmates express confusion over the scenario Sally has asked them to perform, the protagonist explains that they

66 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature are enacting a “trick”: Lila and Tante Rose, she clarifies, are not actually being led to a shower but to a “big gas oven” (29). At the center of Sally’s game of Concentration Camp is the figure of her second cousin Lila, the dark-haired beauty who the reader already knows has perished in Dachau. Over the course of the novel, the reader learns that Sally’s family owns “twenty two photographs in silver frames, four of them showing Tante Rose and Lila at different ages,” and that Sally’s favorite photograph is one that shows Lila to be “happy even though she isn’t really smiling” (104). There is something compelling about this description of Lila’s image—indeed, something vaguely reminiscent of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, whose famous half-smile continues to prompt audiences to wonder what so preoccupied Leonardo’s subject. The appeal of the Mona Lisa is the enigma it poses: Leonardo’s subject knows something, which causes her to smile serenely, yet also somehow complacently. However, the viewer, who does not know the source of the Mona Lisa’s perplexing amusement, is left to grasp at explanations for her secretive demeanor. Similarly, Lila’s own expression, which is neither explicitly happy (she is “not really smiling”) nor sad or distraught, suggests an ambiguity which Sally feels compelled to unravel. Like the Mona Lisa, Lila knows something that Sally as of yet cannot. The secret knowledge the photograph promises is tied, in part, to the mature sexuality the “beautiful woman” within it exudes, and thus it invites Blume’s young protagonist to look at it until she may possess the mystery it holds (28). According to Freud, the question that initially most perplexes young children is not, as one might expect, the difference between the sexes, but the “Sphinxian riddle” of where babies come from (“Three Contributions” 562). In other words, it is a question of origins. Such an obsession with origins is manifested in the immense curiosity with which children regard their surroundings. “About the same time as the sexual life of the child reaches its first rich development,” Freud writes, “there appear the beginnings of that activity which are ascribed to the impulse for knowledge and investigation” (562). This investigative impulse corresponds, “on the one hand, to a sublimated form of acquisition, and on the other hand, the energy with which it works comes from the looking impulse” (562). Such a looking impulse—such a scopophilic tendency—is tied, in Freud’s view, to sexual awakening and the problems that such awakening inevitably brings with it. Blume’s novel offers a startlingly lucid representation of how the child’s desire to inquire, and to look, is deeply tied to her desire to unravel the “Sphinxian riddle” of origins and procreation. Sally’s obsession with Lila’s image is directly related to her other tendencies to spy, eavesdrop, or otherwise observe the objects and people that surround her in order to uncover what she perceives as secrets that, paradoxically, are at the same time readily available to her and confounding. However, Sally’s scopophilic tendency, and the expression it finds in her preoccupation with Lila’s photograph, is just as tied to her anxieties about death as it is to her fi xation on sex.

Sitting Shivah • 67 As Blume’s novel unfolds, the reader follows Sally as she becomes increasingly preoccupied with sex. At home, at school, and at the movies, Sally is surrounded by talk of sex and sexual imagery, and yet she is confounded by what this phenomenon is exactly, and why even her vague idea of what it is should give her such a strange thrill. In order to solve this mystery, then, she begins to cobble together the clues she finds at her disposal. Inspired by a teenaged babysitter, whose letters she furtively steals and reads, Sally begins to sign letters to her best friend “love and other indoor sports”; although she is perplexed by the connection between “love” and “sport,” she suspects that the phrase is one that indicates some sophistication, and that her friend will be duly impressed (50). Later in the novel, Sally becomes enchanted by a family friend’s buxom mistress, who gives Sally an impromptu lesson in diamond-washing (143). Finally, near the end of the novel, Sally accepts a dare and kisses her classmate, Peter Hornstein, in the bushes behind the local synagogue; subsequently, she prides herself on having won a “Latin lover” (127). Sally’s path to knowledge of procreation is similarly long and meandering. When her mother announces that Sally’s Aunt Bette and Uncle Jack will soon be greeting a new “addition,” Sally is initially perplexed by what the term “addition” might mean; she wonders if perhaps “Aunt Bette has passed some kind of arithmetic test” (254). When her mother explains that Aunt Bette is expecting a baby, Sally immediately and inevitably responds by asking where the baby comes from in the first place. Her mother’s answer is characteristically vague: Uncle Jack, she explains, has “planted a seed” in Aunt Bette (upon hearing this, Sally writes Aunt Bette a congratulatory letter in which she ingenuously notes that she is “very glad to hear that Uncle Jack has got the seed planted at last”) (256). Sally’s satisfaction with her mother’s cursory explanation of seed planting is short-lived, however, and she demands a more detailed elaboration of this process. In a final concession to Sally’s multiple requests, her mother finally buys her a book on sex and procreation. Nevertheless, even this book is not enough to satiate Sally, as its insistence that only married couples can procreate fails to explain how Sally’s teenaged neighbor became pregnant without being married. Once again, Sally takes it upon herself to garner the details adults and their books fail to supply her, and she resorts to spying on her downstairs neighbor just as she once spied on her babysitter. Of course, the question of origins invariably leads to another question, which initially appears to be directly opposed to it: the problem of death. As Jacqueline Rose argues in her analysis of Freud, the child’s capacity to reckon with her own origins through procreation prompts her to recognize, as well, that there necessarily existed a time that preceded her own conception and birth—that is, that there was a time when, quite simply, she did not exist.5 This is a sublime problem indeed, and it invites, in turn, the speculation that sometime in the future, she will cease to exist. Certainly, this is a problem that perplexes Sally just as much as the question of pregnancy does. When Sally considers that her parents will someday die, her thoughts turn to her own

68 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature mortality and consequently cause her several sleepless nights: she wonders, for example, whether her death will render her a “beautiful angel” or “just plain dead” (280). Sally’s meditations on mortality lead her to engage in anxious fantasies about not only her own death, but also the deaths of those around her. She is dreadfully frightened, for example, that her father will die on his thirtyfourth birthday because he would be reaching the age that his two brothers were when they died. When Sally’s friend Andrea is injured after falling off her bicycle, Sally runs home for help and entertains morbid visions of finding her playmate dead upon her return. Moreover, she is utterly confounded by her downstairs neighbors’ decision to sit shivah for their disgraced pregnant teenaged daughter; what, she wonders, would impel her neighbors to mourn a still-very-alive girl as though she were dead? Sally’s often anxious curiosity about matters of sex, birth, and death find their ultimate expression in her fascination with Lila’s photograph. As I have argued above, Lila’s half-smiling image appears to possess a knowledge that Sally is intent upon acquiring. Given Sally’s preoccupation with sex and death, it may be argued, then, that it is precisely the knowledge of these two phenomena that the protagonist presumes Lila’s image to “know.” Sally, mesmerized by her cousin’s beauty, wants to “grow up to look just like Lila”—that is, she wants to achieve not only her cousin’s physical attractiveness but the sexual confidence such physical bearing communicates (104). However, Sally is aware that Lila’s image communicates another sort of knowledge as well. The very eyes that gaze contentedly at the camera are those that, in later years, will witness first-hand the atrocities visited upon Jews in the ghettos and the concentration camps; indeed, they will bear witness to Lila’s own ultimate encounter with mortality. Lila’s photographic likeness is a reminder to the protagonist that Lila knows what Sally cannot, and has seen what Sally will never see. And yet, her perplexing expression is nevertheless an invitation to Sally to pursue this knowledge—in effect, to see from another’s eyes. It is no wonder, then, that Sally so venerates her cousin’s portrait, for it contains—and promises to divulge—the twin secrets of sex and death that the protagonist is so intent upon unraveling. In effect, the photograph serves as a fetish. The fetish, according to Freud, is a “substitute for a sexual object” which is “generally a part of the body but little adapted for sexual purposes, such as the foot or hair or some inanimate object (fragments of clothing, underwear) which has some demonstrable relation to the sexual person” (“Three Contributions” 534). Although Freud generally associates the fetish with what he regards as abnormal sexual activity, he concedes that a “certain degree of fetishism is . . . regularly found in the normal, especially during those stages of wooing when the normal sexual aim seems inaccessible or when its realization is unduly deferred” (535). Freud’s defi nition of the fetish lends Blume’s narrative a particular clarity. By understanding the portrait as a fetish—or as a fragment of the whole which the protagonist would like to

Sitting Shivah • 69 possess—the reader is better able to comprehend the desires which motivate Sally’s actions throughout the narrative.

“The Photograph, Taken in Flux” If Lila’s portrait serves as the centerpiece around which Sally’s game of Concentration Camp—as well as her numerous other fantasies—revolves, then the question that remains involves why she should incorporate this image into a game. If Lila’s photograph holds the answers to the questions Sally so desires to have resolved, then what function does the framing narrative of the game play in extracting such answers from the silent and unyielding portrait? In Camera Lucida (1981), Roland Barthes argues that the photograph is merely a single document—a transposition of the image of a physical body onto paper by means of light and chemicals—which, in its singularity, is “without future” (90). The photograph serves only to verify “what has been” (82). Although the photograph does affirm “what has been,” it makes no promises to restore the person or event whose existence it confirms. There is a certain damning finality about the photograph: as a single image, it implies a story—for example, the person to whose existence the photograph attests had a particular life history, which began and ended in such-and-such a way— but it denies any certain and cogent narrative. Given Barthes’s delineation of the limits of photography, one may better understand the problem Lila’s portrait presents to Sally. As I have argued above, Lila’s photograph promises to divulge the secrets it contains and which Sally is most intent upon acquiring. However, this portrait is but a single, de-contextualized image: whatever story it might tell is securely fastened behind its subject’s static and placid expression. In order to make it speak, Sally must place it into a narrative in which she may glean from the photograph the answers she demands. This is by no means a new task for her. For example, although she and her friends know relatively little about sexuality, they nevertheless play a game of “Love and Romance” (27). The game of Love and Romance, like similar children’s games such as “playing house” and “mothers and fathers,” is an attempt to imitate, repeatedly, the sexual behavior of adults until the secrets of sexuality might ultimately be collected and assimilated from such a re-staging. Similarly, the game of Concentration Camp can be read as an attempt to reproduce the probable circumstances of Lila’s death until the secret of that death—hidden or implied by the photograph—might be revealed. What is especially remarkable about Sally’s game of Concentration Camp, however, is the matter-of-fact and thoroughly unsentimental recitation of the basic process of extermination employed by the Nazis. The essential elements of the game—the guards, the showers, and the “gas oven”—not only faithfully resemble the various objects and persons the Nazis used in order to achieve their plan of mass murder, but Sally’s careful organization of these elements

70 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature into a narrative directly corresponds to established (and by now, well-known) accounts of such mass executions. Given that, in the preceding chapter, the protagonist’s ignorance of the Nazi genocide is such that she believes it to have occurred in the U.S., a reader might well wonder how her fantasy has come to achieve such a documentary fidelity at all. An answer to this question might be found in certain clues the novel furnishes regarding Sally’s love of fi lm. Sally is a great fan of Hollywood cinema: she is familiar with the personal lives of her favorite movie stars, and she regularly engages in fantasies in which she performs alongside these actors. Her love of fi lm is underscored, moreover, by frequent and sometimes casual references in the narrative to contemporary performers such as Bing Crosby and Esther Williams. The novel’s setting, as well as temporal markers such as actors’ names and fi lm titles, presumes the reader’s knowledge of the circulation of images within 1940s cinema—specifically, a familiarity with the newsreels that regularly preceded fi lms released in that historical moment. According to Barbie Zelizer, Certain [Holocaust] photos found their way into atrocity fi lms, which were screened in cinemas on both continents. During a two-week presentation of stills and footage taken by the U.S. Signal Corps and the British Army Film and Photographic Unit, one New York City theatre chain reported a 25 percent increase in audience attendance. The newsreels mesmerized audiences with their depiction of horror and “no persons took refuge in shutting their eyes” because nearly “all patrons were determined to see.” (148) Certainly, the grim matter-of-factness of Sally’s game of Concentration Camp echoes something of the stoical narration one might expect of such an “atrocity fi lm”; thus, this connection might give the reader some implicit explanation for Sally’s sudden acquaintance with the facts of the Holocaust. What is of even greater significance, however, is how the game’s resemblance to a documentary fi lm places into relief the particular role that fi lm, specifically, plays in Sally’s fantasies; indeed, her narratives are as cinematic as the memories that Lowry’s Jonas receives from the Giver. In his elaboration of the photograph’s inert character, Barthes argues that whereas the photograph is an essentially static form, the fi lm, on the other hand, involves the “photograph, taken in flux” which is “impelled, ceaselessly drawn toward other views”; unlike the photograph, which “flows back from presentation to retention,” the cinema is “protensive” and “simply ‘normal’ like life” (90). Film—most notably Hollywood fi lm—promises the possibility of narrative resolution: it speaks, it guarantees. Thus, if Lila’s photograph remains mute and secretive (as Barthes argues a photograph always does), then Sally’s insertion of her cousin’s image into a re-enactment of a narrative, “protensive” form can be read as an attempt on her part to put it into a context in which it

Sitting Shivah • 71 is forced to speak. By imagining Lila as a specific, individual casualty of the gruesome process she ostensibly sees dramatized in newsreels, Sally is better able to understand how her cousin died, and thus she is a step closer to approaching the mystery of death that so confounds her.

Hollywood Narrative and the Search for Meaning The question of “how” is nevertheless subordinate to—or at least much less compelling than—the attendant question of “why.” It is one thing to inquire into the exact process of an event’s unfolding (e.g., an innocent young woman’s victimization at the hands of her own neighbors) and an entirely different thing altogether to ask for the reasons such an event occurred—to ask for its meaning. The question “why” is one that is typically asked by young children, and Blume’s heroine is no exception. For example, she does not rest content with accepting the laws of segregation that prevail in her Florida beach town, but insists upon knowing what motivates them, and why they should exist in the first place (an inquiry that prompts a certain amount of back-peddling on the part of her parents). It is not surprising, then, that Sally’s game of Concentration Camp—which allows her to confront how her cousin might have died—gives way, in the latter part of the novel, to fantasies Sally constructs in order to discover the reason for, or meaning of, this inscrutable death. Unlike her game of Concentration Camp, however, these latter fantasies do not so much draw on images gleaned from documentary fi lm as they do from images and narrative schemes prevalent in classic Hollywood cinema. Although the novel’s seemingly indiscriminate weaving together of Holocaust and Hollywood imagery probably motivated its reviewers to dismiss it as an exercise “in poor taste” that is “neither credible nor humorous,” its juxtaposition of otherwise irreconcilable images ultimately lends greater insight into the ways in which its protagonist confronts the meaning (or lack thereof) of her cousin’s tragic death. The conventions of Hollywood cinema upon which Sally’s fantasies clearly draw incline toward a clear resolution, and thus they offer Blume’s heroine a tempting—if ultimately disappointingly unsuccessful—means of garnering a satisfactory explanation for Lila’s death. Soon after she moves with her family to Florida, Sally constructs a fantasy in which she imagines herself as a spy who is captured by Hitler in his “round-up” of New Jersey Jews. In the course of this fantasy, which Sally entitles “Sally F. Meets Adolf H.”—and her use of a title is interesting in and of itself, insofar as it communicates a self-conscious drawing on fi lmic conventions—Sally confronts Hitler in his “private office” where he cuts off her hair, burns her toes, and slashes her fingers until her blood covers the “huge swastika in the middle” of his rug (84–85).6 Ultimately, however, Sally escapes and gives the “underground” information “leading to the capture of Adolf Hitler and the end of the war” (85).

72 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature If Sally’s story seems simplistic, it nevertheless bears a close resemblance to a formulaic espionage fi lm, in which the hero sets out to uncover a conspiracy, is captured by the enemy and given the requisite roughing-up, and fi nally escapes to vindicate both himself and his country. According to Thomas Schatz, the Hollywood spy/espionage fi lm gained greater prominence during the Second World War, at a time when the war film already constituted a substantial portion of the fi lms released annually in the U.S. The espionage fi lm enjoyed such popularity, in fact, that producers scrambled to churn out “reformulations of low-grade crime formulas” in which “B-grade G-men and undercover cops simply turned their sights from gangsters to foreign agents; the trappings of the story—props, sets, costumes, cast, and plot structure— remained the same” (241). Similarly, Schatz notes, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were updated to wartime sleuths in Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror and Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon and B-grade Western series were recruited in films like Republic’s Valley of Hunted Men, in which the Three Mesquiteers battle Nazi spies, and Monogram’s Cowboy Commandos, in which the Range Busters pursue Nazi saboteurs. Even the Universal horror fi lm was converted to war production in Invisible Agent; Jon Hall’s “invisible man” took on both Nazi and Japanese spies. (242) Given the preponderance of 1940s spy fi lms that indiscriminately blended characteristic American genres such as the crime fi lm and the Western with tales of European espionage, Sally’s spy fantasy set in Hitler’s “New Jersey office” does not seem so unique or problematic. Rather, it can be read as an allusion to the Americanization of the Second World War effected by Hollywood fi lm and the tremendous hold such an attempt had on even the youngest generation of American audiences. Moreover, the novel’s allusions to a genre that was especially dependent upon reformulation underscores its usefulness to a protagonist whose greatest desire is to resolve a mystery that haunts her. The formula-driven spy fi lm promises, time and again, that no matter how daunting the hero finds his assignment, and no matter what obstacles he meets as he undertakes it, he will ultimately bring to light the conspiracy that lies beneath the clues he has amassed, securing both justice and truth once and for all. No doubt this genre can be compelling to a young person who questions the truth or meaning of a confounding historical event, and who wonders what kind of justice could ever restore a loved one whose life this event has claimed. The spy fi lm is consoling: unlike the adults who speak in hushed tones just slightly out of earshot, it is forthcoming in its revelation of secrets, promising easy and definitive answers. More generally, the fi lmic conventions that characterize not only the espionage genre but also Hollywood cinema as a whole promise the kind of

Sitting Shivah • 73 swift resolution that Blume’s protagonist clearly desires. In their introduction to classical Hollywood cinema, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson elaborate on how American films produced during the heyday of the Hollywood studio system are constructed so as to ensure “closure” and thus reward the audience’s “search for meaning” (47). The conventional Hollywood narrative is linear and forward-driven, so that the “arrows of the spectator’s expectations are turned toward the encounter to come, the race to the goal” of ultimate resolution (45). In order to make such a “race” as gripping and satisfying as possible, the narrative “creates gaps, holding back information and compelling the spectator to form hypotheses” (38). These hypotheses pertain, most “minimally and generally,” to “what can happen next,” but may extend as well to the motivation behind the actions of a particular character or the significance of key bits of information the narrative either discloses or withholds (38). Moreover, the Hollywood fi lm helps its audience along by repeatedly turning to crucial details the spectator will need in order to uncover the secrets possessed by both the narrative and its characters. For example, according to the Hollywood “rule of three,” an event “becomes important if it is mentioned three times . . . once for the smart viewer, once for the average viewer, and once for the slow Joe in the back row” (31). Ultimately, the fi lm’s divulgence and repetition of significant clues prompts the spectator to “pass through [it] as if moving through an architectural volume, remembering what he or she has already encountered, hazarding guesses about upcoming events, assembling images and sounds into total shapes”—an effort for which the fi lm “rewards” the viewer with a tidy conclusion in which his or her hypotheses are confirmed and justice is meted out (37–38). A brief elaboration of the history of the Hollywood espionage fi lm specifically and the classic Hollywood cinema narrative more generally places into relief the extent to which Sally’s perception is structured by the films to which she has been exposed. As the very title of Blume’s novel implies, Sally believes—solipsistically, perhaps—that her own life is a fi lm. Situating herself at once as director, star, and audience, she assumes the necessary responsibility of unraveling both the great and small mysteries with which she, as its self-imagined heroine, is confronted. It is significant, therefore, that Sally’s tendency to think of her life as a script in progress should coincide with her growing preoccupation with sex and death. Her obsession with imagining herself within various fi lmic episodes in which she confronts the sexually nefarious villain to whom she assigns full blame for her cousin’s murder may be read as an attempt to gather together the information she has been given—as fi lm has trained her to do—in order to work toward some satisfactory resolution. Read thus, Sally’s fantasies are not so much moments of frivolous play as they are earnest attempts to confer meaning upon phenomena that exist outside the realm of understanding. Moreover, such fantasies can be read as a clever exposition of the extent to which a medium such as fi lm structures the protagonist’s attainment and organization of knowledge.

74 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature Mastering the Narrative Significantly, in fantasies such as “Sally F Meets Adolf H,” Sally takes on roles that are traditionally assigned to men. Although it is apparent that her torture at the hands of “Adolf H” has a certain sexual, sadomasochistic dimension, and that some of the threats the villain uses against Sally are gendered (e.g., his threat to cut off her hair), the overall narrative structure is one that typically involves a male protagonist. It is important to note as well that although Sally readily assumes a role that is gendered male, she frequently relegates her cousin Lila to a passive female role whose purpose is limited to placing into relief Sally’s own heroics. Such an obvious polarity between gender roles at work in Sally’s fantasies invites further inquiry into the ways in which Hollywood fi lm structures her response to the mysteries with which she is confronted and offers the promise of meaningful explanation of these secrets. That is, Hollywood fi lm plays a pivotal role in Sally’s inquiry into sex and death not only because it suggests that hypotheses about accrued information may be tested and ultimately rendered true, but also because it solidifies a gender-coded subject–object relationship that guarantees that the knowledge embodied by the objectified woman may be mastered by the controlling gaze of the male protagonist and spectator. Sally’s assumption of an active male role and her relegation of her cousin to a passive female role makes visible the expectation, prompted by fi lmic conventions, that the inert female body— here figured as Lila’s photographic image—may render to scrutiny its secrets, however threatening or forbidding they might be. In her landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Laura Mulvey argues that the visual apparatus grants the spectator (always coded as male) the opportunity to make others—specifically the woman— the object of his controlling gaze.7 This process is significant on two counts. First, fi lm allows the spectator to indulge in a certain voyeuristic pleasure: the fi lm constitutes a “hermetically sealed world” at which the spectator, situated in the “darkness of the auditorium” and facing the “brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen,” may gaze without fear of retribution, and thus indulge in the pleasure of taking in the object of his desire (749). Second, fi lm’s objectification of the woman allays certain anxieties the spectator retains concerning castration and sexual difference; although he initially is threatened by the risk of castration the woman embodies, he soon identifies with the male protagonist who demystifies the female object and places her firmly under his visual control (751). Thus, according to Mulvey, the female character has no importance outside of the passive role she plays in delivering herself to male scrutiny and thus motivating the protagonist’s actions (and, in turn, the narrative). The process Mulvey delineates resonates clearly in a lengthy fantasy sequence Sally titles “Sally Saves Lila.” The fantasy, like many classic Hollywood fi lms, begins swiftly and abruptly, in medias res: “It is during the war.

Sitting Shivah • 75 President Roosevelt asks for volunteers to go to Europe to help” (31). Sally, of course, “is the first on line” of willing volunteers (32). Although the “Head of Volunteers” expresses some hesitation at Sally’s age—after all, she is only ten years old—he eventually admits confidence in Sally’s claim that she is “smart,” “strong,” and “tough,” and thus declares that he will “take a chance and send” her on the next ship bound to Europe (32). Immediately, therefore, Sally is coded as the stereotypical young and idealistic soldier—a bit of a pipsqueak, perhaps, but all the more impressive in her alacrity to do battle with a formidable Goliath. Sally’s identification with the familiar figure of the underdog-soldier is further evidenced in her adoption of the iconic gesture of the soldier leaving home for battle: upon receiving her assignment, she “salutes” the Head of Volunteers and “slings her duffle bag over her shoulder and boards her ship” (32). The influence of war fi lms in this sequence is undeniable, as is Sally’s identification with the male soldier-protagonist. Once she reports to Europe, however, Sally does not report to the front, but rather finds herself in a pleasant city square near a corner drugstore, where she decides to buy some toothpaste and a “salami sandwich on rye and a Coke to go” (32). During an impromptu picnic in the park, she “hears someone crying” and swiftly “investigates” (32). As it happens, the source of the “sobs” Sally hears is Lila, “dressed in rags” and “huddled on the ground next to a tall tree” (32). Sally promptly questions the unfortunate woman, asking her where she comes from and how long it has been since she has eaten. In the sequence that follows, Lila breaks down in response to Sally’s persistent questions, and their exchange reaches a thrilling climax: when Lila, convinced that Sally is a Gestapo spy, threatens to kill herself, Sally reveals her true identity as Lila’s cousin and savior. Here, Lila is the epitome of helplessness: she is reduced to a shivering mass of rags. By contrast, Sally exudes calm and a certain masculine solidity; although she expresses compassion for the wretched woman she encounters, she nevertheless maintains control of a situation that potentially could get out of hand by firmly steering her cousin away from the point of near-suicidal hysteria to a state of relative composure. Here, Sally demonstrates complete mastery over her cousin, not only in her obviation of Lila’s suicide but also in her declaration that she will “help” the near-starved woman to survive (34). Moreover—and perhaps most significantly—Sally maintains power over Lila’s very ability to speak. By assuming the authority of a soldier, Sally hails her cousin, obliging her to provide answers to Sally’s persistent questions and thus extracting from her the knowledge that Sally herself would like to possess. For example, when Sally demands to know what has become of Lila’s mother, and Sally’s great-aunt, Rose, her cousin tearfully spills out a winding narrative that details her life in Dachau, her mother’s death in the “showers,” and her own fantastical escape. Sally’s position of masculine power vis-à-vis her comparatively feminized cousin is evident as well in the conclusion of her fantasy. After explaining that

76 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature Lila should not thank her for saving her life—like any good soldier, Sally is “just doing [her] job”—Sally whisks her cousin away, giving her a “bath and shampoo” and allowing her a “good night’s sleep” (34). If, at this moment, Sally’s veritable bedding of her cousin bears a suspicious resemblance to a romantic turn in a wartime love story, in which the brave young soldier woos the lovely victim under his charge, the following detail in the fantasy confirms this hypothesis: the next morning, Sally surprises Lila with a “big breakfast in bed”—and innocent yet telling substitution for the iconic postcoital cigarette.8 In this veiled allusion to sexual consummation, Sally’s mastery over Lila is confirmed once and for all: in effect, she now fully “knows” her cousin—and, by extension, her cousin’s secrets. To underscore this triumph—and to place into relief Lila’s lack of importance relative to Sally—the fantasy ends with Sally’s return home to a hero’s welcome, greeted with “cheers” and “confetti” by people watching a “big parade in her honor” (35). The ecstatic imagery with which “Sally Saves Lila” concludes further resonates with Mulvey’s discussion of visual pleasure and narrative cinema insofar as it demonstrates the parallels Mulvey observes between the Lacanian mirror stage and the spectator’s identification with the male protagonist. Briefly and succinctly summarizing Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, Mulvey writes that this “phase occurs at a time when the child’s physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous in that he imagines the mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body” (749). Such a “recognition,” Mulvey reminds us, is “overlaid with misrecognition”: the child perceives his mirror-image to be a “superior” body projected outside itself as an “ideal ego, the alienated subject, which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of identification with others” (749). Although Mulvey admits that this process occurs before the child’s acquisition to language, she argues that it is repeated in the act of cinema spectatorship, in which the male protagonist becomes the “more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego” of which the viewer—positioned across from the cinematic image as a child is situated before a mirror—may entertain a “joyous recognition” (749). According to Mulvey, the “cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego,” a process that is achieved through the viewer’s temporary suspension of self-awareness and simultaneous identification with the protagonist projected before him (749). Certainly, this process is evidenced in the above passage from Blume’s novel: Sally’s identification with what appears to be a composite of strong male protagonists allows her to imagine herself as a subject who is more confident and knowledgeable than she otherwise believes herself to be. Once completely dependent on the (often withheld) knowledge of her elders, Sally can nevertheless rely on an identification with a male alter-ego in order to envision herself as an agent of change, rather than a mere receptacle of knowledge cobbled together from various sources. Armed with such a sense of agency,

Sitting Shivah • 77 she can in turn invert the relation of power implied in her position vis-à-vis Lila’s portrait. Whereas once Lila’s photograph implied a knowledge that Sally did not possess, Sally’s placement of this image in the subjugated position of the passive female role relative to her own assumption of the active male role ensures that Lila will give up her secrets at last.

Sitting Shivah: From Melancholia to Mourning Throughout the course of Blume’s novel, Sally persistently returns to her Hollywood-inspired fantasies, as if by doing so she might extract Lila’s twin secrets of sex and death once and for all. At times, she resorts to re-enacting her original games of War and Concentration Camp—although she soon finds that her new friends in Florida are more resistant to performing such spectacles than were her old friends in New Jersey. At other times, she invents new variations on her espionage fantasies: for example, while still in Florida, she begins to imagine that her elderly Jewish neighbor, Mr. Zavodsky, is “Hitler in disguise” and writes him a series of letters (never posted) in which she threatens to report him to the authorities (165). As Sally’s obsession with Lila’s secret grows stronger, the frequency of her fantasies in turn increases exponentially. Nevertheless, not one fantasy seems to deliver the satisfactory answer Sally desires. Once Sally moves back to New Jersey, however, she gradually begins to lose interest in the games and fantasies that had once held her in thrall. For example, after her brother tells her of a lunatic who lives in the nearby woods, Sally’s immediate response to this story is to envision Hitler as the lunatic forest dweller. When she tells her brother of this fantasy, however, he laughs at her—and surprisingly, his reaction causes her to laugh as well: “Sally started laughing too. She couldn’t help it either. It was funny . . . Hitler in Union Woods . . . why would he bother to go there?” (298, emphasis and ellipses in original). Sally’s ability to laugh at her proposed fantasy—a reaction that the self-conscious and defensive protagonist formerly would not have had—and her ability to see the preposterousness of the scenario (“why would he bother to go there?”) signal her abandonment of her fantasies, which nevertheless aided her in a time of uncertainty. Moreover, Sally’s ability to laugh at—and thus distance herself from—her obsessive fantasies suggests that she has passed through the stages of “acting out” and “working through” that characterize traumatic experience. To be sure, the trauma Sally has experienced is significantly different from that undergone by survivors of mass trauma such as the Holocaust. Obviously, Sally has not been affected by the Nazi persecution of Jews to the immediate degree that her European relatives were; therefore, her response to the event takes on a substantially different form from that of actual survivors. Nevertheless, Sally has been faced with at least some degree of loss. Having

78 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature acknowledged her cousin’s brutal death in Dachau, the protagonist must confront the fact that her own existence is much more precarious, or far less secure and self-contained, than she formerly imagined it to have been. Indeed, as Sally’s fantasies concerning Hitler’s “round-up” of New Jersey Jews make clear, she realizes that the anti-Semitic policies that led to Lila’s death could just as well have targeted her—or could even be directed at her in the future. Thus, Sally’s multiply mediated memory of her cousin’s experiences comes at a cost: it exposes her not only to the death of a loved one but also to the institutional violence she herself might potentially suffer. This recognition, although it is merely cognitively rather than immediately and physically experienced, is nevertheless traumatic insofar as it dramatically disturbs a previously functioning system of values, expectations, and behaviors. Consequently, it necessitates a process that Freud identifies as “acting-out” and “working-through”—or melancholia and mourning, respectively. Melancholia, according to Freudian theory, involves the ego’s inability to decathect from the lost object; in such a condition, “one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, looks upon it as an object” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 168). Moreover, melancholia involves “acting out”: that is, the melancholic, instead of consciously remembering a traumatic loss, repeatedly acts out such loss “without . . . knowing that he is repeating it” (“Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” 150). However, although such successive instances of acting-out may initially appear endlessly cyclical and therefore destructive, they may—under the proper circumstances—be necessary to an ultimate act of mourning, or the “working-through” of loss (“Remembering” 155). Only by repetitively acting out the drama of loss can an individual, with the help of an interlocutor (for Freud, the analyst), identify the obsessions and habits that have held her in thrall, and therefore consciously begin to decathect herself from the object of loss. According to this perspective, then, Sally’s games and fantasies may be read not only as a means by which she may understand and make meaning of her cousin’s death—and the problem of death, more generally—but as a process through which she might come to terms with the sense of loss such death inspires.9 Of course, this is not to say that such abandonment is in any way ultimate or decisive. Indeed, in his exposition of Holocaust mourning, Dominick LaCapra notes that mourning (or “working-through”), although it “counters compulsive acting-out,” nevertheless “does not provide full enlightenment or definitive liberation from the constraints of the past” (186). However, Sally’s ability to distance herself from her fantasies does indicate some degree of negotiation of loss. Sally’s process of mourning is also based, in part, on her recognition of the important role of collective mourning. Such a recognition is made through her acquaintance with the Jewish custom of sitting shivah, in which the bereaved are visited by family and close friends, who together form an minyan (or group of ten or more Jews over the age of thirteen) necessary for the

Sitting Shivah • 79 praying of the Kaddish. In the course of the novel, Sally recounts previous instances in which she took part in the mourning ritual: she “enjoyed sitting shivah very much” (24). Shivah is, for Sally, nothing more than a pleasant family gathering, during which she can enjoy not only the sweets her relatives bring but also the attention they lavish upon her. Moreover, shivah is an opportunity for Sally to observe the interactions of those adults whose activities remain mysterious to her. For example, when, after having received news of their deaths, Sally’s family sits shivah for Tante Rose and Lila, Sally is still less preoccupied with the loss of her aunt and cousin than she is with observing those who come to pay their condolences. She takes pleasure, for example, in watching the “people from the old country, who had known Ma Fanny [Sally’s grandmother] when she was just a girl, before she sailed to America on the banana boat”: observing these “foreign” relatives becomes yet another way for Sally to entertain herself (24). The actual occasion for the ritual—the death of loved ones—is something that Sally casually overlooks. Although she recognizes that sitting shivah is necessitated by a person’s death, she does not yet understand the significance of death; this is partly because the deceased whom Sally’s family has mourned have been either “foreign” relatives or those who “were much older or very sick and she didn’t know them well enough to really care” (24). In effect, sitting shivah is, at this point in the narrative, still a game for Sally. Indeed, it is not unlike the games she plays with her classmates. Like the game of Concentration Camp, which initially is a mere scripted performance of historical circumstances she does not yet understand, sitting shivah is, for Sally, a performance of a ritual whose structure is evident, but whose significance or meaning is absent. Sally’s understanding of sitting shivah changes radically, however, when her brother Douglas becomes seriously ill. When Sally fantasizes about Douglas’s death, and about the mourning rituals that would follow, she realizes that “with Douglas, [sitting shivah] would be different. It wouldn’t be like a party at all” (25). In this moment of crisis, what Sally had previously understood as a “party” (or as a game) now takes on its full significance. She recognizes sitting shivah as a sober, collective response to an irrecoverable loss—for her, the custom is transformed. And if this is the case, one might also argue that the other practices she had previously understood as mere games (particularly Concentration Camp) become transformed as well. Although Sally’s game of Concentration Camp initially might have been a rote (and morbidly pleasurable) re-enactment of an event beyond her comprehension, it takes on new significance once she encounters the possibility of her brother’s near-death. Having recognized the potential and more immediate loss of her brother, Sally may now better understand the loss of her distant cousin, and the necessity of responding to this loss in an active manner. Thus, her game of Concentration Camp is transformed into an act of mourning. In this way, Sally’s game, like the practice of sitting shivah, can be interpreted as an attempt to “work through” a traumatic loss. This is not to say

80 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature that Sally directly or consciously models her game on the Jewish custom of mourning, or that she somehow “sacralizes” the Holocaust through a religious ritualization of her memory of the event.10 Rather, by coming to recognize the practice of sitting shivah as an effective and necessary response to loss, Sally in turn acknowledges her own need to memorialize and thus “work through” her cousin’s death within a familiar, collective context. According to LaCapra, “mourning [in order to be effective] would seem to require a supportive or even solidaristic social context” (184). Such collective mourning demands an active communal recognition—rather than a melancholic denial—of a loss; this active recognition thereby prompts the collective to seek out a transformative relationship to the present and the future, rather than a (potentially dangerous) repetitive-compulsive acting-out of the past. Indeed, much like Lowry’s Jonas, Sally intuits that individuals cannot apprehend and productively mourn past losses on their own but rather as a collective—and although the playground setting on which Sally orchestrates her mourning rituals may seem trivial, her motivation certainly is not.

The Secret Signal As a representation of the ways in which a child uses narrative and play in order to remember, if only vicariously, a tragic historical event, Starring Sally J Freedman provides a compelling literary perspective on second-generation memory. In some respects, its depiction of such memory is not so much different from that offered by Lowry’s The Giver—although, as I have argued above, its setting is far more familiar and mundane (and thus more potentially threatening) than Lowry’s is. Not unlike Jonas, Sally is haunted by past events that she did not experience first-hand, but which she nevertheless intuits have profoundly affected her present circumstances. That is, like Jonas, whose “capacity to see beyond” is actually an ability to perceive traces of the past within the immediate present, Sally possesses the ability to detect residual, and often repressed, elements of the past in everyday details. Moreover, Sally’s engagement with the past is influenced by both her interpretation of cultural artifacts (e.g., newsreels and narrative Hollywood cinema) and her interactions with family members—just as Jonas’s participation in the ritual of memory-reception implies, on a literal level, interpersonal contact, and on a metaphorical level, an interaction with visual media. Finally, Blume’s novel, like Lowry’s, suggests that second-generation memory is never merely an individual phenomenon: it draws on collective memory and in turn makes possible potentially transformative collective action. If Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself is distinct from The Giver, however, this is not only because it transports the fabulous setting of Lowry’s novel into a comparatively more “real” and quintessentially American setting. Unlike Jonas, whose experience of second-generation memory isolates him,

Sitting Shivah • 81 at least temporarily, from the company of his peers, Sally’s own engagement with such vicarious memory occurs within, and is shaped profoundly by, the company of other children and the spaces traditionally associated with childhood. Moreover, whereas Jonas’s reception of memory renders him as if he were older than his years, Sally remains childlike at the conclusion of Blume’s novel. Although Sally matures significantly throughout the course of the narrative—she recognizes, for example, that shivah is not a “game”—she certainly is not so heavily burdened by the weight of memory as Jonas is, and thus does not transform into a world-weary adult. What Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself offers, therefore, is a compelling correlation between secondgeneration memory and the figure of the child. Paradoxically, Sally’s complexity as a protagonist derives from her remarkable childlike innocence. Such innocence, however, cannot be qualified in traditional Romantic terms. It has nothing to do, for example, with her lack of sexual knowledge: although Sally may be ignorant of the precise operations of sexual behavior, her fantasies are clearly sexually driven. Nor should her innocence be described in strictly moral terms: although Sally demonstrates a capacity for kindness, compassion, and justice, she is also attracted to the morbid and the violent. Rather, what renders Sally “innocent” is her relative disregard for—or more pointedly, her ignorance of—the social constructs and categories to which her adult counterparts, as well as her comparatively more urbane playmates, so assiduously adhere. At first glance, Sally’s many gaffes and malapropisms—her allusions to seedplanting, for example, or her fantasy of enjoying a “salami sandwich on rye and a Coke to go” in the middle of war-torn Europe—appear only to function as instances of comic relief which underscore her lack of sophistication. A closer reading of the novel, however, suggests that Sally’s perspective, although naïve, nevertheless serves as a counterpoint to normative and reified modes of perception. Insofar as she has not yet fully internalized the epistemological boundaries and categories that otherwise limit socialized adults’ ways of experiencing and engaging with the world, Sally is able to produce explanatory narratives that, although they may not be strictly rational, produce effective insight nonetheless. In turn, her comparatively unconstrained manner of engaging with the perceived world suggests a correspondence between the child’s imagination— characterized more by association than by logic—and second-generation memory, which equally depends upon mimesis, analogy, and association. The child’s mode of perception was of particular interest to Walter Benjamin, who believed it to hold revolutionary political potential. Children, Benjamin argued, are more likely to notice details that their elders are wont to overlook, because children, unlike their adult counterparts, have not yet internalized conventional modes of appreciating value. Thus, according to Benjamin, Children are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated

82 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products they recognize the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. In using these things, they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced by play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship. (“One-Way Street, 449–45011) Adults, according to this formulation, see the world of things in terms of finished products: they are less concerned with how things are produced than with what the final outcome of such production might be; thus, they are indifferent to the detritus created in the processes of production. Children, however, have not yet learned to discriminate between unfinished works-inprogress and completed objects; therefore, they are fascinated with “waste products” or “trash.” (Indeed, anyone who has ever watched a three-year-old open a gift knows that the child is just as likely to play with the box as she is with the toy contained within it.) Whereas the adult sees an ordered world composed of distinct objects of relative, culturally assigned value, the child responds indiscriminately, considering “waste products” just as much as fi nished products as usable objects for potentially endless, recombinant play. As a result, children seize upon what adults would otherwise prefer to hide from view: by “haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on,” they resist the inclination to reify material objects. According to Benjamin, such a childlike mode of perceiving and engaging with the material world offers children’s grown-up counterparts a potentially revolutionary worldview. Although Benjamin certainly did not advocate a sentimental return to childhood, as his Romantic predecessors did, he nevertheless believed that fully socialized adults could re-adopt the ostensibly “childlike” manner of “haunting” sites of production.12 That is, by acknowledging rather than habitually ignoring or taking for granted the structures and processes by which objects are produced and in turn given (arbitrary) value, adults might consequently recognize and transform the inequities of labor on which such structures are founded. Certainly, one might find some stunning correspondences between Benjamin’s image of the curious, unselfconsciously playful child and Blume’s depiction of her eponymous heroine. Sally’s fantasies, for example, are as much the product of her fascination with cultural detritus, as it were, as they are the effect of an arguably morbid imagination. By cobbling together narrative elements culled from fi lms that might otherwise be dismissed as “mere entertainment,” Sally does “not so much imitate the world of adults” as she “bring[s] together, in the artifact produced by play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new intuitive relationship.” As I have argued above, the “new intuitive relationship” effected by Sally’s play involves the recognition of the ways in which a past event—here, specifically, the Holocaust—continues to reverberate within the present. Unlike her mother, for example, who is intent

Sitting Shivah • 83 upon “think[ing] about peace instead” of the genocide and imagining her victimized cousins as existing in a place “far away,” Sally does not think strictly in terms of such binaries as past/present or presence/absence (8–9). Rather, she intuits that the memory of the Holocaust may still haunt her family and thus cannot be so easily repressed. She can do so, moreover, precisely because she can cull together fragments of Hollywood fi lms—cultural detritus—that betray a continued collective preoccupation with war and its aftermath. Moreover, Sally’s preoccupation with cultural memories that have been repressed, discarded, or otherwise sublimated within popular (and thus easily overlooked) narratives allows her to effect a “new, intuitive relationship” with her contemporary, and specifically American, circumstances. It is not entirely coincidental, for example, that Sally becomes acquainted with—and obstinately questions—segregation within the U.S. only shortly after having learned of Hitler’s racist policies abroad. Soon after she leads her friends in a game of Concentration Camp, Sally learns that a black family she has befriended on her Miami-bound train has been surreptitiously herded into a different car. Sally’s immediate response is to question her mother about this apparently inexplicable event: In the morning Loreen and her family were gone. “But they’re going to Miami too,” Sally said. “Mrs. Williamson told me.” “They had to change cars,” Mom said. “But why?” “Because they’re Negro.” “So?” “We’re in a different part of the country now, Sally . . . and colored people don’t ride with white people here.” “That’s not fair.” “Maybe not . . . but that’s the way it is.” (56) Here, Sally’s exchange with her mother bears an uncanny resemblance to their earlier conversation about the fate of Tante Rose and Lila: Sally stubbornly interrogates her mother for details and explanations, and her mother just as stubbornly tries to shut down the conversation. Moreover, just as in the former conversation, Mrs. Freedman’s responses suggest a certain resignation. As much as Mrs. Freedman cannot explain why Hitler “took away” her cousins, she cannot explain why the Williamson family was forced to move to another car; consequently, she resorts to insisting, simply, that “that’s the way it is.” Sally, however, has not yet learned to resign herself to—and thus internalize—uncomplicated explanations. For this reason, she continues to investigate the “mystery” of segregation much as she attempts to unravel the “mystery” of the Holocaust. Indeed, as the narrative progresses, Sally continues to badger her father—a much more forthright interlocutor than her mother—about racially segregated trains, water fountains, and schools with

84 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature the same inquisitive energy she uses to tease out details of her cousin’s death. Like the child Benjamin imagines as playing in construction sites, Sally insists upon occupying—and excavating—those epistemological and social spaces that present-oriented and rule-abiding adults would rather avoid. In doing so, she relies upon methods that “rational” adults would consider absurd or otherwise unrefined: for example, she nags her parents and constructs fantastical explanatory narratives. Nevertheless, it is precisely because Sally depends upon such presumably irrational methods that she can expose the utter irrationality that underlies both American and German policies regarding race. Like the child whose dirt-covered clothing attests to his occupation of liminal “construction sites” that adults would rather bypass or overlook, Sally’s intrepid forays into the censured topics of racism and cultural violence expose complex questions that adults, like her mother, would rather repress. It is not insignificant, furthermore, that Sally first encounters American-style racial injustice on a train. Readers who are generally familiar with the Holocaust know that the Nazis used trains to transport Jews and other members of marginalized groups to concentration camps such as Auschwitz, where they were either executed on the spot or conscripted to punishing hard labor. Although African-Americans who were consigned to “colored-only” train-cars faced different circumstances than racially marginalized populations in Europe, there nevertheless exists an uncanny correspondence between the use of infrastructure in war-era Europe and the use of trains in pre- and post-war U.S. to preserve artificially distinct categories of race. It is not entirely coincidental, then, that Sally would add segregation to her ever-expanding list of social mysteries at this specific juncture of the narrative, and in this specific setting. That is to say, it is in this haunted context—that is, the quotidian but well-engineered context of human transportation—that Sally apprehends the injustices of the (European) past and the (American) present in a “new, intuitive relationship,” recognizing both as equally irrational and thus worthy of account. Moreover, it is precisely because Sally has lingered so long, and in such an ostensibly irrational manner, on the morbid details of Nazi practices of segregation, deportation, and extermination that she can interrogate the questionable ends of American policies of discrimination. Haunted by ghosts of the past that her elders would prefer to exorcise simply by explaining them away, Sally cannot help but recognize their grim reincarnation in her present moment. Blume’s novel suggests, moreover, that Sally is able to perceive such “new, intuitive relationships” between the past and the present precisely because she actively performs them. Children, Benjamin repeatedly argues, perceive the world not only in a visual but also in a tactile manner. Like a “painter who sees more accurately with his hand when his eye fails him, who is able to transfer the receptive innervation of the eye muscles into the creative innervation of the hand,” the child literally incorporates what she sees by physically reenacting it (“Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre” 204). For example, the “child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher, but also a windmill

Sitting Shivah • 85 and a train” (“On the Mimetic Faculty” 720). Likewise, the child “inhabits” picturebooks by not only looking at their illustrations but “describ[ing] them by enactment”; moreover, she “inscribe[s] the pictures” by “scribbl[ing] on them” (“Old Forgotten Children’s Books” 411, emphasis in original). The child’s mode of perception, that is, is simultaneously receptive and active. Such an active mode of perception, Benjamin maintains, should not be overlooked by adults who, through the efforts of their bourgeois education, have been trained to consider action and reflection as radically different responses. Such training, he warns, renders adults impotent in the face of class disparities and impending genocide, because it limits responses only to intellectual reflection and thereby obstructs the possibility of direct, physical engagement with material circumstances. Thus, the child—who not only looks at pictures but also scribbles on them, and who not only reads books but also acts out the stories contained within them—becomes the model for the socialized adult, who must not only interpret the conditions of the world in which he lives, but intervene in them. Crucially, according to Benjamin, the child’s active mode of perception also serves as a “secret signal of what is to come” (“Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre” 206, emphasis in original). In his essay on children’s theater, Benjamin argues that children’s dramatic performances are as much—if not more—instructional for adults as they are for children. Adults who watch child performers improvise on stage, he argues, witness a “radical unleashing of play” which lays bare the uninhibited energies of the players (205). In turn, the audience members observe in the performers’ “gesture[s]” what the child-actors themselves do not, or cannot, see (204). That is, as adults watch children imitate what they do not yet fully understand, they see—as if for the first time—behaviors and practices they have long taken for granted or considered “second-nature.” Consequently, not unlike audiences exposed to Brechtian epic theater,13 they become aware of the social constructs that have shaped and informed their perception of relations they might otherwise consider natural. Simultaneously, adult spectators also perceive within the performers’ gestures an image of future relations and practices. Benjamin’s term “gesture,” argues Hans-Thies Lehmann, refers to “an intermediate realm in which, unhampered by ‘culture,’ that which is mute becomes eloquent”; it refers, that is, to a possible future that is immanent within the unmediated bodily practices of those who act entirely within the present (189). In other words, the child’s unselfconscious, unmediated mimicry holds up a proverbial mirror to adult spectators who might perceive in her play the uncanny image of social relations in need of future transformation. Moreover, the child’s unrestrained movements and gestures may signal to adult audiences the raw, unrepressed energy necessary for potential revolutionary action. Crucially, this notion of an immediate future contained within the body and gestures of the child should not be confused with the more recent, popularly held Western

86 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature declaration that “children are our future.” Ultimately, this latter, sentimental belief betrays an anxiety concerning the next generation’s ability to carry on the beliefs and practices espoused by earlier generations; thus, as Whitney Houston’s 1986 hit song would have it, adults should “teach [children] well” so that they may be properly equipped to carry on the ideological standards of their forebears. According to Benjamin, however, the image of the future embodied by the spontaneous performances of the child is one that is necessarily “unhampered” by adults’ interventions and teachings: it is an image of what is possible rather than what is pre-determined. It is important to recognize, then, that Blume’s novel depicts Sally’s literal reincarnation of her family’s past through her performance of it—and that, in doing so, it also prompts readers to consider the implication of the protagonist’s games with respect to the immediate future. On the one hand, Sally’s engagement in the game of Concentration Camp may be interpreted as an effort to extract the secrets of the (European) past within a present (American) setting. On the other hand, it may be read as a naïve, unconscious imitation of immanent, present instances of injustice. Although Sally’s performance reenacts a specific event that took place within a specific setting— the “showers” of Dachau—it bears an uncanny resemblance to the instance of injustice she later witnesses on her south-bound train. In both circumstances, racial minorities are marginalized, displaced, and deprived of human dignity. Admittedly, Sally does not immediately perceive the analogy implicit within her performance, and the omniscient narrator of Blume’s novel refrains from making it explicit. And yet, the reader who resists interpreting the game of Concentration Camp merely as a symptom of a morbid imagination might perceive the “new, intuitive relationship” it enacts, and consequently consider its implications within her/his own present moment. That is, the present-day reader whose grasp of history is more solid and wide-ranging than Sally’s may perceive in the “gesture” of her play evidence of the associations she can only intuit and ingenuously mimic. Indeed, a contemporary audience might even detect within the narrative of Sally’s game traces of much more recent events and policies. For example, the adult reader who is attentive to the ritual acts of human “processing” that Sally innocently performs may perceive the ways these rituals have been repeated in the detention of illegal immigrants, the “special registration” of Arab and Muslim men living in the U.S. immediately after the events of September 11,14 and the legal torture of stateless prisoners at U.S. detention camps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.15 This is not to say that there is an immediate, direct correlation between the events that occurred in Dachau and these later phenomena—nor is it to deny the uniqueness of these separate, historically contingent events. Rather, Sally’s game exposes general patterns of behavior and practice that structure or underlie individual statesponsored instances of de-humanization and that therefore link a vicariously remembered past with an immediate present. Likewise, the sudden intuition afforded by this moment in the narrative—the possibilities it opens up for

Sitting Shivah • 87 thinking about the relationship between otherwise disparate past and present events—potentially prompts inquiry regarding the future. If, that is, the child’s naïve performance exposes social constructs and modes of relation that are not “natural,” “static,” or “given” but rather historically-contingent, then it becomes possible to consider ways these relations might be restructured, reformulated, or even abolished in the future. Of course, it is problematic to read Sally’s games in the same way one would observe the spontaneous games of an actual child. Sally is, after all, a fictional child created by an adult author. Even though Blume has maintained that the novel is based on her own experiences as a young Jewish girl coming of age in New Jersey and Florida, her narrative is still mediated by the cultural categories and assumptions she has necessarily internalized as an adult.16 Nevertheless, Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself offers valuable insight into not only the production of second-generation memory but also its political potential. It does so, moreover, in a manner that is much more provocative—and arguably more productive—than its canonical counterpart, The Giver. Unlike Lowry’s novel, which displaces political and cultural concerns onto a fantasy setting, Blume’s novel insists that questions regarding memory and injustice may be posed in the most familiar of settings. What is more, even its self-consciousness presentation as a semi-autobiographical text poses additionally useful questions. What difference would it make, one might ask, if such an account were written by an actual child, rather than by an adult merely remembering childhood? Would it be possible, moreover, for such a child to remember past events vicariously by improvising familial ties to an elder, rather than relying—as Sally and Jonas do—on already-established domestic relations? These are precisely the questions invited by Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary, and thus it is to this text that I now turn.

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Chapter Three Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” Intertextuality and the Intergenerational in Zlata’s Diary

At the center of J. K. Rowling’s second novel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999), is an enchanted object: a “very secret diary” which promises to reveal the mysteries of Hogwarts’s legendary Chamber of Secrets. When Rowling’s eponymous hero first finds the diary under the sink of a flooded, unused bathroom, he thinks little of it: the “non-descript and soggy” book is disappointingly blank, and seems to reveal none of the clues Harry had hoped it would offer (231). However, once Harry prints his name in the diary, “words [he] had never written” appear across the blank page. The words belong to the diary’s author, a former Hogwarts student named Tom Riddle, who responds willingly when Harry subsequently enters questions into the diary’s blank pages. Riddle confesses, for example, that he knows about the racially motivated violent acts that are occurring on the school grounds; moreover, he suggests that there exists a connection between these episodes and a monster who dwells in the supposedly legendary Chamber. When Harry excitedly pursues this new information, Riddle makes him a greater offer yet: he promises to take Harry inside of his—Riddle’s—memory, thereby allowing Harry to witness first-hand certain events that will unlock the secret of the chamber and the violence its inhabitant has wrought. Harry’s willingness to be transported into the “memory” of the secret diary is motivated not only by his curiosity regarding the present affairs taking place in his school but also by his quest to discover his own origins. In the course of the novel, Harry becomes increasingly disturbed by parallels he observes between himself and Salazar Slytherin, the infamous co-founder of Hogwarts who, according to school legend, sealed the Chamber of Secrets until his “own true heir” would arrive to unseal it and “unleash the horror” 89

90 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature within it (151). In his anxiety to learn whether he himself is the prophesized heir of Slytherin, and thus whether he is in some way implicated in the bloody events that have recently transpired at his school, Harry accepts the diarist’s invitation to enter into its memory of past events, so as to confirm or disprove his possible genealogy, and by extension, to articulate his own, present, identity. In effect, Harry intuits that his own identity is encrypted in Riddle’s diary, an intuition that is literalized when his engagement with the diary leads him to open the Chamber of Secrets—that is, the crypt. Harry’s relationship with Riddle’s diary may be read as a figure through which to study a very different literary text, Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo (1994). At first glance, Zlata’s Diary, a work of nonfiction, seems radically different from Rowling’s whimsical text. Zlata’s Diary is, after all, no children’s fantasy. It is, instead, a text which bears witness to a very real historical conflict: the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. In the course of this diary,1 whose entries span from September of 1991 to October of 1993, its narrator, Zlata,2 documents the losses she endures as her once-peaceful city suddenly comes under siege. As realistic and objective as this diary purports to be, however, it nevertheless exposes desires that are uncannily similar to those depicted in The Chamber of Secrets. Although the ostensible, and much-publicized, objective of this diary3 is to document the immediate circumstances of war and the effect of such wartime conditions on the general welfare of children in Sarajevo, its ultimate purpose is to place into relief the awakening of an individual child to the political and cultural contingencies that shape her burgeoning sense of self. That is, like Rowling’s fantasy novel, Zlata’s Diary offers a protagonist who undertakes a quest to discover her position within a larger historical context of racially motivated violence. Moreover, like Rowling’s Harry, Zlata is able to secure this position through her engagement with another diary—in this case, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl (1947). Frank’s diary, insofar as it exists in cultural memory4 as a “classic” example of children’s wartime writing, legitimizes—or, in effect, makes legible—not only Zlata’s claim to the status of “wartime child” but the notions of childhood on which such a claim is founded. In turn, it is this legitimizing quality of Anne Frank’s text that prompts Zlata to consider herself an heir not only to a tradition of children’s wartime writing but to the memories contained in Anne’s diary. Zlata’s reliance on the legitimizing potential of Anne Frank’s earlier wartime diary makes her text a particularly intriguing case study for this present discussion of second-generation memory. The representations of second-generation memory that I have studied up to this point have featured individuals who have made personal claims on memory on the basis of immediate kinship ties. Lois Lowry’s hero, Jonas, for example, receives his memories directly from his surrogate father, the Giver. Similarly, Judy Blume’s heroine, Sally, is motivated to re-collect images of the Holocaust only once she realizes that her own cousin has perished as a result of this genocide. By contrast, Zlata

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 91 has no familial ties to Anne Frank, whose “heir” she nevertheless implicitly claims to be. Zlata is not directly related to Anne. Moreover, she is not Jewish (or, at least, she never admits to being Jewish5) and her only knowledge of the Holocaust, and more generally, Anne’s Second World War-era context, comes solely from literary and fi lmic, rather than familial, sources. Nevertheless, Zlata’s diary posits a kinship between its author and her literary predecessor that is determined not by blood, physical proximity, or the ties of diasporic memory but rather by a perception of the similarities that exist between the two authors’ respective historical contexts—a perception that is enabled by the mediation of various cultural texts that make such similarities evident and that, in turn, serve as the sources which permit Zlata to trace a genealogy that links her directly to her Dutch counterpart. Not unlike Rowling’s protagonist, then, Zlata inductively—rather than deductively—traces a correspondence between an historical forebear and herself. She begins not with the certainty that particular kinship ties exist between herself and Anne, but with the intuition that the exposition of historical associations might ultimately uncover an intimate bond between them. Zlata’s claim to a certain kinship with Anne in turn permits her to adopt her literary predecessor’s style and rhetoric as her own. Initially, Zlata’s consumption of Anne Frank’s prose style appears problematic: it may well prompt a reader to question whether Zlata’s reliance on Anne’s voice limits, rather than amplifies, the effectiveness of Zlata’s representation of herself and her contemporary context. Indeed, as Adrienne Kertzer remarks in her discussion of Zlata’s Diary, certain passages in Filipović’s text “suggest that, even if giving children Frank’s diary does not stop a war, it may well produce children who will learn to imitate her voice”; Kertzer’s observation implies that, in relation to Anne Frank’s diary, Zlata’s Diary is comparatively inauthentic and uninspired (136). However, I would like to propose that a reading of the imitative strategies enacted in Zlata’s Diary tells us much more about this text, and the historical context in which it was written, than a first reading might initially seem to suggest. Specifically, an analysis of Zlata’s Diary may place into relief the textual nature of all memory—including oral and habit memory—and the tremendous role such textual memory plays in the consciousness of both quotidian and exceptional affairs. Moreover, this diary exposes the ways in which a continued cultural investment in the Romantic child shapes both the production and reception of children’s wartime diaries and, furthermore, the various discourses surrounding childhood and trauma.

Entering the Diary The first few passages of Zlata’s Diary are brief, matter-of-fact entries that document events one might expect to see addressed in any other Western middleclass pre-adolescent’s diary: impressions of the first day of school, a birthday

92 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature party to which both girls and boys are invited, a catalogue of test grades, and a weekend away at the family’s country home. None of these entries is especially insightful or attentive to detail: for example, when Zlata describes her first-day-of-school reunion with her classmates, she merely notes that “[w]e all went somewhere and we all have so much to tell each other” without bothering to elaborate on what exactly she and her friends did over the holiday, or what news they have to disclose (1). Moreover, there is little indication that Zlata has any specific audience or interlocutor in mind as she registers her daily activities: she drops proper names without bothering to account for their relationship to her, and she provides only the barest of sketches of the different environments in which she finds herself. There is no suggestion of literary pretension in these early passages, nor is there any hint of self-conscious desire to document—journalistically, as it were—noteworthy experiences for posterity. Rather, one has the impression that these early entries are merely cursory jottings intended only to jog the memory in later years. As the diary progresses, however, a subtle shift occurs in Zlata’s tone and style, as well as in the content she addresses: her entries begin to allude, tentatively, to the internecine violence that is encroaching dangerously on Sarajevo’s city limits. For example, in an entry made on 19 October 1991, Zlata reports with alarm that her father has been called up by the police reserve; later in October, she reports having seen disturbing televised images of violence in the city of Dubrovnik and expresses concern about the safety of family friends who live there (7). Yet these entries—which are somewhat more detailed and emotionally charged than the ones preceding them—are still nevertheless punctuations in an otherwise routine catalogue of quotidian activities. For example, as soon as Zlata’s father returns from a weekend of service, she quickly proclaims that “it looks as though everything will be all right” (6). Similarly, the entry in which she darkly reflects upon recent events in Dubrovnik is immediately followed by a passage on an upcoming piano recital and the promise of a ski vacation (6). The sudden shift from self-conscious reflection on national events to unselfconscious matter-of-factness is especially evident in the following entry, made on 14 November 1991: War in Croatia, war in Dubrovnik, some reservists in Herzegovina. Mommy and Daddy keep watching the news on TV. They’re worried. Mommy often cries looking at the terrible pictures on TV. They talk mostly politics with their friends. What is politics? I haven’t got a clue. And I’m not really interested. I just finished watching Midnight Caller on TV. (10) At this point in the diary, Zlata regards war, like the less visceral “politics,” as an abstraction: something to be reflected on and questioned, certainly—but also something distant and strange, and thus best to be put out of mind by a comfortingly familiar television program. However, a sudden turn in Zlata’s style and narrative approach occurs in an entry made on 30 March 1992.

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 93 Whereas the passages preceding this one reveal an increasing attention to the steadily mounting violence in Zlata’s native Sarajevo, this entry is one of the first in which Zlata acknowledges the direct effect the hostilities may have on her personally: Tomorrow we’re supposed to go to a classical music concert at Skenderija Hall. Our teacher says we shouldn’t go because there will be 10, 000 people, pardon me, children, there, and somebody might take us hostages or plant a bomb in the concert hall. Mommy says I shouldn’t go. So I won’t. . . . I’m afraid to say this next thing. Melica says she heard at the hairdresser’s that on Saturday, April 4, 1992, there’s going to be BOOM— BOOM, BANG—BANG, CRASH Sarajevo. Translation: They’re going to bomb Sarajevo. (27–28) Significantly, it is in this same passage—in which Zlata acknowledges the war as an immediate reality rather than as a mere abstraction—that she decides to give her diary a name. “You know what I think?” she writes at the beginning of the entry. “Since Anne Frank called her diary Kitty, maybe I could give you a name too” (27). After listing a catalogue of names (including “Asfaltina,” “Ševala,” and “Hikmeta”) Zlata finally settles upon “Mimmy,” a diminutive name that bears the most striking resemblance to the one Anne Frank gave her own diary. The concurrence of Zlata’s recognition of war as an immediate reality and her decision to name her diary in imitation of Anne Frank is not, I would argue, a mere coincidence. First, the very act of naming a diary implies the recognition of an interlocutor (if only an imagined one) who has some vested interest in Zlata’s immediate situation. This in turn implies that Zlata acknowledges her circumstances as significant and worthy of being related to an outside observer in a clear and detailed manner, rather than being casually jotted down for her own edification, as she previously had done. Indeed, Zlata recognizes her immediate context as being historically significant—and thus worthy of being related to another. Thus, she posits an equivalence between herself and Anne Frank, another young girl who herself lived in and documented a state of emergency. In other words, the diary’s sudden appeal to Anne Frank can be read as a direct effect of the narrator’s equally abrupt recognition of the political crisis in which she fi nds herself implicated. Once Zlata establishes a parallel between herself and Anne Frank, she begins to inhabit her literary predecessor’s style in ways that surpass the mere address of an interlocutor. First, she begins to adopt Anne’s journalistic approach as she describes events that occur in the city. Just as Anne summarizes news reports her family hears on their contraband radio, Zlata recapitulates information she receives from television and radio news. Similarly, just as Anne describes street scenes she observes from her limited vantage point in

94 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature the attic, Zlata describes episodes from her occasional forays away from the safety of home. Such descriptions provide the reader with some larger context that will enable him to better understand the more immediate struggles Zlata and her family undergo as they wait out the siege. Although Zlata’s description of the cellar in which she and her family take shelter from the bombing are not nearly as detailed and compelling as Anne’s thorough portrayal of the secret annex, they do communicate something of the atmosphere surrounding the experience of hiding: The cellar is ugly, dark, smelly. Mommy, who’s terrified of mice, has two fears to cope with. The three of us were in the same corner as the other day. We listened to the pounding shells, the shooting, the thundering noise overhead. We even heard planes. At one moment I realized that this awful cellar was the only place that could save our lives. Suddenly, it started to look almost warm and nice. It was the only way we could defend ourselves against all this terrible shooting. (39) Here, the sense of danger communicated by descriptions of pounding shells and over-flying planes is balanced by an impression of domestic comfort: assured of her family’s unity against the backdrop of chaos, Zlata can now imagine the dank cellar as a “warm and nice” place of familial respite. Here, the reader may be reminded of passages from Anne Frank’s own diary, which document how alternate moods of boredom and anxiety are occasionally broken by pleasant family conversations and games of Monopoly.6 However, the most revealing parallels in style between Zlata’s narrative and that of Anne Frank appear in those entries that are more contemplative and meditative in tone and content. For example, in an entry in which Zlata confesses a penchant for “philosophizing,” she meditates on the politics of ethnic difference: I keep wanting to explain these stupid politics to myself, because it seems to me that politics caused this war, making it our everyday reality. War has crossed out the day and replaced it with horror, and now horrors are unfolding instead of days. It looks to me as though these politics mean Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. But they are all people. They are all the same. They look like people, there’s no difference. They all have arms, legs, and heads, they walk and talk, but now there’s “something” that wants to make them different. Among my girlfriends, among our friends, in our family, there are Serbs and Croats and Muslims. It’s a mixed group and I never knew who was a Serb, a Croat, or a Muslim. Now politics has started meddling around. It has put an “S” on Serb, an “M” on Muslim and a “C” on Croats, it wants to separate them. And to do so it has chosen the worst, blackest pencil of all—the pencil of war that spells only misery and death. (96–97)

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 95 This passage bears a remarkable resemblance to those in which Anne, although she originally disavows any personal interest in politics, goes on to analyze, with remarkable astuteness, both the wartime political climate and her fellow annex-members’ various opinions on the present situation. For example, in an entry made on 27 March 1944, Anne announces that “[a]t least one chapter on our life in hiding should be about politics, but I’ve been avoiding the subject because it interests me so little” (240). Despite her proclaimed disinterest in politics, Anne goes on to describe, with great sophistication, the dissension in the annex that is caused by political debate; in doing so, she aims to explain the discourse of the grown-up world of which she is a part, but from which she still feels alienated (240). Zlata’s attempt to “explain these stupid politics to myself,” because such political fissures make up our “everyday reality,” thus echoes her predecessor’s desire—a desire articulated through an affected reluctance—to explain to herself the world of adults. Similarly, Zlata’s entry recalls passages in which Anne evaluates the complex and intertwined conflicts between various groups—most notably, conflicts between Dutch Christians and German-Jewish immigrants to Holland—in order to discover some explanation for both the war and what she perceives to be the elements of human nature that make such war possible. For example, Zlata’s passage, quoted above, bears some resemblance to a passage in The Diary of a Young Girl dated 22 May 1942: When you hear [about conflicts between the Dutch and the German-Jewish immigrants seeking asylum] you begin to wonder why we’re fighting this long and difficult war. We’re always being told that we’re fighting for freedom, truth and justice! The war isn’t even over, and already there’s dissension and Jews are regarded as lesser beings. . . . To be honest, I can’t understand how the Dutch, a nation of good, honest, upright people, can sit in judgment on us the way they do. On us—the most oppressed, unfortunate and pitiable people in all the world. I have only one hope: that this anti-Semitism is just a passing thing, that the Dutch will show their true colors, that they will never waiver from what they know in their hearts to be just, for this is unjust! (303–304) In addition to expressing the optimistic confidence in human goodness for which she has become best known to modern-day readers, Anne communicates here an unwavering belief in the innate equality of human beings. Indeed, the conflict between the Dutch Christians and the German Jewish immigrants is all the more tragic to her because of the failure of the Dutch (an inherently “good, honest, upright people”) to recognize their Jewish neighbors as equal compatriots, joined with them in a united front against Nazi occupation. The frustration with which Anne makes this statement is underscored by her sense that, although she is merely a child, she sees such equality as self-evident (and the denial of such equality as “unjust”) even as

96 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature Dutch gentile adults are dangerously slow in coming to this conclusion. Such frustration with adult blindness to the seemingly self-evident truth of equality is dramatically reflected in Zlata’s own humanist proclamation (“But they are all people. They are all the same”) and in her realization that she and her girlfriends are aware of such sameness whereas adult citizens, politicians, and soldiers remain blind to it. “I think we ‘young’ would do it better,” Zlata writes later in her entry. “We certainly wouldn’t have chosen war” (97). Here, she stands in allegiance with Anne—drawing on a vision of her own childhood wisdom derived from Romantic notions of the child and in juxtaposition with adult irrationality—to articulate a plea for peace and justice. Although Zlata’s adoption of Anne’s humanist rhetoric and righteous indignation is immediately evident in the passage quoted above, what is perhaps more subtly expressed is the particular mode of perception that allows Zlata to adopt such rhetoric in the first place. In this passage, Zlata regards her “everyday reality” precisely as a text which is written by a particular author— “politics”—who communicates through a specific medium—that is, writing (made possible through the “pencil of war”). In other words, Zlata engages with the circumstances in which she is placed in a manner that is similar to the way she might read a book: she carefully scrutinizes the scenes “spell[ed]” out before her, noting the editorial changes, as it were, made by an author (“politics”) who uses a black “pencil” of war to “cross out” once-scripted settings and quotidian exchanges. Moreover, she observes the ways in which this author’s “pencil” marks individuals who had formerly appeared to be relatively indistinguishable: politics, she writes, “has put an ‘S’ on Serbs, an ‘M’ on Muslims and a ‘C’ on Croats.” By approaching her “everyday reality” as one might approach a passage in a novel, Zlata fashions herself as a textual critic of sorts, making note of original markings and their later emendations, judiciously citing scenes or “passages” she fi nds particularly significant, and interpreting them according to a standard she believes “correct.” Zlata’s orientation to perceived reality as a text—a text that is constantly in a state of revision and which therefore demands attendant commentary or exegesis—in turn elucidates her relatively liberal borrowing of Anne’s style and rhetoric. That is, if Zlata is already predisposed to regarding perceived reality as inherently textual—or, in other words, as constructed and thus open to scrutiny, quotation, and interpretation—then it is not entirely surprising that she should consider Anne Frank’s diary in a similar manner.7 According to Zlata’s perspective, all of the objects and scenes that she encounters in the course of everyday life—whether they take the form of a street-battle in a residential neighborhood of Sarajevo or a passage from a published diary— equally constitute a rich field of sources that she may draw into and reconstitute in her own meditation on her present circumstances. Indeed, although Anne Frank’s diary is the one text on which Zlata’s own writing most heavily draws (for reasons that I will elaborate on below) it is difficult to read the above-quoted passage without remarking upon other literary

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 97 texts it calls to mind. For example, Zlata’s insistence that politics has “put an ‘S’ on Serbs, an ‘M’ on Muslims and a ‘C’ on Croats” might be read as an allusion to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), whose protagonist Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her clothing that identifies her as an adulteress. Similarly, Zlata’s assertion that Serbs, Croats, and Muslims are fundamentally “all the same” because they “all have arms, legs, [and they all] they walk and talk” bears a striking resemblance to Shylock’s famous setpiece in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1598): I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?—if you prick us do we not bleed? if you tickle us do we not laugh? if you poison us do we not die? and if you wrong us do we not revenge? (3.1.52–60) Of course, Zlata never admits to reading either of these texts: thus their direct influence on her own writing is questionable. However, their indirect influence is indeed possible. Zlata is well-enough acquainted with works of American literature (e.g., she notes that she has read the works of Jack London [18]) that she may at least be familiar with the title and general plot of Hawthorne’s novel. Moreover, although Zlata never cites The Merchant of Venice, Shylock’s words are quoted frequently enough that even those who have never read Shakespeare might recognize this celebrated passage. Thus, the striking resemblance between critical moments in Hawthorne’s and Shakespeare’s texts and moments in Zlata’s own diary points to the rich intertextual dimension of her diary. In other words, it speaks to the ways in which she unselfconsciously draws on various sources—even those that have been freed from their original contexts—in order to articulate her own, equally textual, impressions of her “everyday reality.” In this way, the passage quoted above epitomizes what Roland Barthes describes, in “The Death of the Author” (1978) as a “text.” According to Barthes, a “text” is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations. . . . The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.” (Image-Music-Text 146) Considered from this perspective—one that Zlata intuits when she gestures to the “always already written” textual character of her “everyday reality”— Zlata’s Diary may not be as derivative or inauthentic as critics such as Kertzer

98 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature imply that it is. Rather, it is as multiply mediated as any text necessarily is. Thus, what perhaps distinguishes Zlata’s Diary is that—at least with regard to those passages that allude heavily to and imitate those from Anne Frank’s diary—Zlata is conscious of the ways in which her own writing “blend[s]” and “clash[es]” with that of another, and thus she recognizes that her own diary is indebted to and shaped by the texts that preceded it. Here, the similarities between Zlata’s recognition of the inherent intertextual dimension of her diary and second-generation memory cannot be ignored. Just as secondgeneration memory involves its bearer’s conscious recognition of the ways in which collective memory has shaped her habits and perceptions, Zlata’s Diary involves its writer’s awareness of the antecedent forms that shape—and indeed make possible—its own composition. If second-generation memory might be imagined as a ghost image, in which two otherwise distinct images “blend and clash,” then Zlata’s diary might in turn be perceived as a material (textual) instantiation of second-generation memory.

Sifting through the Fragments Although the status of Zlata’s Diary as a literary artifact may be justified by an analysis of its rich intertextual character (which its narrator herself recognizes), it nevertheless appears problematic once it is considered as an historical account of the Bosnian war. For example, in the passage quoted above, Zlata subtly likens her “everyday reality” to the Second World War-era context in which her predecessor lived by accounting for the ways in which the “pencil of war” has “marked” the various ethnic groups living in Sarajevo. As an obviously astute reader of The Diary of a Young Girl, Zlata is certainly aware of the Nazi law that required Jews to wear yellow stars that literally marked them as Jewish; many of these stars bore the letter “J” or the word “Jude”—an additional identifying marker. Zlata’s insistence, then, that “politics” has “put an ‘S’ on Serb, an ‘M’ on Muslims, and a ‘C’ on Croats” implies her correlation between the racist violence that forced Anne Frank into hiding and the violence which Zlata now faces. This sense of historical parallels appears in an entry made four days earlier, in which Zlata describes the mass emigration of Sarajevo’s citizens and remarks that the sight “reminded me of the movies I saw about the Jews in the Second World War” (93). This reference to the Holocaust, it appears, further strengthens Zlata’s sense of connection to her literary predecessor. However, it also points to what may be considered a certain lack of distinction between the present and the past. Like her fictional counterpart Harry Potter, who becomes literally absorbed by a text whose composition preceded his own birth, Zlata appears to be so fascinated by Anne Frank and her historical context that Zlata’s ostensible goal (reporting the siege from the perspective of a native Bosnian) seems to be swallowed up by her will to pattern her voice and narrative strategies

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 99 after those of a writer whose life and times were significantly different from her own. According to this view, Zlata’s Diary, although it ostensibly aims to preserve memory—of both the Bosnian genocide and, indirectly, the earlier Nazi genocide that claimed the life of Anne Frank—also ironically institutes a form of forgetting. That is, it marks a refusal or an inability to recognize the inherent differences between these two historical moments and the respective writers’ placement within them. Moreover, Zlata’s attempt to extend a connection between herself and Anne Frank by likening the sufferings of Bosnian émigrés to those of Jews she has seen in Holocaust movies signals an equally problematic forgetting of the boundary between historical events and the aesthetic representations of those events.8 However, despite Zlata’s apparent tendency to conflate her contemporary moment with that of Anne Frank, and despite the degree to which such conflation puts to question the authenticity of what could be considered Zlata’s specifically Bosnian voice and perspective, there remain significant differences between Zlata’s depiction of Sarajevo and Anne’s depiction of Holland during the Second World War. These differences are not immediately obvious. After all, both texts are diaries. Moreover, both texts share a sense of chronology that is necessary to the diary form: each of their entries, made on a more or less daily basis, follows one after the other, giving the reader a sense of progression in time. Finally, the two texts share both a first-person narrative perspective and certain objects of discussion and contemplation at which such a perspective is aimed; in the case of these two specific diaries, the most prevalent object of inquiry is the effect of extraordinary wartime circumstances on the interior lives of self-proclaimed “ordinary” adolescent girls. However, insofar as both of the diaries’ narrators are invested in documenting the domestic circumstances in which they are situated as well as the political crises in which they are implicated, the two texts can just as well be considered as historical narratives. As historical narratives, however, The Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata’s Diary manifest two distinct formal approaches: that of the history and the chronicle, respectively. Hayden White has made a useful distinction between what he calls “proper history”—a mode of historical narrative whose emergence was concurrent with the rise of modernity—and the pre-modern chronicle form. “Proper history,” White argues, perceives historical events as existing within a totality: it “reveals to us a world that is putatively ‘finished,’ done with, over, and yet not dissolved, not falling apart” (21). The historian approaches events as though they “had a plot all along,” and thus understands his responsibility as involving the “finding” of an already existing plot within the events he documents. For this reason, “proper” historical narrative seeks to represent events in their “coherence, integrity, [and] fullness”; more significantly, it imposes a demand for closure, for a moral meaning that springs organically from events in their totality (24, 21). The chronicle, on the other hand, lacks the historical narrative’s impulse toward cohesion and closure. Although a chronicle, like

100 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature the historical narrative, may concern itself within a geographical and social center, and treat the activities of a central subject within a localized period of time, it nevertheless “fails as proper history” because it does not perceive within events a plot which it might discover, extract, and exposit. Rather, the chronicle merely presents events within a basic chronology, “throw[ing] onto the reader the burden for retrospectively reflecting on linkages between the beginning of the account and its ending” (18). Strictly speaking, Anne Frank’s diary is not “proper history” in White’s terms. Written during the Second World War, rather than after its end, the diary lacks a certain critical distance or detachment necessary to a proper final evaluation of the war and its effects on those in hiding. Moreover, Anne’s tragic deportation to and death in Bergen-Belsen foreclosed the possibility of a definitive conclusion: the diary simply stops abruptly, days before Anne’s arrest. Nevertheless, The Diary of a Young Girl does imagine disparate events as existing within a coherent, totalizing narrative. Although Anne’s writing may be read simply as a series of journal entries—that is, as separate and distinct records of events that unfold on a given day—they may be alternately read as episodes within a larger, serial narrative. Each passage of the diary builds upon the last, documenting the intermittent swelling and recession of the narrator’s adolescent anxieties as they occur against a backdrop of interfamilial conflict and, even more dramatically, against the historical conflict in which they are implicated. In the course of the diary, each of Anne’s fellow annex members—from her gentle and erudite father, Otto, to her irascible and ever-snoring roommate, Dr. Dussel—emerges as a fully and distinctly developed character whose painstakingly documented desires, habits, and eccentricities motivate the various conflicts that unfold over the course of the text. Moreover, Anne’s distinctive voice, which is characterized by a delicate balance of sardonic wit and tenderness, as well as her realist’s eye for detail and ear for turn of phrase, transform what could be otherwise a desultory recitation of quotidian affairs into a gradually unfolding narrative that is part memoir, part adventure story, and part domestic drama. By contrast, Zlata’s own narrative is comparatively sparse and undeveloped. Even the most cursory glance at both texts as they appear on the printed page reveals an important distinction between them. Whereas Anne’s entries consistently involve at least five well-developed paragraphs that span across an average of two or three pages, Zlata’s entries are often only a paragraph long; despite the large type-face used by the Penguin edition, most of her entries only occupy a third of the printed page. Although Zlata’s Diary involves its own cast of friends, family members, and political figures, these individuals—unlike Anne’s fellow attic-residents and the individuals who aided them—are not sufficiently developed enough to take on a life of their own. Indeed, these characters are so thinly developed that the Penguin edition of the diary is prefaced by a list of individuals Zlata mentions throughout her narrative and brief descriptions of their relationships to her, ostensibly so

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 101 that the reader might make quick reference to each as he encounters them in his reading. Similarly, although Zlata makes an effort to explain the major events she records and to describe the settings in which they take place, her descriptions, unlike Anne’s, are thin enough to require the editor to make bracketed notes that better contextualize these events and settings. Finally, although Zlata’s more meditative entries are certainly lucid and poignant, they lack the lyrical sweep of Anne’s prose. Overall, the diary communicates not so much a distinct voice as it does a matter-of-fact, detached narration, as exhibited in the following entry, made on 10 August, 1992: Dear Mimmy, Mommy’s [brother] Braco is fine. He’s already walking well. Today he went to Otes. He’ll be working in the press center there, reporting on the situation. Things are all right there. They have no shooting and they have food. They’re lucky. I really miss my cousins Mikica and Dačo. I haven’t seen them since the war broke out. Your Zlata (73) In many ways, this passage is characteristic of most of the entries included in the diary. First, it begins abruptly and with little narrative exposition; unlike Anne’s diary, there is no attempt at a characteristically epistolary unfolding of topics to be developed within the course of the passage. Absent, too, is any attempt to link the topic of the entry—the uncle’s recuperation from a gunshot wound—to earlier passages that addressed the circumstances under which he was wounded and hospitalized. Rather, the narrator takes it for granted that the reader will remember this information from entries made several weeks prior. Moreover, such lack of contiguity between this passage and those preceding it is paralleled by the general lack of coherence within this passage: Zlata moves, in a series of blunt, staccato sentences, from reviewing her uncle’s health to documenting conditions in Otes to expressing her wish to see her cousins, without accounting for the associations she makes in order to make the transition from one topic to the next. The fragmentary, chronicle-like nature of Zlata’s Diary is especially clear in a particularly memorable entry, dated 27 May 1992, in which Zlata attempts to document her mother’s near-escape from shelling: Dear Mimmy, SLAUGHTER! MASSACRE! HORROR! CRIME! BLOOD! SCREAMS! TEARS! DESPAIR! That’s what Vaso Miškin Street looks like today. Two shells exploded in the street and one in the market. Mommy was nearby at the time. She ran to Grandma and Grandad’s. Daddy and I were beside ourselves because she couldn’t come home. I saw some of it on TV but

102 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature I still can’t believe what I actually saw. It’s unbelievable. I’ve got a lump in my throat and a knot in my tummy. HORRIBLE. They’re taking the wounded to the hospital. It’s a madhouse. We kept going to the window hoping to see Mommy, but she wasn’t back. They released a list of the dead and wounded. Daddy and I were tearing our hair out. We didn’t know what had happened to her. Was she alive? At 4:00, Daddy decided to go and check the hospital. He got dressed, and I got ready to go to the Bobars’, so as not to stay home alone. I looked out the window one more time and . . . I SAW MOMMY RUNNING ACROSS THE BRIDGE. As she came into the house she started shaking and crying. Through her tears she told us how she had seen the dismembered bodies . . . A HORRIBLE DAY . . . UNFORGETTABLE . . . (50–51) Unlike the passage cited previously, this entry seems comparatively cohesive: Zlata delivers a chronological account of the day’s events that begins with her mother’s disappearance, explains her family’s subsequent search, and ends with her mother’s shaken return. In other words, Zlata journalistically describes a specific episode. However, she cannot fully communicate how exactly she experiences this event. Certainly, some statements (“Daddy and I were tearing our hair out” and “Was she alive?”) communicate the anxiety she feels before her mother returns, but the sheer horror of losing the person she most loves—indeed, one of her last ties to protection and comfort— ultimately remains unexpressed. Zlata can only gesture toward, or indirectly communicate, her reaction to her mother’s potential loss by reciting a series of abstract nouns (“SLAUGHTER! MASSACRE! HORROR! CRIME! . . .”) which stand in the place of directly perceived images and emotions, but which fail to bring forth such perceptions in their concrete specificity. Indeed, the list can only compensate for the overwhelming character of such perceptions by its use of capital letters and exclamation points. Likewise, the disturbing image of Zlata’s mother “running across the bridge” relates a specific event and implies, through its use of capitalization, a particularly strong emotional response to her mother’s return. However, it is unclear what this response is, exactly: does Zlata draw attention to the image of her mother crossing the bridge because she wants to communicate the relief she feels upon discovering that her mother has survived the shelling, or is she instead gesturing toward a renewed sense of terror she feels as her mother crosses a structure frequently targeted by snipers? Either response seems viable, and yet, no clear contextual clues either precede or follow the image to indicate the response it signifies. Indeed, the image, detached as it is from any contextual ties that would affi x it definitively to any particular affective response (a detachment that is emphasized by the use of capitalization) may in fact signify no response whatsoever. That is, the isolated statement may be read purely as an image (or, rather, as a “pure” image) whose sudden and shocking appearance on the printed page precedes, or pre-empts, any attempt to explain or make meaning of it. In

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 103 other words, it is as though this image, and the capitalized words that communicate it, serve as a screen which obscures the full experience: Zlata can recite the external details of the events she has survived, but cannot describe such events from her position within them.9 This entry, which is one of the most fully developed passages of the diary, dramatizes the extent to which Zlata’s Diary, as a chronicle, places the burden of meaning-making squarely on the shoulders of the reader, prompting him, as White argues, to reflect retrospectively on the “linkages between the beginning of the account and its ending” (17). Although, certainly, the reader may extract from the diary an image of the events in Bosnia, and Zlata’s position within them, he is able to do this not by immersing himself in a coherent narrative made full and immediate by thick description10 (such as that provided by Anne Frank’s diary) but rather by piecing together the non-contiguous words and entries heaped up one after the other throughout the text. By assembling these scattershot images, the reader becomes conscious of the narrative gaps that make such an assemblage necessary. That is, he becomes aware of what Zlata (and, by extension, the reader) cannot know or tell of her experience. For example, although the image of Zlata’s mother’s flight across the bridge may give the reader an impression of what life under siege might “look like,” its isolated and uncontextualized placement within the narrative calls the reader’s attention to the gaps implicit in the narrative—that is, to what Zlata (and, hence, the reader) cannot fully know of what it is to experience the limit-situation of a violent siege “from the inside.” Moreover, although the reader might be able to extrapolate some sense of meaning from the events Zlata attempts to document in her diary—for example, he might interpret Zlata’s exclamatory sentence regarding her mother as an expression of relief, or, conversely, of terror—he recognizes that such meaning is not that which Zlata herself has assigned. Ultimately, the events Zlata witnesses confound her, and thus forbid her making “sense” of them. Consequently, whatever meaning there is to be had from this passage is that which the reader brings to his reading. Certainly, this notion of the reader’s interpretive primacy applies to all acts of reading— indeed, the concepts of the “death of the author” and of the inaccessibility of full textual meaning are those which underpin contemporary literary criticism.11 However, the obvious gaps and false starts within Zlata’s Diary dramatize the limits of determinate and transmittable meaning that a more linear, cohesive narrative—such as The Diary of a Young Girl—might obscure. As a chronicle—rather than as a fully developed, moralizing “proper history”—Zlata’s Diary reveals trauma. Trauma, according to Cathy Caruth, is a wound inflicted upon the mind, a wound which causes a “breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” (4). Unlike a physical wound, such a psychological wound can never be fully healed, as it was “experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known”; it makes itself available to consciousness only belatedly, as it gradually becomes manifested in the “nightmares and repetitive actions” of the survivor (4). Trauma, then,

104 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature cannot be located in the “simple violent or original event in an individual’s past,” for the individual’s encounter with this event was necessarily a missed one—that is, one which could not be originally assimilated by the individual’s consciousness (4). Thus, trauma can only be identified in the traces it leaves in its wake—for example, in the repetitive attempts to articulate the traumatic event through language, which is ultimately inadequate to giving full expression to the event. Thus, insofar as the traumatic event exists in excess of language (which exists in the domain of consciousness, and of the “everyday”), its expression, through language, ultimately reveals less of what the witness knows than of what the witness does not know. Bearing in mind this defi nition of trauma, it becomes easier to see how Zlata’s Diary assumes the form of a chronicle. Unlike Anne Frank’s diary, which was written during a period of seclusion (albeit forced seclusion) which allowed its writer the time to edit and refi ne her text to the extent that it could become a fully developed narrative peopled with round,12 dynamic characters whose complex and various motives intersect with larger, carefully accounted historical and material circumstances, Zlata’s Diary was composed even as its author-narrator was continually and literally exposed to the threats of the “outside world.” Whereas Anne frequently complains of being bored,13 her Bosnian counterpart laments that she “can’t relax for even a second”: the quiet moments in which she fi nds time to write, draw, study, or spend time with family and neighbors are merely punctuations in a continual series of efforts to hide from shelling to secure water and food in the midst of sniper-fi re, and to cross the city in the heat of street-battle in search of more secure shelter (74). Given the precariousness of these circumstances, it is surprising that Zlata’s Diary could be composed at all: one might well imagine that the constant inundation of the senses brought about by warfare, compounded by the struggle to meet immediate physical needs, might drastically limit the diarist’s ability to take in and subsequently transmit the events she witnessed, as well as the time she would have to do so. Conversely, it is not surprising that the diary ultimately emerges as a collection of loosely connected fragments, whose minimally coherent form attests to its narrator’s limited ability to assimilate the images that constantly barrage her senses. Indeed, a great many passages in Zlata’s Diary greatly resemble entries made soldiers’ war journals, whose composition between battles and marches render them brief and barely contiguous, and whose blunt allusions to fallen comrades speak less to any callousness or masculine stoicism than they do to an inability to account for, immediately, these sudden losses.14 The difference is, perhaps, that unlike a soldier who receives some degree of training and preparation for battle, Zlata is a civilian who is suddenly and involuntarily exposed to warfare, and who thus lacks any communally received framework through which she may interpret her experiences. The young narrator may only repeat, emphatically, “WHY? WHY ME? WHY? WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?” (170).

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 105 This is certainly not to say that Zlata should be considered as more traumatized than her Second World War-era counterpart was. Indeed, Zlata was ultimately airlifted from her war-torn city whereas Anne eventually perished in Bergen-Belsen: Zlata did not, in the final analysis, suffer the extremity of violence to which Anne was finally exposed. When I refer to trauma in this specific context, then, I refer only to the immediate circumstances in which each writer composed her diary entries. To be sure, if, by some chance, Anne had been able to maintain her diary even during her incarceration in BergenBelsen, her entries would have been even more sparse and undeveloped than Zlata’s own, not the least because the material deprivation and constant violence she encountered in this setting would have been so traumatizing as to prohibit any possibility of sustained reflection. Indeed, the fact that Anne— like nearly every Jewish prisoner of the Nazi concentration camps—could not maintain a physical record of her experiences demonstrates the limit point, and silencing effects, of absolute trauma. To be sure, this is why the abrupt ending of Anne’s diary continues to haunts audiences: the unintended conclusion of her diary forces readers to recognize that, upon her arrest, the author’s voice was silenced once and for all. Nevertheless, the sophisticated and supremely detailed entries that precede this sudden conclusion speak to material conditions that were—if only temporarily—secure enough to allow the composition of what could be called a “history proper.” By contrast, although Zlata survived her ordeal whereas Anne was ultimately murdered, the material conditions that delimited the immediate context in which Zlata penned her diary—conditions that included, for example, radical exposure to the elements and the daily dodging of sniper fire—were precarious enough to allow for merely a chronicle-like account. The precariousness of Zlata’s situation during the time of her diary’s composition places into relief the significance of her allusions to fi lm and television news. In the passage cited above, for example, in which Zlata documents her mother’s perilous crossing over a local bridge, Zlata begins her account by alluding not to the scene visible immediately outside her apartment, but to images she sees on television news reports. These news reports, which account for three bombs that have exploded on Vaso Miškin Street (“two in the street and two in the market”) and which include images of the wounded being taken to the hospitalized amidst “madhouse” chaos, serve as a contextual backdrop for the event Zlata is most intent upon relating—that is, her mother’s return home from Vaso Miškin Street via the nearby bridge (50). Zlata’s recourse to televised news images renders this passage more coherent and structurally sophisticated than other entries, insofar as it allows her to place a single, immediate event (her mother’s escape) within a larger set of circumstances and thus allows her to understand, if only minimally, the causes of the near-loss of her mother. Moreover, Zlata’s reference to “movies . . . about the Jews in the Second World War” (95) fulfi lls a function similar to her use of television news,

106 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature insofar as it places into relief the radical disorientation Zlata feels in her present situation and her consequent need to find a stable point of reference by which she may better articulate her experiences. On several occasions in the diary, Zlata states that her wartime existence “isn’t life—it’s an imitation of life”(80).15 Her comment gestures toward the performative character of the wartime practices she must adopt: her daily activities are part of a role with which she is neither familiar nor comfortable playing. Moreover, it implies a certain sense of detachment or lack of agency, as if her life has become as distant to her as someone else’s life being performed on the big screen. Thus, Zlata’s reference to Holocaust fi lms may be read less as a comparison of her present-day circumstances to those of the past than to a sense of alienation brought on by her traumatic experiences. A spectator of her own life, she may only gaze at the street-scenes below her—and at herself, as she “imitates” life—with the same sense of detachment she might feel upon watching a fi lm. Furthermore, insofar as Zlata’s wartime experiences are in some sense alien to her, and thus profoundly difficult to describe, fi lms provide her with a way in which she might describe the siege analogically. In no section of the diary does Zlata state, either implicitly or explicitly, that the warfare and ethnic cleansing taking place in Bosnia is “another” Holocaust, or even that the siege is “just like” the Second World War —a comparison that others have not been hesitant in making.16 She does not confuse two distinct historical events, and thus risk slipping into a dangerous ahistorical account of her present situation. Rather, she merely states that the sight of Bosnians leaving Sarajevo reminds her of scenes from Holocaust fi lms. By proposing an analogical relationship between the events she witnesses and the fi lms she has watched—and, ostensibly, which she assumes the reader has watched as well—Zlata is thus able to communicate indirectly what, in her traumatized state, she is unable to directly express. If Zlata’s occasional references to television news and fi lm help her better relate specific incidents, then her more pervasive allusions to Anne Frank’s diary might be read as an attempt to grant a greater sense of coherence to Zlata’s diary as a whole. In the course of his discussion of the chronicle form, White argues that although the chronicle fails to secure narrative closure— that is, although it is unable to provide a thick description of the object it treats so as to draw a “moral meaning” from that object—the chronicle form does nevertheless aspire to some degree of coherence through its invocation of a “patron.” The chronicler’s allusion to a patron—generally, a fellow chronicler or set of chroniclers within a specific tradition—lends his text an “authority” and, moreover, bestows upon the chronicler a “‘right’ to narrate” (18, 19). The chronicler, as a self-conscious narrator, recognizes the contested nature of the “facts” he reports, and thus appeals to predecessors whose own works might confirm the veracity of his present account. As an example of such citation of authority, White cites The History of France (AD 998) written by Richerus of Rheims, who admits to drawing on and modifying the annals of the scribe

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 107 Flodoard, and who cites “such classics as Caesar, Orosius, Jerome, and Isidore as authorities for the early history of Gaul and suggests that his own personal observations gave him insight into the facts he is recounting that no one else could claim” (18). By making such citations, the chronicler places himself within a tradition which confirms the legitimacy of his present study; consequently, he is able to posit his own text as offering a new, unique perspective on the events he documents. If one identifies Zlata’s Diary as a chronicle—that is, as a document that is cohesive enough to offer some representation of a particular series of events but is still so fragmentary as to place the burden of closure onto the reader—then one might in turn argue that Zlata’s appeal to Anne Frank echoes the chronicler’s appeal to a patron. In effect, Anne Frank, as a literary patron of sorts, authorizes Zlata’s diary, insofar as Anne functions as an author by whom Zlata may establish the legitimacy and purpose of her own text. In the Foucauldian sense, the term “author” does not designate an actual individual but rather operates as a figure—or a “function”—under which a body of texts may be classified. The “name of the author,” writes Foucault, “remains at the contours of texts—separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing a mode of existence” (123). The name of the author, moreover, may be assigned not only to those texts traditionally attributed to a specific individual, but to an entire discursive tradition “within which new books and authors can proliferate” (131). In this way, Foucault argues, Marx and Freud can be understood as authors not only of specific texts (such as Capital [1867] and The Interpretation of Dreams [1900], respectively) but of an “endless possibility of discourse” that extends beyond the scope of these individual texts (131). Given this understanding of authorship, one might recognize Zlata’s explicit and implicit allusions to Anne Frank not as an appeal to a specific historical personage, with whom she identifies and whom she tries to emulate. Rather, one might interpret such allusions as an appeal to a particular literary tradition of child’s wartime writing—whose inauguration is conventionally attributed to Anne Frank—into which Zlata might insert her own text and thereby assert its legitimacy. On its own, Zlata’s narrative threatens to appear as a collection of trauma fragments that are only minimally connected to one another. However, the invocation of a figure, Anne Frank, bestows upon these fragments a cohesion they might not originally have had. Such an invocation signals, in other words, the form (i.e., the wartime diary) under which these otherwise disparate entries are organized. The articulation of a form in turn gives expression to the diary’s purpose: Zlata’s Diary, like The Diary of a Young Girl, is to be understood as the relation of a series of wartime events from the perspective of a child. Moreover, through its implicit invocation of Anne as patron (literally, “father”), Zlata’s diary constructs, albeit in a gynocentric or matrilineal context, a genealogy that connects Zlata to her literary forebear. In aligning her diary with a form already established by her literary predecessor, and thus implicitly confirming the purpose of her writing, Zlata is

108 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature then able to adopt the discursive practices instituted by the original text: she is able, for example, to employ Anne’s journalistic style, as well as her more meditative tone. Admittedly, Zlata’s Diary lacks the literary finesse of its predecessor; indeed, when compared to the richly developed account offered by Frank’s text, Zlata’s Diary continues to resemble a chronicle, rather than a “proper history.” Nevertheless, by situating her diary within a specific literary tradition, and by employing the rhetorical and philosophical perspective of its most notable author, Zlata is able to grant a degree of shape and cohesion to a narrative which otherwise threatens to collapse. In effect, Anne Frank’s diary legitimizes—or, in other words, makes legible—not only Zlata’s Diary, but also, significantly, Zlata’s representation of herself as a “wartime child.”17

Consuming the Romantic Child As I have argued above, Zlata’s constant and traumatic exposure to shelling and deprivation renders her diary a chronicle-like collection of narrative fragments and thereby impels its narrator to invoke another text which confers upon the diary a coherence it cannot have on its own. However, the trauma that Zlata suffers involves just as much her sudden and unceremonious propulsion into adulthood as it does her witness to the destruction of her native city. Although Zlata regularly refers to herself as a child—albeit a “wartime child,” (158) a “child hungry for everything”(121), and a “child of rice, peas, and spaghetti” (183)—the conditions and responsibilities the war has thrust upon her render her more a woman than a girl. In the course of her narrative, Zlata reports crossing the city for much-needed supplies, comforting her grief-stricken mother, and deciding for herself to stay in Sarajevo instead of leaving—all actions one might expect from the head of a household rather than from an eleven-year-old girl. Similarly, the tone with which Zlata addresses developments in Sarajevo occasionally surpasses her young years. Regularly referring to politicians and soldiers as mere “kids,” and chastising them for “drawing maps,” “coloring with their crayons,” and “playing games of War and Peace” while their fellow citizens struggle for survival, Zlata often sounds uncannily maternal (167). At some points, her voice fluctuates from despondence and resignation (she even once considers suicide) to flippancy (“The Security Council is hopeless. It makes no reasonable decisions at all”) (65). Zlata’s sudden and unbidden entrance into adulthood prompts in her an intense longing to return to the “shores of [her] childhood” (156). In perhaps the best-known passage of the diary, Zlata bemoans the loss of those everyday pleasures she associates with childhood: That’s my life! The life of an innocent eleven-year-old schoolgirl!!! A schoolgirl without school, without the fun and excitement of school. A child without games, without the sun, without birds, without nature,

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 109 without fruit without chocolate or sweets, with just a little powdered milk. In short, a child without a childhood. (61) Childhood, for Zlata, is a cozy Neverland, hermetically sealed off from the outside world.18 In this blissful state, the child wants for nothing, as all of her needs are provided for her by nature and by the presence of solicitous adults who are content to ensure her happiness. Although it promises “fun and excitement,” this notion of childhood does not threaten those who are inside its secure borders with any significant or life-altering challenges. Although games may begin and end, friends may come and go, and “chocolates and sweets” may be alternately presented and consumed, nothing significantly changes in such a neo-Romantic childhood: as a self-contained and self-sufficient little world, it promises a certain comforting stasis. Thus, to be expelled from this state of existence into one marked by contingency, responsibility, and permanent loss is the equivalent, for Zlata, of being cast out of Eden. It is—as trauma always is—an irreparable gash in a system of meanings, practices, and expectations that was previously considered immutable and natural. It is not surprising, then, that Zlata should find Anne Frank’s diary so compelling. Ending as it does before Anne’s own more tragic expulsion into the violence of the adult outside world, The Diary of a Young Girl creates the illusion of the self-contained existence Zlata desires. Compared with Zlata, the narrator of The Diary is relatively sheltered and well provided for: she is looked after and sustained not only by the benevolence of her family’s adult protector, Miep Gies, but by the paternal affection of her father, whom she regards as “goodness personified” (125). Moreover, although Anne regularly reports the troubling events that occur around her and voices her anxiety concerning them, she is, until the point of her arrest, merely an on-looker: unlike Zlata, who regularly must leave the safety of home, Anne may escape the blare of the news-radio or leave her perch at the attic window to retreat to her room, where she can delve, uninterrupted, into reading and writing. Secure—for a time—in the secret annex, Anne appears to inhabit a state of constancy and cohesion that exists independently of the chaotic and ever-changing circumstances that surround her. Indeed, the fullness and solidity of Anne’s narrative seems to mirror the relative plentitude and self-containment of her material existence. Ironically, Anne occupies what Zlata would consider an ideal childhood. If Anne’s occasional complaints of boredom, coupled with her frequently voiced desire for the war’s end and her subsequent release from the attic, belie this vision of childhood bliss in stasis, popular uses of her image nevertheless work to reaffirm it. Anne’s manifestation in cultural memory as an eternal child, forever content to recline on what Zlata would call the “shores of childhood,” is perhaps most heavily influenced by the photograph that graces the cover of most of The Diary’s editions. To a certain extent, this portrait, taken in 1941, gives the reader a snapshot, as it were, of the personality of the diary’s

110 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature narrator: Anne greets the camera with a direct and confident gaze and a wide smile as she holds her hands over a notebook, which the viewer might conclude is the original diary itself. The slight incline of Anne’s head, the direct line of her gaze, and the somewhat stiff posture of her arms above the diary’s pages suggest that the photograph is staged. However, despite the artificiality of the subject’s pose, the photograph is still a convincing “portrait of the artist”: the image is crafted to suggest that the camera has captured its subject looking up in pleasant surprise only seconds after having been immersed in her favorite activity.19 Initially, one might suggest that this photograph offers the Diary’s readers some degree of consolation regarding the tragic death of its author. That is, the image of a young and vibrant Anne Frank seems to promise that, although the individual Anne Frank has died, an extension of her, present in both the photographic image and the diary, survives even to the present. Upon closing the book after having read its final entry and having acknowledged the end its author would face only weeks after its composition, the reader is once again greeted with an image of a smiling girl, fully restored to health, happiness, and life. The photograph thus seems to assure the reader that Anne lives on—if not in body, then in eternal memory. However, if one pushes beyond this initial, emotionally satisfying response to the iconic image, then one may begin to recognize the photograph as an ultimate testament to its subject’s death, rather than as a reassuring promise of her survival. Counter-intuitively, this acknowledgement of death best sustains the popular image of Anne’s eternal childhood. In order to better exposit the apparently incongruous relationship between the photographic image, death, and childhood, it may be helpful to turn to Roland Barthes’s mediation on photography, Camera Lucida (1981). In the course of this text, Barthes notes the uneasiness he feels upon inspecting a photograph of himself. In the photograph, he writes, he encounters himself as other: that is, he recognizes an image of himself that is detached from the corporeal being he recognizes as “himself.” This sensation of detachment leads him in turn to pose an equivalence of the photographic image with death. Photography, Barthes writes, has the uncanny capacity to “transform . . . subject into object,” just as in death, a once animate agent is rendered an inert body, a mere object whose use and disposal is left to the whims of others (13). “What I see [in the photograph],” Barthes writes, “is that I have become the Total Image, which is to say Death in person; others—the Other—do not dispossess me of myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object, they put me at their mercy, at their disposal, classified in a fi le, ready for the subtlest deceptions” (14). Thus, Barthes reports a strange exhilaration—a “voluptuousness”—at the moment the “metallic shifting of the [camera’s] plates” signal the creation of his photographic image, for it is at this moment that he is “neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object” (14). In effect, it is at this moment that he experiences a “micro-version of death” (14).

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 111 According to Barthes, photography’s capacity to render the subject into an object makes it not unlike the ancient theater of the dead, in which actors “separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead” and thus marked themselves as “simultaneously living and dead” (31). Photography, Barthes writes, is similarly a “kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead” (31–32). However “lifelike” the photographer wishes to make his scene and the subject within it—for example, by photographing his subject in the outdoors rather than within the neutral confines of a studio—the product of his labor is still ultimately a frozen, transmogrified image that is detached from the original, living subject. Indeed, Barthes notes that the “frenzy to be life-like can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death”—that is, an unconscious compensation for the photograph’s mortifying potential. According to Barthes’s formulation, then, the “life-like” image of Anne Frank before her open diary does not, as one might originally imagine, contain within it something of the “living essence” of its subject—an assuring presence that might signal Frank’s survival—but rather testifies ultimately to her death. That is to say, the photograph—detached as it is from its subject, inert, and made available to whatever uses its viewers might make of ithauntingly figures Anne’s own passage into death (before and during which, it might be added, she was most mercilessly made use of, or objectified, by her Nazi persecutors20). This recognition of death figured by the photograph is underscored, moreover, by the gaze to which its viewers subject it. Even as the viewer attempts to bring Anne’s photograph “to life”—for example, to read in the image something of her personality and ambitions, and thus to posit these attributes as still “present” and “alive’ within the photograph—he acts upon the image. The viewer objectifies the image, thereby recognizing at once its difference from himself and its passive openness to his own uses. Moreover, in recognizing the photograph as an historical trace, a monument to a bygone era, the viewer implicitly reaffirms the wide gulf of death that separates himself from the photographed girl. “History,” writes Barthes, “is hysterical—it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it” (65). To recognize the photograph of Anne Frank as the portrait of a schoolgirl who grew up in the 1930s and died in 1945 is to recognize her existence in a time and society that is radically other relative to the position from which the viewer now contemplates it. That is, to recognize the photograph as an historical trace is to recognize it, simultaneously, as a trace of death. The death of the child is a central trope in those literary representations most influenced by Romantic notions of childhood—notions that are immanent in Zlata’s own characterization of childhood. The concept of a child’s occupation of a separate realm of existence is so dramatic that the child’s existence as a child is guaranteed, in much of nineteenth-century British and American literature, by her absolute non-existence—that is, by her death.21

112 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature For example, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Beth March is such a model of child-like goodness and purity that her death becomes absolutely necessary. If Beth—who, as Elizabeth Lennox Keyser argues, is the only March daughter who is “incapable of imagining a life outside her parents’ home”— were to live beyond her tender years, she would have to abandon her position at the center of a close-knit circle of sisters. Thus, Beth’s death guarantees that her childhood has been preserved intact; ultimately, her loss, although sad, is considerably less tragic than the losses incurred by her sisters, who must eventually leave their childhoods behind forever.22 Similarly, William Wordsworth’s dead child-figure Lucy, entombed as she is in “rocks and stones and trees,” remains in the enviable position of never having to feel the “touch of earthly years”; instead, her body persists in an ideal state of harmony with nature (“rolled round in earth’s diurnal course”) while her living counterparts depart, slowly and inevitably, from that state of original grace (246). Anne Frank’s iconic photograph, insofar as it is a testament to her death, thus can be read simultaneously as a testament to her inviolate childhood. The black-and-white cover-photograph, taken four years before her death, literally covers over the desire to grow up which Anne regularly expresses within the diary’s pages, and instead puts forth the image of a young girl suspended, quite blissfully, in a perpetual state of childhood grace. The fresh-faced girl in the photograph will never outgrow her charmingly youthful appearance. Instead, her death guarantees that her purity and her absolute completeness as a child remains intact, embalmed and made available to an adult gaze desperately in search of evidence of an elusive golden age of inviolate childhood. Moreover, the photograph, and the death it implies, assures the viewer that Anne will never emerge from the camps to tell of her suffering, or—even more disturbingly—to revise her famous proclamation regarding the innate goodness of humankind. Rather, the image assures the viewer that her childish ideals remain as frozen as her photographic pose, undisputable and inviolate. Anne’s suspension in a perpetual state of childhood grace is further ensured by the decision, on the part of the cover designer of the diary’s definitive edition, to crop the photograph so that only Anne’s face and the tops of her shoulders are visible. For contemporary American readers, this cropped version of the photograph bears a striking likeness to the school portrait, which traditionally focuses only on the subject’s face against a neutral background. Although the ostensible purpose of the school portrait is to capture the uniqueness of each individual schoolchild—hence, its focus on the child’s face and its unmistakable features—it ultimately diminishes the difference between each photographed subject and thus posits one child as interchangeable with any other. The child is directed—occasionally, with gentle prodding—to incline her head, to square her shoulders, to look directly into the camera’s lens, and (most importantly) to smile. Although the occasional photograph might reveal a mischievous grimace or a stubborn frown, most school photographs reproduce the same image of a well-behaved and poised little individual who appears to be happy simply

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 113 being a child—an image that is more clearly aligned with the adult’s desire to remember childhood as a pleasant and neatly ordered realm of existence than it is with the child’s own inclinations. Such a desire to imagine the child’s fixture in a happy and self-contained little world is underscored, moreover, by the neutral background of each school portrait: the child is seized from the flux of time and the materiality of space and is suspended instead in a dimension that exists outside of the affairs of everyday existence.23 The cropped cover photograph of the Diary’s definitive edition, which obscures its historically specific “workplace” setting, thus reproduces the neutralizing effect of the school portrait and extracts Anne from her contemporary context. Moreover, by limiting the viewer’s focus solely on Anne’s face, and thereby simulating the universalizing effect of the school photograph, the cover portrait suggests that she is not unlike any other child who obligingly smiles and tilts her head for the camera’s benefit. Significantly, by positing Anne as “any child”—virtually interchangeable with children from around the globe and across the expanse of time—the photograph posits her as The Child. That is, if the aim of the school photograph is to elide difference and to posit one child as effectively indistinguishable from others, then the isolation and display of a single photograph stands in, metonymically, for the rest.24 If the photograph of Anne Frank makes possible a collectively shared image of the young writer as an ideal child, then George Stevens’s immensely popular 1959 film, The Diary of Anne Frank (based on the equally popular stage play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett) further bolsters this image. As several critics have noted,25 the Hollywood film dramatically downplays Anne’s religious, cultural, and national background, ostensibly so that its young protagonist may be more accessible to a largely Protestant American audience. Rather than focusing on the conflicts Anne registers in her diary regarding her identity as an assimilated German Jew living in Holland, the film merely nods at her Jewish identity by inserting a token Hannukah scene, which so resembles a typical Christmas dinner that it renders any question of religious and cultural difference invisible. Moreover, although the film makes clear that the Frank family has gone into hiding because, as Jews, they are being persecuted by the Nazis, the Nazi threat is reduced to a disembodied wail of a police siren and to the lone appearance of a night-watchman, whose bemusement at finding Peter’s cat dissipates not only the dramatic tension of a key scene but the sense of mortal danger felt daily by the Frank and Van Daan families. Most significantly, the film’s conclusion forgoes an account of Anne’s deportation to and death in BergenBelsen, and focuses instead on a chaste kiss she shares with Peter; furthermore, at the film’s final dissolve, Anne makes her famous declaration, via voice-over, that “all men are really good at heart.” Here, history gives way to a formulaic Hollywood ending: the audience is left to conclude, as Zlata once does, that “it looks as though everything will be all right” (Filipović 6). Virtually evacuated of any historical specificity, Stevens’s fi lm seems to resemble less an adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary than it does a retelling

114 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature of The Swiss Family Robinson.26 At the center of this “adventure story”— which renders Anne’s attic home as distant and mysterious as a faraway island—Anne, played by the waifl ike Millie Perkins, alternately giggles, simpers, romps, and pouts throughout the duration of the fi lm. Perkins’s doe-eyed character is naïve, almost maniacally exuberant, charmingly attached to her father, and a tiny bit naughty—a veritable female Little Lord Fauntleroy, with a pinch of Tom Sawyer, for the 1950s.27 However, the fi lm’s accentuation of Anne’s childish magnetism downplays the diarist’s more “adult-like” intellectual sophistication. For example, when Anne walks in on a dispute between the elder Van Daans, she ingenuously remarks that she has “never seen grown-ups quarrel before”—a guileless observation that seems uncharacteristic of the Diary’s Anne, who not only documents the various domestic spats that occur in the attic, but also analyzes them with an almost derisive pleasure. Clearly, this saccharine rendering of Anne Frank, arguably inspired not so much by the Diary itself as it is by the photographic image of the young girl, posits a figure who meets Zlata’s requirements for a “proper” childhood. Even if the Anne one meets in the diary is, like Zlata, bereft of “school,” “friends,” “sun,” “trees,” and “chocolate and sweets”—all those elements Zlata deems essential to a “normal” childhood—the image of Anne that remains prevalent in cultural memory is one of a virginal young girl, forever smiling and forever about to record in her diary her newest adventures in her secret hiding place. It is no wonder, then, that Zlata appeals to Anne’s memory by adopting her voice and literary style—for, in doing so, she is able to reclaim that voice of childhood innocence she fears she has lost. Indeed, Zlata’s application of Anne’s voice and style may be considered as analogous to a physical incorporation, or consumption, of the desired Romantic child. In her study of Charles Lamb, Judith Plotz argues that the Romantic poet, who was also a legendary gourmand, exhibits in his poetical oeuvre a desire for food that is equaled only by his desire for his lost childhood. These twin desires are not unrelated, according to Plotz; rather, she argues, Lamb’s longing for childhood is often, not so subtly, expressed simultaneously in his expressions of appetite. In the poem “The Dessert,” for example, Lamb’s speaker compares a child’s features to such delicacies as peaches, strawberries, cherries, and cakes: the child is rendered “explicitly good enough to eat” (127). According to Plotz, these images of virtual child-consumption reveal a desire on the part of the poet/speaker to assimilate the childhood he has lost (and which is still available in the “dessert” he wishes to devour) into the adult-self he has become. The poem thus suggests a pattern of incorporation by eating a child, an act once a source of continuing comfort and the mark of a fall. To preserve the child self within the adult is to consent to growing up into the adult social world and is thus . . . the beginning of civilization. It is also a strategy of self-

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 115 protection, preserving what is most lovely in the original self and keeping it safe within the enclosing walls of flesh. (127–128) Plotz’s argument regarding Lamb’s desire to consume the child in order to assure the existence and protection of the “child within” may be extended to Zlata’s case as well. A self-described “child hungry for everything,” Zlata—for reasons very different from those of Lamb—expresses a continued obsession with food which is linked to her obsession with childhood. She craves, for example, not only “chocolates and sweets” and “chicken, a good cutlet, pizza [and] lasagna,” (183) but also a “normal” middle-class childhood that is characterized, in part, by the assured presence of these delicacies. Thrust prematurely into adulthood, Zlata longs for a time in which not only her material needs (including her dietary needs) were provided for her, but when she had the luxury to move and play as she wished, secure in the knowledge that she was safe and protected. Her appeal to Anne Frank’s memory, then, can be read as one marked by an intense nostalgia. Recognizing in Anne Frank (or in culturally circulating images of Anne Frank) the qualities of wholeness and invulnerability that she herself desires, Zlata seeks to assimilate those traces of her predecessor that are most readily and materially available to her—that is, the language of Anne’s narrative. Zlata’s incorporation of Anne’s narrative strategies—and I use the term “incorporation” deliberately, in order to gesture toward both her borrowing of Anne’s literary techniques and her assimilation of another’s voice into the body of her own work—implies a twin recognition. By having to assimilate, digestively, as it were, the voice of the desired child, Zlata recognizes childhood’s existence as external to her own, present situation; that is, she confirms, as Plotz argues that Lamb does, her own adulthood, her own distance from childhood. By the same token, however, by internalizing the voice of another child (an “eternal” child), she protects and preserves those qualities she most valued in her own (lost) childhood, and which she sees reflected in Anne Frank: her curiosity, her optimism, and her humanist impulses. In other words, Zlata’s evocation of Anne Frank through her use of the latter’s voice and narrative strategies serves as the catalyst by which she might achieve the unification of the “adult self” she has suddenly come to occupy and the “child self” whose traces she wishes to preserve. If, as I have argued above, Zlata’s dependence upon the Diary’s narrative strategies allow her to render her own, potentially fragmentary, narrative relatively more coherent and cohesive, then it can be argued as well that her appeal to a childfigure perpetually resting on the “shores of childhood” allows Zlata to “shore up” her own sense of childhood.

“A Bundle of Contradictions” To return to the text with which this discussion began, Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, although it is a fantasy and is thus different from

116 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature Zlata’s Diary in terms of genre and ostensible “social importance,” nevertheless bears a helpful analogous relationship to the young Bosnian’s diary. Like her fictional counterpart, Harry, Zlata finds herself unwittingly implicated in a social-political crisis which radically destabilizes her own sense of selfhood. Moreover, like Harry, she attempts to resolve the question of her position within this new and troubling set of circumstances by turning to a diary composed before her birth—one whose narrative, she believes, might assist her in composing her own account of her present situation. Unlike Harry, however, Zlata is not so much “absorbed” by her predecessor’s diary as she is willing to “consume” it. That is, unlike Harry, who complies with being physically transported into the past, Zlata does not passively submit herself to Anne’s diary, overlooking the historical and cultural differences between them. Rather, Zlata remains attentive to the particular set of historical circumstances she currently faces, and actively incorporates her predecessor’s narrative strategies only insofar as they might guide her in creating a cogent, cohesive representation of her present situation and her role within it. However, there is yet another aspect of Rowling’s novel that may further expose questions inherent in Zlata’s relationship with Anne Frank’s diary. This is Harry’s essential misreading of the “very secret diary” and the narrator, Tom Riddle, whom he encounters within it. As his name implies, Riddle is not who he seems. The voice which emerges from Riddle’s magical diary is solicitous and mildly conspiratorial: it is apparent that he will become yet another one of Harry’s avuncular allies, ready to assist the young protagonist in his hot pursuit of truth. The memory-image of the young Riddle that Harry encounters “within” the diary only seems to confirm Harry’s initial impression of his elder: the youthful Riddle is a serious, buttoned-down prefect, who, like Harry, breaks the rules solely when he is intent upon exposing a wrong committed on school grounds. Only when it is almost too late does Harry realize that Tom Riddle is actually none other than his arch-enemy, Lord Voldemort himself. Flattered by Riddle’s ostensible show of confidence in him, and eager to see pleasing parallels between himself and the mystery diarist, Harry interprets the diary—and the past events to which it bears witness—according to his own desires, rather than through a critical, contextualizing investigation of Riddle’s narrative and the motives expressed within it. Although, ultimately, Harry’s history and memory is in fact bound up with Riddle’s own—a relationship which Rowling’s seven-part series undertakes to expose—it is certainly not the connection Harry had originally imagined. Similarly, Zlata’s Diary reveals a narrator/protagonist whose appeal to another’s diary is motivated more by her needs and desires than by any particularly attentive reading of the actual text and of the self-representation of its narrator. As I have argued above, Zlata adopts Anne’s use of form and narrative strategies—her address of an interlocutor, her approach to historical documentation, and her inflection of voice and tone—in order not only to lend her own narrative greater cohesion but to recapture those “childlike” qualities

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 117 she senses present in Anne but lost to herself. Nevertheless, despite her apparent close attention to her predecessor’s use of language and form, Zlata seems comparatively inattentive to some of the content it expresses—specifically, to Anne’s intense dissatisfaction with her own experience of childhood. Instead, she appears to be swayed more by the more Romantic, extra-textual cultural memory of Anne as the virginal child-martyr, forever suspended, through her death, in a state of happiness and charmingly blind faith. Admittedly, Zlata may have overlooked certain aspects of Anne’s less ideal childhood qualities because, in most editions of the Diary, many examples of them are not-so-mysteriously absent. That is, most editions of Frank’s text are not the original manuscript she herself arranged (now known as versions “a” and “b”) but the text her father, Otto Frank, edited (version “c”).28 According to the introduction of the definitive version of the Diary, Otto Frank, who assumed responsibility for the diary’s original publication in 1947, expurgated certain passages that either involved “unflattering” representations of Anne’s fellow annex-members or included sexually explicit content (vi). Although, as the introduction notes, Otto Frank’s editorial decisions were motivated by a desire to respect the memory of his deceased fellow annex-members and a prudent wish to withhold potentially disturbing sexual content from mass audiences, these decisions seem as much influenced by a wish to preserve intact certain deeply held ideals of childhood. For example, although Otto Frank’s caution regarding respecting the memory of the dead is reasonable—and thus it is understandable that, even in the definitive version, the individuals with whom the Franks lived continue to be referred to by their pseudonyms, rather than by their given names—this caution seems to speak not only to an official respect for the dead but to a certain uneasiness with the contradictions inherent in many of Anne’s professed sentiments. After all, how should one reconcile passages in which Anne looks skyward and declares her faith in humankind’s goodness with those in which she caustically refers to one of her elders, Mrs. Van Daan, as a “silly, sniveling specimen of humanity”? (321) If the former image of the meditative—even prayerful—Anne confirms a Romantic notion of the child’s innocence and innate goodness, the latter introduces the suspicion that young girls, for all their naïve charm, can just as much be insolent, angry, and—worse yet—aware of grown-ups’ occasionally transparent behavior. Thus, the expurgation of Anne’s more vituperative statements easily resolves what could pose an uncomfortable ambivalence.29 Given his arguable insistence upon purging those passages that reveal the “bad” Anne in order to maintain an image of the “good” one, Otto Frank’s claim to expurgating overtly sexual content from the diary because “at the time of the diary’s initial publication . . . it was not customary to write openly about sex, and certainly not in books for young adults” seems suspicious, if not disingenuous (vi). After all, in the Diary itself (albeit only in the definitive version) Anne expresses her desire to read “adult” books owned by the Frank family and reports with great glee having pilfered a semi-pornographic

118 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature novel in which the female protagonist strips down to simulate childbirth and produces a “sausage” on her bedroom floor; this book, Anne notes, also mentions menstruation and alludes to prostitution (51–52). This fact alone belies the claim that sex was not openly written about in the early 1940s: indeed, even a respectable bourgeois family like the Franks owned books of questionable sexual content which they could not successfully keep hidden from their teenage daughter. This suggests that the motivation behind the expurgation of more sexual material was more conceivably the denial of what Freud calls the “polymorphously perverse” sexuality of the child—a crucial aspect of childhood that Jacqueline Rose argues, that children’s literature has traditionally waged a desperate effort to repress.30 However, even a great many of those passages of the Diary that were not expurgated are in some way or other concerned with Anne’s desire to grow up, and the various ways in which she feels thwarted in her attempts to be recognized as an adult. Literally trapped in the attic, the Anne of the Diary is trapped, as well, in a state of childhood she desperately longs to outgrow. She confesses, for example, that she can no longer love her mother “with the devotion of a child” and declares that, even in the crowded confines of the attic, she may assert some degree of independence (159): “I have to mother myself,” she announces after a particularly furious row with her mother; “I’ve cut myself adrift from them. I’m charting my own course, and we’ll see where it leads me” (141). In the well-known final passage of the Diary, Anne refers to herself as a “bundle of contradictions”: a self whose serious, contemplative inclinations are perpetually in conflict with her cheerful, more exuberant exterior. Frustrated by what she perceives to be her inability to reconcile these two aspects of her personality, Anne ends her entry (and, unbeknownst to her, her diary) on a particularly woeful note: I get cross, then sad, and fi nally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world. (337) It is difficult, perhaps, not to dismiss this final sentiment as simply a symptom of adolescent angst, or to regard it—as well as Anne’s term, a “bundle of contradictions”—as somehow charming in its naïvté. Yet this is precisely the reflexively patronizing adult attitude Anne protests, and which makes her so “cross.” To be treated as an adult, rather than as a child, is equivalent for Anne with being treated with a certain amount of dignity: she is “no longer the baby and spoiled little darling whose every deed can be laughed at” (142). Thus, it is ironic that the diarist who so wished to be considered a woman is now known to her readers by the title, “young girl,” just as it is ironic that the photographic image with which she is recognized is one taken before significant portions of her diary were written.

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 119 The insistence with which this memory of Anne-as-young-girl has survived into the contemporary moment speaks to a discomfort with precisely those “contradictions” Anne articulates so clearly in her final entry. According to Rose, adults wish to see in the child a “unified subject” who has successfully transcended the messiness of the Oedipal drama in order to emerge, once and for all, a coherent and stable self; to see a child in this way is to confirm the adult’s own sense of stability. The child’s expression of an innately “perverse” sexuality—or, concomitantly, any behavior that transgresses adult notions of a well-ordered self—thus threatens adult expectations that “subjectivity [is] something which we can fully know, or that ultimately can be cohered” and must be summarily repressed (15). It is not surprising, then, that Anne’s representation of herself as a “bundle of contradictions” should be replaced in cultural memory by a frozen, smiling portrait—or by a film character who, in her transference of affection from her father to Peter Van Daan, moves swiftly and comfortably through the Oedipal drama to emerge with an affirmation of the goodness, and implicitly, the wholeness, of humankind. Nor is it surprising that Zlata should prefer this conventional rendering of Anne Frank over the “contradictory” Anne of the actual diary, for, considering Zlata’s own increasing sense of self-fragmentation, the iconic image of Anne promises a solidity that a “bundle of contradictions” cannot. Zlata, however, is not herself immune to the uses readers make of her own image. If Anne Frank, who wants so desperately to be considered as an adult, paradoxically has been iconized as an eternal child, Zlata, who desires nothing more than to return to her childhood, has become celebrated—in a paradox that is inversely proportional to the one inherent in Anne Frank’s case—for her prematurely “adult” voice. Whatever strategies the narrator might employ in order to rescue and secure a childlike voice—from her evocation of the iconic child, Anne Frank, to her temperamental characterizations of the siege as “STUPID!” to her sentimental declarations of love for her kitten—Zlata nevertheless earns the reputation of being “precociously wise” (Newsweek 25). This characterization is perhaps not so much influenced by a reading of the actual diary as it is by the introduction that prefaces it, written by Canadian journalist Janine Di Giovanni. In her introduction, Di Giovanni describes the first time she met the young diarist. Filipović, she remarks, seemed to her to be “more adult, more resigned and stoical, than most of the adults I knew” (ix). She notes, for example, that Filipović did not flinch as Di Giovanni did at the sound of shelling; likewise, she describes a meeting during which Filipović calmly consoled her own mother, who sobbed violently as she described the effects of war on her family. In a later passage of the introduction, Di Giovanni implies that Filipović seemed older and wiser than even herself: At one point, I turned around to see Zlata. I placed my hand on her shoulder and asked, “Are you all right?” She looked at me gravely and said, “I have to be all right.” Her voice was very old and it chilled me. Not only had

120 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature she lost her innocence, those wonderful years when she should have been meeting boys and laughing with her girlfriends, but she was in the terrible reversed position of having to be strong for the sake of her parents. Even if she wanted to, she could not fall apart. (x, emphasis mine) The consternation Di Giovanni expresses upon observing this stoical child who cares for her own parents is uncannily similar to the intense unease Henry Mayhew expresses in his interview with the little watercress girl in London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Mayhew is utterly confounded by the young vendor he interviews, who, while she was only “eight years of age, had entirely lost all childish ways, and was, indeed, in thoughts and manner, a woman” (64). Finding the girl’s mature bearing to be incompatible with her immature physical features, Mayhew realizes that he “simply did not know how to talk with her” (64). As a middle-class Victorian, Mayhew expects the watercress girl to enjoy games, toys, and days spent in the park; consequently, he is dumbfounded when the young vendor expresses surprise at the very existence of these pastimes. Likewise, he is baffled by the matter-of-factness with which this child discusses her long hours of labor, the care she gives to her younger siblings, and her poor diet. Clearly, the watercress girl does not have what Mayhew considers to be a “childhood”—and, what is more, she does not even seem to care. Mayhew’s bewilderment (as well as the girl’s indifference) suggests that, ultimately, he does not perceive childhood as an innate quality, but rather as a category demarcated by class. His interaction with this girl is mediated, that is, by a cultural notion of childhood that is contingent upon the presence of a domestic circle in which parents are clearly caretakers and in which children are relatively passive. Likewise, his image of childhood involves the presence of certain material accommodations such as clothing and toys which mark the child clearly as a child. Moreover, Mayhew’s conclusion that the watercress girl is not really a child implies that childhood is not a state of being that she naturally inhabits, but rather is a quality that he, as an adult, has the power to determine. Di Giovanni’s impressions of Filipović, which so clearly echo Mayhew’s observation of the watercress girl, are similarly inflected through class. Although Di Giovanni’s introduction suggests that she is drawn to Filipović out of a concern for the girl’s physical safety and well-being, her chief concern seems to be with what she considers Filipović’s lack of those luxuries to which she expects every child is entitled. Her introduction draws less attention to Filipović’s vulnerability to sniper-fire and shelling, and to the entire complex of racial injustice which effects her placement in mortal danger, than it does to Zlata’s inability to enjoy “pop music, boys, Linda Evangelista and Claudia Schiffer, skiing in the mountains outside Sarajevo and her next holiday in Italy or at the beach” (v–vi). Confronted with a child whose “adult-like” responsibilities leave her no time or opportunity for these decidedly middleclass pleasures, Di Giovanni is hesitant to recognize Filipović as a child at

Anne Frank’s “Own True Heir” • 121 all, and instead pronounces the girl “old.” Like Mayhew, DiGiovanni assumes the role of arbiter of a girl’s childhood (or lack thereof), and, like Mayhew, the shock she registers upon her interaction with this girl seems less directed toward the object of her observation than it does a crisis she perceives, if only unconsciously, as she witnesses an exception to her bourgeois expectations. Of course, Zlata’s Diary demonstrates the fact that its author-narrator, unlike the watercress girl, is keenly aware of her interviewer’s understanding of a “proper” childhood; moreover, Zlata’s narrative reveals that she, unlike her nineteenth-century counterpart, shares her interlocutor’s desire that she might have access to those material goods and practices that may render her closer to the bourgeois ideal of childhood. However, paradoxically, it is precisely the demands impressed upon her by Di Giovanni and other journalists who take interest in her that make possible Filipović’s reputation as a prematurely adult child, rather than as an “innocent” child. In the latter half of her narrative, Zlata reports the publicity she receives after passages from the former half of her diary are published by UNICEF: scores of international journalists greet her at home and at school with gifts of chocolates and flashing cameras, and ABC News honors her as its “Person of the Week.” In an entry dated 17 July 1993, Zlata describes how a Spanish journalist photographs her at a book promotion—a relatively extravagant affair, by wartime standards—posed atop jerrycans of water, emblems of wartime deprivation (156). The press’s obvious concern with Zlata’s status as a war victim—indeed, as a spokesperson of sorts for all suffering Bosnians—arguably influenced the revised, complete version of Zlata’s Diary, which amplifies accounts of wartime deprivation and the “adult” responsibilities Zlata must take on in the face of them. An entry in which Zlata documents the origins of her diary’s public form is particularly telling: Maja [an older friend who works at a community center Zlata attends] is still working with our teacher Irena Vidovic. And the other day, Maja asks me: Do you keep a diary, Fipa (my nickname)?” I say: “Yes.” And Maja says, “Is it full of your own secrets or is it about the war?” And I say, “No, it’s about the war.” And she says, “Fipa, you’re terrific.” She said that because they want to publish a child’s diary and it just might be mine, which means—YOU, MIMMY! And so I copied a part of you into another notebook and you, Mimmy, went to the City Assembly to be looked at. And I’ve just heard, Mimmy, that you’re going to be published! You’re coming out for UNICEF week! SUPER! (89–90) Zlata’s response indicates that, if she wants her voice to be heard—something she clearly desires—then she must concentrate on providing her audience with what it ostensibly wants to hear: that is, a testimony as to the effects of war. To

122 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature accomplish this, however, she must refrain from dwelling on those aspects of her life—her “own secrets”—which might impede her primary goal of documenting the siege. Consequently, she denies the reader a glimpse into the unexpressed desires and fears that shape and motivate her, ostensibly because she assumes that such “secrets” would be of little interest to her reader. Thus, if there is a child’s voice in Zlata’s narrative, that voice has been repressed— not, as in the case of Anne Frank, by an editor who deems certain passages inappropriate, or by an audience that would rather forget the troubling significance of her secrets, but by the author-narrator herself, who modifies her prose as she constitutes herself according to an adult gaze. Thus, if Zlata is celebrated as an “Anne Frank of Sarajevo” (v)—in effect, as Anne Frank’s “own true heir”—it is only insofar as she is an heir to a tradition which strategically undercuts the child’s voice, even as it professes to reveal it once and for all.

Chapter Four “The Past Is a Foreign Country” The Individual, Diaspora, and Nation in Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s The Hunger

“The past is a foreign country,” declares L. P. Hartley’s narrator in the opening line of The Go-Between (1958): “they do things differently there” (5). Hartley’s novel—whose first line is often quoted but whose subsequent content is sadly underappreciated—is narrated by a middle-aged man who reluctantly recalls a childhood trauma that resulted in a nervous breakdown. As the narrator, Leo Colston, describes the events leading up to this catastrophe, he scrupulously draws his twentieth-century audience’s attention to the very otherness of the turn-of-the-century historical context in which these incidents occurred, documenting such details as the importance of wearing a proper suit to meals, the regularity of morning prayers in an English great house, and—most crucially—the taboo nature of inter-class romantic affairs. Likewise, he deftly underscores the differences between his childhood self and his present, adult identity, thereby suggesting that one’s youth is as impossible to directly access and represent as the national past itself. And yet, even as Hartley’s narrator observes a border between the present and the past, and even as he never forgets the distressing consequences of the event he remembers—he was an inadvertent participant in a secret affair gone terribly wrong—he nevertheless occasionally succumbs to bouts of nostalgia that threaten his careful respect for the past’s distance and otherness. His sensuous descriptions of the pastoral setting in which the disaster took place betray an inadvertent longing for a time that seemed simpler but indeed was not; moreover, his frequent allusions to Greek mythology, although made with irony, nevertheless grant his setting and characters a certain “golden age” luster. Such moments of unintentional nostalgia enrich, rather than weaken, the significance of Hartley’s opening line. As even newcomers to post-colonial 123

124 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature theory know well, the perceived “foreignness” of a place (or, as it were, time) often leads to its characterization as exotic—a characterization which problematically invites the projected desires of the beholder onto the “othered” beholden.1 Hartley’s novel thus subtly and masterfully demonstrates the ease with which even the most scrupulous observation of the barrier between past and present might lapse into nostalgic transgression. It is tempting and altogether too easy, his narrative suggests, for an individual to colonize the past and to refashion it (and himself) according to present-day needs, wishes, discourses, and mores. Certainly, the problem of maintaining a proper relation to the “foreign” past—or what one might call an ethical relation to the historical past—is a key motif in the second-generation themed texts under consideration in this study. Like Hartley’s novel, these texts feature protagonists who are mindful of the temporal and cultural differences between themselves and the elders whose memories have shaped them. In turn, these narratives remain wary of an all-too-easy appropriation or colonization of the “foreign” past. This is not to say, of course, that these books fail to admit memory’s necessary mediation. To be sure, they suggest that memory, particularly second-generation memory, involves narrative emplotment; thus, like all narrative, it is subject to interpretive acts informed by the specific material and political circumstances in which they occur. Indeed, each implies that acts of social transformation necessitate some degree of creative interpretation of former memories of the traumatic past. The radical potential of Lowry’s novel, for example, depends upon its protagonist’s re-narrativization of the memories he has inherited, just as the revolutionary vision implicit in both Blume’s novel and Filipović’s diary involves the recognition of associations between different historical moments of violence and injustice. Nevertheless, each of these texts insist that, no matter how intimately connected their protagonists might be to their respective elders, they can never fully inhabit their forebears’ subject positions. The palimpsestic or ghost image–like character of secondgeneration memory implies not only a recognition of the intermingling of two orientations to a past event but also a consciousness of their difference. Although, for example, Jonas is profoundly influenced by the memories that the Giver imparts to him, he does not confuse his position with that of his mentor. Likewise, although Sally plays at being her cousin—ultimately, as I argue, to productive ends—she nevertheless remains mindful of her present identity. Just so, Filipović’s diary, although it problematically romanticizes the figure of Anne Frank, never once directly equates Zlata with Anne; nor does it confuse the siege of Sarajevo with the Holocaust. What, then, might one make of a representation of second-generation memory that, unlike the previously mentioned ones, does not appear to consider the ethical implications of breaching the divide between the present and the “foreign” past? How might one respond to a novel that envisions secondgeneration memory as a natural or unproblematic phenomenon in which the

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 125 apparent tensions between self and other, past and present, do not remain in critical tension but rather are easily resolved? These questions apply, quite dramatically, to Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s young adult (YA) novel The Hunger (1999). In the course of this novel, its protagonist, Paula, travels to early twentieth-century Armenia after having suffered cardiac arrest from a debilitating eating disorder; during her adventures in Turkish-occupied Armenia, she learns the lessons of “true hunger” and returns to the present resolved to combat her anorexic habits. Even a brief synopsis of Skrypuch’s plot makes clear the degree to which it flattens out what should be dramatic historical differences, rendering the individual anxieties faced by a present-day North American schoolgirl virtually interchangeable with the persecution of more than a million Armenians.2 Ultimately, The Hunger is so driven by didactic “consciousness raising”—about eating disorders and the Armenian genocide, respectively—that it becomes inattentive to questions of historical and cultural difference and the related problem, evoked by Hartley, of approaching the past in any ethical manner. Indeed, as Kenneth Kidd has rightly argued, The Hunger’s “ostensible ‘historicity’ feels almost painfully voluntarist and presentist” (174). However, it is precisely because Skrypuch’s novel is “voluntarist and presentist” that it may expose a particular investment in memory and history by children’s fiction, specifically, and by contemporary Western culture more generally. At the heart of The Hunger is a complex of intertwined cultural fantasies that exist in tension with Hartley’s famous dictum. According to the logic of Skrypuch’s novel, the past is not so much a “foreign country” as a tourist destination where meanings correspond fluently with those that circulate in the traveler’s home country. Moreover, the text suggests that the meanings that can be extracted from this not-so-foreign past can be easily assimilated, exported, and subsequently applied in the vacationer’s own, native circumstances. Skrypuch’s novel, unlike Hartley’s or the texts previously discussed in this study, reaffirms the notion that the past is not only directly accessible but ultimately personally useful: like a new territory opened up to colonial exploitation, the past may be mined for pragmatic solutions to present-day problems. Moreover, unlike novels such as The Giver and Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself, which suggest that a second-generation relation to the past might prompt a collective re-envisioning of present-day injustices, The Hunger is concerned primarily with the past’s role in personal reinvention, rather than in collective political action. It is important, therefore, to study the ways in which a novel like The Hunger negotiates history and memory on multiple levels—explicitly, with respect to the individual, and implicitly, in relation to diasporic and national formations—in order to distinguish a particularly conservative investment in second-generation memory. Insofar as Skrypuch’s novel employs the conventions of the problem novel—a literary form inherited by young adult literature from an earlier nineteenth-century tradition—it focuses primarily on

126 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature individual, rather than collective, orientations to the past. By drawing on this literary convention, which insists upon pragmatic individual resolutions to larger systemic problems, it suggests that an individual might draw on her vicarious investment in her elders’ past experiences in order to cultivate her personal development rather than to participate in a collective transformation of existing structures of injustice. As a formulaic and only loosely developed problem novel, however, Skrypuch’s novel invites figurative readings that transcend its immediate intentions or investments. The protagonist’s anorexic body, I argue, might be read as a figure through which the narrative attempts to resolve, if only unconsciously, the conditions in which diasporic immigrant communities paradoxically receive sustenance from memories of a traumatic past. Moreover, the protagonist’s attempt to reconcile her inherited memories with her present circumstances might be read as an allegory of Canadian policies of multiculturalism, which aim to reconcile constituent diasporic memories with a larger state identity. To these ends, the narrative is significantly influenced by what Svetlana Boym calls “restorative nostalgia” or the attempted “transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” (xviii). That is, it reaffirms the desire of both local and national communities to recuperate what they imagine to be a lost sense of wholeness by exporting and repurposing past identities and traditions. The extent to which Skrypuch’s novel depends upon such restorative impulses to reaffirm, rather than to critique, both diasporic and state mythologies therefore circumscribes its representation of second-generation memory. That is, it limits the radical potential of this form of memory—a form which may prompt its bearer to question the ostensible naturalness of dominant ideologies—by depicting it within a narrative structure that ultimately confirms them.

The Problem Novel and the Time-Travel Novel The Hunger’s presentist and pragmatic orientation to the past is enabled, in part, by its blending of two separate, but not entirely dissimilar, sub-genres of YA fiction: the problem novel and the time-travel novel. The central purpose of Skrypuch’s novel is to address a dilemma commonly faced by North American teenagers—that is, adolescent eating disorders—which it seeks to resolve in the course of its 184 pages. Unlike most YA problem novels, however, The Hunger proposes that the solution to this particular problem might be found not so much in the resources available within the protagonist’s present moment (e.g., therapy or consultation of wiser adults) but rather in the distant past. Indeed, Skrypuch’s novel makes it clear that its heroine is not able to recognize and take advantage of present opportunities for healing until she first comes to terms with an historical era that long preceded her birth. Like other YA problem novels, Skrypuch’s is ultimately prescriptive: it provides a

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 127 veritable management plan for the cure of a disorder commonly suffered by adolescents. Unlike most problem novels, however, the therapeutic solution it prescribes specifically entails a journey to a “foreign” past. According to Josephine Guy, the term “problem novel” was first coined in the 1950s to “refer to a body of English fiction written in the late 1840’s and 1850’s which allegedly takes as its subject matter large-scale problems in contemporary British society, problems which in turn were products of changing demographic patterns and changes in work practices associated with the accelerating industrialization of the British economy” (3). The “principal distinction” of the problem novels such as Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1853) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) existed “not so much in any formal features or properties . . . but rather the non-literary ambitions which certain authors were assumed to hold” (4). Nineteenth-century problem novels were inspired by the belief that social ills could be realistically represented in fiction and in turn ameliorated by readers who were moved by the texts’ frank portrayals of these ills. Significantly, Guy notes, the “large-scale issues” addressed by problem novels “were addressed by recommending changes in individual behaviours rather than changes to social structures” (10, emphasis in original). Victorians, she explains, lacked certain theoretical frames of reference so accessible to twentieth-century authors and critics—for example, Marxist criticism—to envision social ills as contingent upon larger or more encompassing cultural and economic structures. Rather, they viewed problems such as alcoholism (or “drunkenness”) as forms of “personal immorality” that could be rectified solely by the personal efforts of the individual; hence, the perceived mediating and corrective effect of the novel, whose form invites private cogitation and (self-)reflection3 (9). More recently, the term “problem novel” has been used to designate a subgenre of didactic literature written explicitly for adolescents. Like many other artifacts of children’s culture, which owe their existence to forms cast off by earlier adult-oriented texts,4 the YA problem novel preserves some of the social sensibilities expressed by its Victorian counterpart. This form, too, represents perceived social ills—for example, drug use and underage drinking, unwed pregnancy, and bullying—and in turn suggests that such problems might be remedied by personal moral development rather than through critical evaluation of encompassing social structures. Indeed, as Roberta Seelinger Trites has argued, the problem novel can be most readily associated with the Entwicklungsroman, or novel of development, which demonstrates an aspect of the protagonist’s personal transformation within a specific and limited situation (14). In order to meet its prescriptive objective, the YA problem novel involves a hero or heroine, only sufficiently developed to enhance reader identification, who suffers dramatically upon her deviance from socially prescribed norms and ultimately triumphs upon her integration into the social whole. Into this carefully prepared formula, the novel injects concentrated doses of “information” (say, about the casualties of premarital sex, or the effects of marijuana on

128 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature athletic performance) which might better educate the reader not only on the condition of the novel’s protagonist, but with regard to the “real-life issues” she might apprehend in her own life. In order to address individual solutions to more comprehensive social ills, some of these texts employ positive reinforcement. For example, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999) encourages its reader to share in the triumph of its protagonist Melinda, a teenaged rape victim who gradually abandons her habits of self-abjection as she begins to speak of her traumatic experience to a trusted teacher.5 Yet other YA novels depend on the tactic of “scaring straight” their adolescent readers. Beatrice Sparks’s Go Ask Alice (1971), for instance, features a drug-addled protagonist who ultimately perishes from the consequences of her addiction; in this way, her novel warns its readers that they might share in such a grisly fate if they engage in the same socially deviant behavior that its narrator does.6 Although certain texts, such as Speak, have earned critical acclaim, YA problem novels generally lack the critical approbation granted to their Victorian forebears. As Charles Frey and Lucy Rollin note in their introduction to an anthology of YA “classics” (which, significantly, includes no readily identifiable problem novel), the YA problem novel occupies a “second tier” of literature for young people (6). The contemporary YA problem novel, critics tend to agree, is insufficiently literary: it is easily identified by a general dearth of wit and an undistinguished, formulaic style that betrays its creator’s chief aim of tackling a social issue and resolving it once and for all (6). Other scholars of children’s literature tend to agree with Frey’s and Rollin’s diagnosis of the problem novel. “Too often,” writes David Russell, “problem novels contain predictable plots, shallow characters, and trite dialogue. Sometimes they are sensationalized and devolve into melodrama” (218). Likewise, Joseph Michael Sommers explains that problem novels sacrifice literary quality for information-laden quantity: such novels, he claims, seek to “focus specifically on what should be the side stories of the central narrative . . . and make . . . them the primary narratives of concern to the audience”7 (268). Although critics’ responses to problem novels might seem particularly harsh, they are not without merit. Indeed, The Hunger illustrates—at least, upon a first reading—the relative poverty of the YA problem novel as a literary form. Like other, equally critically disparaged problem novels, Skrypuch’s narrative is clearly focused on the problem of, and the attendant solution to, a present-day concern which it immediately addresses in its introduction and proceeds to address throughout its duration. Unlike its Victorian counterparts, however, it dispenses with the tiresome work of literary crafting in order to deal bluntly with the issue at hand. Skrypuch introduces her didactic program on her very first page. Like other representations of teenage angst—for example, Brian DePalma’s 1976 fi lm Carrie8 —The Hunger begins by depicting the veritable gauntlet that is the North American high school gym class. In the course of the exposition, Paula becomes increasingly despondent as she watches her classmates, whom

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 129 she imagines to be considerably smaller and more agile than she is, gracefully scale a balance beam. Paula’s own attempt at the exercise predictably results in a humiliating fall and prompts her insensitive phys-ed instructor to remark, “it’s a good thing you’ve got so much padding, otherwise you could have hurt yourself” (11). This first scene thus swiftly and unambiguously sets up the central problem of this problem novel: Paula is overweight (or at least she is convinced she is, after having been told so by certain unsympathetic individuals), and for this reason she feels inadequate to others’ expectations. Rather than allowing this dilemma to unfold gradually and subtly throughout the course of the narrative, the novel forefronts it immediately, relying on a battery of exclamations (e.g., “It’s so effortless for [the other girls]!”) to explicitly dramatize her situation. Moreover, the first chapter includes an equal amount of rhetorical questions (e.g., “Why did she have to be so big and awkward?”) which signal, in no uncertain terms, that the rest of the novel will document the process by which Paula comes to terms with her body-image and her scruples about “fitting in” (9). The chapters which follow elaborate on the ways in which Paula pursues her quest for both physical and academic “perfection” (15). Smarting from the callous remarks of her phys-ed teacher and those made her equally authoritative father, Paula soon adopts a rigorous exercise regimen and imposes upon herself a starvation diet, with the hope that her efforts will help her achieve a body to rival those of her supermodel idols. Paula extends her spartan regiment to her schoolwork as well: for example, she begins a class assignment on the Armenian genocide months before it is due. As the novel charts Paula’s quest for perfection, it makes little effort to render her a fully rounded character. Paula does not, in other words, meet E. M. Forster’s prerequisite for a character whose “inner as well as . . . outer life can be exposed” (74) to the reader to such an extent that he might walk away from the novel feeling as though he knows more about its protagonist than he does his own neighbor (87). Admittedly, the reader sees certain of Paula’s actions that the protagonist’s family and friends do not: he is led, for example, to Paula’s bathroom, where she triumphantly throws up her dinner, and he is given certain graphic descriptions of the protagonist’s desperate longing for forbidden food. However, the reader is never given any convincing impression of what motivates Paula to act in the way that she does. The novel hints at some possible explanations for the heroine’s behavior: Paula looks up to waifish supermodels; she wants her classmates to think she is agile and pretty; she is impressed by her mother’s ability to stick to a diet; and she wants to earn the respect of her demanding father. However, the novel fails to demonstrate how these factors influence her in the way that they do. It fails, for example, to exposit why Paula admires supermodels and finds them so attractive; moreover, it barely ever shows her interactions with her classmates, save for the sparse introductory gym-class sequence. Furthermore, it neglects to develop the history of Paula’s relationship with her parents, preferring

130 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature instead to usher them in and out of the narrative only so long as to pop a Lean Cuisine meal into the microwave or to deliver a stern lecture on the importance of strong academic and athletic performance. In the fi nal analysis, it seems as though the author has researched all of the psychological and social causes of anorexia/bulimia and has inserted examples of each into convenient points of the narrative with the assumption that the reader will consider these brief sketches reason enough to believe Paula’s driving obsession. In doing so, the novel forecloses the possibility of exposing any particular eccentricities or preferences on the protagonist’s part that might render her a uniquely defined character; moreover, it forbids any flashbacks that might illuminate specific events in Paula’s life that might have precipitated her present condition. Rather, it rests content with rendering Paula merely a “textbook case”: she embodies her problem, and not much else. True to the conventions of the problem novel, The Hunger ultimately supplies a solution to its protagonist’s dilemma. Increasingly depleted by both her ascetic physical regime and her academic efforts, Paula is ultimately hospitalized after suffering from cardiac arrest. Following her hospitalization, she allows herself to be admitted to a rehabilitation clinic specializing in eating disorders, where she avails herself to the ministration of wise elders. What makes this narrative different from other YA problem novels, however, is its depiction of events that occur between Paula’s ultimate crisis and her ultimate rehabilitation. That is, although Skrypuch’s novel generally adheres to conventions of the contemporary YA problem novel, it temporarily departs from this formula in order to embrace that of another sub-genre: the time-travel novel. While Paula’s emaciated body lies in a hospital bed, suspended between life and death, her spirit travels to early twentieth-century Armenia, where it presently inhabits the body of a young Armenian woman named Marta. As Marta, Paula struggles to survive under the newly imposed Turkish rule, enduring a grueling death march, hiding in a Turkish farmer’s cart under the protection of his young son, and literally taking cover in a Turkish harem until she is eventually saved by a pair of German missionaries. During her entire ordeal, Paula/Marta learns that her most powerful tool for survival is neither the set of coins she hides in her sleeve nor the sickle she superstitiously wears for protection, but her ability to nourish herself with whatever scraps of food come her way. When, for example, the Turkish soldiers assigned to guard the Armenian deportation distribute food rations, Paula/Marta consumes her allotted portion with a sensuous resolve: Marta marveled at the oily bread and was amazed at how hungry the sight of it made her feel. She took a huge bite and relished in the sensation of olive oil dripping down her chin. She ate every last crumb and every bit of cheese with a vague sense of triumph. The Turks may wish us to die, she thought, but I’m not about to cooperate. (115)

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 131 As Paula leaves the body of Marta and re-enters her own, she draws on the lessons of resistance she has learned during her adventures in Armenia and begins to consider food as “medicine” rather than as the “enemy” (160). During her steady recovery, she becomes closer to her once-neglectful parents and to her maternal grandmother, whose adoptive mother, she later learns, was precisely the Marta whose struggles Paula experienced while in her coma. Paula’s relationship to the past that she vicariously experiences is not as easily definable as, say, the ones represented in The Giver or Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself. Strictly speaking, the memories she internalizes are those of her step-great-grandmother, Marta; thus, her orientation to the Armenian genocide might be characterized as a product of fourth-generation memory. However, Paula cannot emplot or contextualize the dream-like memories she has inherited until she discusses them with her Gramma Pauline; in this respect, her connection to the past might be more appropriately characterized as an effect of third-generation memory. Indeed, Paula’s relationship with her grandmother is the one that is most fully developed within the novel; as such, it offers particular insight into grandparent–grandchild affi liations. Unlike her parents, whose preoccupation with achieving cultural assimilation and bourgeois affluence apparently limits their curiosity about past family traumas, Paula is inquisitive enough about the past to solicit her grandmother’s testimony. In this way, Skrypuch’s novel speaks to a dynamic that is welldocumented in sociological studies: it represents, that is, a renewed interest in the past on the part of third-generation members of immigrant communities raised by a more future-oriented and assimilationist second generation.9 Moreover, The Hunger demonstrates certain affective and materially contingent bonds achieved between members of first- and third-generation diasporic communities. For example, although Paula’s behavior and opportunities for self-expression are restricted by the rules and expectations established by her parents in their mutually shared household, she feels less constrained in her grandmother’s home; indeed, she finds Gramma Pauline’s airy and well-decorated home to be a welcome respite from the claustrophobic, rule-bound setting of her parents’ household. In this way, Paula’s relationship with her grandmother is mediated by material circumstances that are common within contemporary Western experience: because her grandmother’s home is detached from the nuclear household, it functions as a separate space in which Paula might interact differently than she does within her immediate fi lial realm. Consequently, Paula is able to engage her interest in the past within her grandmother’s home in ways that she cannot in her own— not the least because Gramma Pauline does not subject her to the obligations that Paula’s parents believe they must. The exchange of memory that occurs between them, therefore, is markedly different from that which occurs in the same household between parents and children, especially because it does not depend upon the specific rules and boundaries otherwise upheld in a parent– child household.

132 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature As important as it might be to identify the specific kind of intergenerational bond that develops between Paula and her grandmother, however, the vicarious memory that Paula inherits from Gramma Pauline may nevertheless be characterized as “second-generation memory”—if only in a figurative sense. That is, the image of the Armenian past that Paula formulates constitutes a contingent (“second”) iteration (“generation”) of an elder’s articulated memories. Until this point, the narrative suggests, Gramma Pauline’s memories of the Armenian genocide have remained entirely within her own possession. However, when Paula begins to question her grandmother about her experiences, Gramma Pauline begins to transmit them in ways that permit her granddaughter’s new (or “second”) interpretation within the present. Moreover, this contingent iteration—or second generation—of a previously articulated past takes on meanings for Paula that her grandmother might not have anticipated or intended, insofar as it grants her a perspective through which she might judge her immanent circumstances. In this case, Paula’s inherited memories of the past prompt her to reevaluate not so much her larger cultural context but her immediate battle with anorexia-bulimia; that is, it allows her to articulate a “solution” to an individually-experienced “problem.” To a certain extent, Skrypuch’s narrative is not alone in its deployment of second-generation memory—or even time travel—as a solution to contemporary adolescent anxieties. Indeed, The Hunger is not the first YA novel to employ the time-travel conceit in order to address conflicts experienced by young people. Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988), for example, features a heroine, Hannah Stern, who journeys back in time to experience the liquidation of Jewish ghettoes and imprisonment in Auschwitz. Similarly, Han Nolan’s If I Should Die Before I Wake (1994) depicts the (literal) awakening of its protagonist, an anti-Semite named Hilary, whose comatose visions of Auschwitz convince her of the terrible consequences of racism. Yolen’s and Nolan’s novels share with Skrypuch’s certain structural elements. In each narrative, the protagonist is blind to her own shortcomings: Paula is obsessed with self-perfection, Hannah resents her Jewish heritage, and Hilary hates Jews. Moreover, each heroine is incapacitated in some way and magically reinstated in the body of a relative or neighbor, whose perspective gradually readjusts her own. What distinguishes The Hunger from these other problemoriented time-travel novels, however, is the manner in which it envisions its heroine’s transformation. Unlike Nolan’s Hilary, whose encounter with the past dramatically affects her historical and political consciousness, Paula seems comparatively unaffected by the implications of the events she has witnessed in Armenia. She does not, for example, consider how the Armenian genocide, which involved in part the forced starvation of an ethnic minority, exemplifies the withholding of food as a well-practiced political strategy of “ethnic cleansing.” Certainly, Paula could—but ultimately does not—perceive resemblances between this state-supported famine and similar historical incidents that followed it: for example, the Stalinist-imposed famine in

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 133 Ukraine in the early 1930s10 or the starvation of more than three million Indians under British rule in the early 1940s.11 Likewise, she does not consider the implications of this event with regard to contemporary instances of hunger and genocide, even though her doing so might place into relief the complicity of developed nations (such as Canada and the U.S.) in the impoverishment and starvation of those in so-called Third World nations.12 Moreover, unlike her counterpart Hilary—or, for that matter, The Giver’s Jonas—Paula does little to share her inherited memories with others in a manner that might work toward a transformation of social consciousness. Although, admittedly, she draws on her time-travel experience to complete a school assignment on the Armenian genocide, her presentation of her research and its implications is given short shrift within the narrative. Ultimately, the novel implies, Paula’s vicarious memory is useful and productive only to the extent to which it benefits her own personal development—that is, to the extent to which it teaches the anorexic heroine that it is better to eat than to starve to death. In this respect, The Hunger also differs dramatically from Yolen’s similarly structured The Devil’s Arithmetic. Unlike Yolen’s narrative, which demonstrates the outwardly directed implications of second-generation memory, Skrypuch’s novel ultimately remains inwardly focused. Yolen’s heroine, Hannah, draws on the memories she has inherited from her forebear, Chaya, with a deeper appreciation for her Jewish identity. Hannah’s time travel, and the intimate insight into the past that it permits, allows her to recommit herself to the Jewish community whose past sufferings she now more fully recognizes and whose memories she now perceives as part of her own inheritance. She comes to understand, for example, that the celebration of the Passover is not an empty ritual but a commemoration of a living past; moreover, she recognizes that her observance of the seder aligns her with past, present, and future generations of Jews. In effect, Hannah learns to shoulder the burden, so poignantly expressed by Maurice Sendak, of “living for those who didn’t”; additionally, she learns to live with those who continue to survive. The Hunger, by contrast, is less concerned with the ethical implications of the time-traveling experience it depicts. Although, as I will demonstrate below, Paula’s inheritance of her forebear’s past ensures her closer connection to her Armenian heritage and community, this aspect of the narrative is ultimately overshadowed by the “lessons” the protagonist extracts from memories of near-starvation about good nutrition and healthy body image. In the end, Paula merely internalizes a “lesson” not unlike that given to Cold War–era children to “eat your peas because there are starving children in China.” That is, although she learns that conditions have been much worse for individuals in other temporal and cultural contexts, she nevertheless does not come to empathize with them in any productive way; rather, her knowledge of others’ sufferings only prompts her to minimize her own. Paula learns, that is, not so much to live for others as to imagine herself as entitled to the examples that

134 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature others have lived for her. In this way, then, Paula’s second-generation memory—that is, her proximity to and subsequent interpretation of an elder’s memory of the traumatic past—is rendered by Skrypuch’s novel only in the most pragmatic of terms.

The Problem Novel and the Crises of Diaspora Although Skrypuch’s novel explicitly privileges the individual’s personal experiences—and in such a way that it, unlike the texts discussed in previous chapters, appears to be inattentive to the individual’s active participation in a larger, collective context—it is at least indirectly concerned with the encompassing cultural context in which such experiences occur. On the one hand, The Hunger focuses on a single individual’s battle with eating disorders—hoping in turn to correct individual readers’ habits, rather than to engage them in a critique of cultural forces that make such habits possible in the fi rst place. On the other hand, however, the novel’s very address of this topic implicitly invites attention to the larger cultural implications of such disorders. Indeed, as Susan Bordo has argued, eating disorders are not so much isolated pathologies as they are “logical (if extreme) manifestations of anxieties and fantasies fostered by our culture” (15). According to Bordo, specific medical ailments often associated with gender—for example, hysteria and anorexia-bulimia— may be read not simply as naturally occurring diseases but as physical and psychological responses to the repressive social and material conditions in which a patient is situated. For example, she argues that the limitations Victorian society placed on women’s capacities for self-expression produced certain physical symptoms that were deemed “hysterical” and gendered as feminine: for example, the “holding of breath, the loss of air, the choking down of anger and desire, the relinquishing of voice, the denial of appetite, the constriction of body” (50). Likewise, she maintains, eating disorders are symptoms of anxieties that permeate “advanced industrial societies within roughly the past hundred years” (50). For example, she argues, the methods of self-control that anorectics regularly exercise place into relief a “culture which is continually drawing us into an inverted world of attainable power”: women, she observes, are increasingly called to perform and embody outward signs of economic success (62–63). Bordo’s analysis suggests, then, that cultural representations of anorexia—including for example Skrypuch’s own narrative—might be read as indices of larger cultural anxieties and desires. For example, such representations might place into relief the burden placed on individuals or collectives to comply with standards or beauty or normative behavior dictated by a reigning ideology. Moreover, even its construction as a problem novel allows The Hunger to address, if only unwittingly and figuratively, larger cultural concerns. Ultimately, the YA problem novel, which initially appears to be concerned only

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 135 with the correction of individual socially deviant behaviors, frequently (and, in some cases, unconsciously) addresses seemingly unrelated cultural concerns. For example, in their study of YA problem novels written on the topic of “cutting” or self-mutilation, Jennifer Miskec and Chris McGee argue that representation of cutting frequently “extends beyond the merely personal to the broadly social” (174). According to Miskec and McGee, novels such as Scott Westerfield’s Uglies trilogy (2005–2006) depict the teenage cutters as synecdochical representations of a larger, image-driven capitalist society that continually seeks release from, and control over, the increasingly unrealizable standards of beauty it has created (174–175). Likewise, M. T. Anderson’s Feed (2002) depicts cutting in order to “comment on the overlapping nature of the body, of power, and of corporate culture” (175). In such novels, according to Miskec and McGee, the anxieties that are (literally) written on the individual body mirror those that are inscribed upon the social body; thus, they expose the inextricable relation between the individual and the social. Although, like its nineteenth-century counterpart, the YA problem novel might explicitly address individual concerns and behaviors, it ultimately (and often unwittingly) places into relief the encompassing social anxieties that prompt or shape these individual actions. According to Miskec and McGee, the relationship between the individual and the social is most evident in those YA novels that tend to depart from the tired formulas of the problem novel. Texts such as Uglies and Feed, they argue, are much more complex and far less didactic than more conventional problem novels depicting cutting, such as Shelly Stoehr’s Crosses (1991) or Patricia McCormick’s Cut (2000), which diagnose a problem but forgo nuance and literary crafting. As convincing as Miksec and McGee’s case may be, however, it might be counter-argued that the conventional, more pedantic problem novel offers a much more transparent view of its latent social motivations. The problem novel expresses at once a naïve sincerity and a spirited confidence: it thinks it knows what it is up to, and it is certain that, if only it reaches its intended readership, it will work its remedying didactic effects. It has no qualms about being an unadorned confection because it imagines that its simplicity is such that its message will be swiftly and easily imbibed. Yet it is precisely such simplicity that betrays its subtler, underlying motivations, which it does not explicitly acknowledge, and of which it may not even be aware. This is most clearly evident in the problem novel’s use of a flat, two-dimensional protagonist. A typical problem novel protagonist such as Skrypuch’s Paula is doubly a cipher: on the one hand, she is a vacuous, insignificant figure and, on the other hand, her simplicity makes her a key to a code. That is, if Paula is developed only so much as she might represent a typical teenager affl icted with the typical symptoms of a disorder, then her character lends itself as a figure13 for any number of phenomena and concepts with which the cultural notions of adolescence and illness have been associated. Thus, when one reads Skrypuch’s relatively formulaic story of hunger and eventual satisfaction in

136 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature light of the cultural backdrop against which it is set, one can perceive the ways in which the protagonist’s individual conflicts mirror those of the cultural milieu in which the novel was produced. The protagonist of Skrypuch’s novel is a member, if only nominally, of an Armenian diasporic community in Canada. Although, for most of the novel, Paula feels little allegiance to this community, she unwittingly shares with it (and indeed, with most immigrant communities) a key anxiety: that is, the anxiety of assimilating, or “fitting in.” In Paula’s case, this concern is limited to only to her physical appearance. In the novel’s first chapter, Paula worries that her sturdy build (or what her gym teacher derisively calls her “padding”) has earned her the disdain of her classmates, whose approbation she desperately desires; moreover, she wants to look “almost as good” as the supermodels who grace the fashion magazines she collects (51). Here, Paula’s attempt to win the acceptance of her peers, or at least to obviate their disapprobation, parallels the experience of immigrant communities which confront the expectation that they swiftly adopt the languages and practices of their new home. In both cases, the pressure to “fit in” is paramount. In turn, Paula’s efforts to embody the desires she imagines her peers place on her also correspond to the sacrifices immigrant communities make in the process of assimilation. Immigrants’ efforts to assimilate—and thus to counter the xenophobic tendencies of their new neighbors, participate in the civic life of the nation, and pursue economic affluence—often come at the cost of painful separation not only from the ties that bind them to their native homes but to their relationship to other members of the present immigrant diaspora. Like Paula’s emaciated body, the memories of a pre-immigration past, preserved within the diasporic community, consequently threaten to wither away. Thus, by aligning Paula with her diasporic community—if only in a subtle or casual manner—the novel implies an equivalence between the anorexia faced by an individual adolescent girl and the cultural anorexia experienced by the diasporic community. It suggests, moreover, that the illnesses faced by both are the consequence of an overly eager, and inadequately self-aware, will to assimilate. In turn, the solution the novel proposes to Paula’s individual problem— that is, her recognition of “real hunger” in genocide-era Armenia—may be read on a figurative level as a call for the reclamation of diasporic communities’ survival and health. The parallels between the novel’s explicit solution to individual health and its implicit solution to communal health become especially clear in its conclusion, in which Paula’s developing relationship with her grandmother, a genocide survivor, becomes an index of her gradually improving physical and psychological well-being. When Paula’s Gramma Pauline first greets her granddaughter upon her reawakening, she is astonished to hear Paula’s startlingly detailed recitation of events that took place in her own Armenian past. Eager to encourage in her granddaughter a “new obsession” that does not involve calorie-counting, Gramma Pauline agrees to help Paula connect the events of her “dream” to those that transpired within her

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 137 own family history (164). Significantly, the degree to which Gramma Pauline becomes increasingly forthcoming in her divulgence of her past parallels the measure of physical and psychological health her granddaughter has attained. For example, when the protagonist admits her problem and elects to commit herself to a recovery clinic, her grandmother takes her to the cemetery where Paula’s great-grandparents were buried and explains, for the first time, the complicated details of her adoption by her aunt, Marta (the same woman whose body Paula assumed in her comatose time-travel). However, Gramma Pauline is still reluctant to divulge the more harrowing memories of her past; consequently, she waits until her granddaughter is sounder in body and mind to extend her narrative. Later, when Paula’s steady recovery earns her an awayday from the clinic, she and her grandmother walk to a secluded park, where Gramma Pauline surprises even herself by freely responding to Paula’s questions regarding her “dream” and unraveling the early memories of deportation, deprivation, and immigration that she had once so closely guarded (179). Ultimately, the bond between the two generations is sealed when, after Paula is released from the clinic with a clean bill of health, her grandmother gives her a small sickle worn by her adoptive mother Marta—the same sickle Paula wore as a talisman during her adventure in Armenia. Here, the past finally converges with the present, as Paula becomes the rightful heir to the memory her grandmother now feels secure in giving away. However, as the novel’s concluding sentence implies, this exchange marks only the beginning of a new opportunity for growth. When Gramma Pauline finally accounts for the circumstances under which she, as a child, left Armenia for Canada, she concludes, “That part of my life had ended, but a new one had just begun” (184). The reader is expected, of course, to recognize that this statement pertains not only to the grandmother’s “new life” in Canada, but to Paula’s post-anorexic condition, no longer marked by want of both food and memory, but now mutually enriched by physical nourishment and a place within history. Thus, Paula’s “new body,” and the “new beginning” it implies, functions metaphorically as an expression of what the novel envisions as the newly formed body of the immigrant diasporic community, whose relative health is measured by the degree it draws sustenance from the past, and which articulates its present strength and survival in light of its past near-demise. In the course of The Hunger, Paula cannot recognize the emaciation of her body, to whose health she has neglected to attend, until she becomes aware of its near death. Thus, through its depiction of Paula’s travails, the novel suggests that, in order to preserve some sense of coherence and continuity, endangered diasporic communities—or collective bodies—must nourish themselves with memories of their own past near-demise in order to guard against being threatened with oblivion once more. The solution Skrypuch’s novel proposes is not at all unique: rather, it is a re-articulation of a myth that circulates within many diasporic communi-

138 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature ties. A myth, writes Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957), is an ideological proposition whose aim it is to make historically contingent objects and social relations seem self-evident and “natural”: it “transforms the reality of the world into an image of the world, History into Nature” (141). Myths, Barthes continues, “immobilize the world: they suggest a universal order which has fi xated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions” (155). By functioning as “depoliticized speech” which re-describes (or “distorts”) socially and economically contingent conditions as simply “normal” or “as things should be,” myth binds together otherwise disparate individuals and solidifies a common perception of the world. In his consideration of specifically French bourgeois myths, for example, Barthes writes, our press, our fi lms, our theatre, our pulp literature, our rituals, our Justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks about the weather, a murder trial, a touching wedding, the cooking we dream of, the garments we wear, everything, in everyday life, is dependent upon the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations between man and world. (140, emphasis in original) In other words, myths are those discrete discourses and representations that grant meaning to and thus perpetuate quotidian practices, so much so that they appear self-evident. The particular myth to which The Hunger gives expression is one that structures the identities of otherwise disparate diasporic communities: that is, the myth of “near-death.” Diasporic communities tend to draw sustenance, in other words, by evoking the memory of past events in which their members were nearly obliterated, but somehow survived. In turn, the memory of such survival is in turn used to promulgate the necessity of safe-guarding the present community in the face of similar potential threats. Here, it is not the event of near-death—almost always a genocide—that is mythical; indeed, this event is always a very real one. Rather, it is the discursive use of the memory of this event that renders it mythical. For example, Armenian diasporic communities in North America tend to have at their respective centers monuments to the Armenian genocide.14 Alongside the institutions one might expect to encounter in any immigrant community—establishments such as community centers, credit unions, dance groups, literary circles, and other associations which promote the continuation of cultural traditions—are those that commemorate the near death of these same traditions, and which therefore sanction the necessity of its reanimation within a new context. Likewise, Internet sites, such as ArmenianDiaspora.com, which are devoted to keeping members of the diaspora “connected,” not only feature updates on current political events in Armenia, information on affordable direct flights to Yerevan, and conference postings for young Armenian writers, but also include “genocide news pages” which document newly discovered records of the 1915 massacre, provide updates on

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 139 international recognition of the genocide, and advise young Armenians on how to confront the problem of genocide denial. To a non-Armenian who might happen upon this website, the seemingly casual juxtaposition of the current weather in Yerevan with “genocide news” might seem perplexing. Indeed, such a juxtaposition places into relief the extent to which the memory of the massacre has become naturalized, as it were, as a significant and necessary aspect of diasporic life—as crucial as any other in ensuring a connection to both a place of origin and the present community. The seemingly matter-of-fact insertion of genocide updates alongside other news of the diaspora implies a tacit conviction that it “should go without saying” that the memory of historical loss governs one’s allegiance to a social group. Of course, this tendency to mythologize events of near-death is not at all specifically “Armenian” in character: one might point, for example, to the function played by Holocaust museums in Jewish communities, monuments to victims of the Stalinist-imposed famine in Ukrainian communities, or the American Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which features exhibits on the Middle Passage. What these memorial institutions, and others like them, have in common is the conviction that the preservation of cultural memories of historical atrocity should play a key role in the life of the present-day diasporic community. Indeed, they suggest that the memory of these events should function as a reminder to members of the community of their need to survive and thrive in light of—or despite—tremendous past losses.15 Crucially, the myth of near-death promulgated by diasporic communities is inspired, at least in part, by nostalgia. Initially, it would seem outlandish to correlate nostalgia with the memory of genocide. After all, nostalgia is conventionally associated with a longing for a lost time or golden age—and no one, save the most pathological masochist, would wish to return to an age of mass execution, let alone characterize it as a golden age. The nostalgia that motivates diasporic myths of near-death, however, is focused not so much on the traumatic event itself, but on the way of life that immediately preceded this event. The voluntary remembrance of genocide, that is, places into relief the image of the community that was interrupted by it: it brings into focus the tremendous loss incurred by mass trauma and thus inspires a longing for that lost time. For example, the “Tower of Faces” exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, features hundreds of photographs retrieved from Lithuanian shtetls whose Jewish residents were nearly all killed. In its demonstration of otherwise ordinary images—family portraits, Zionist youth group meetings, parties, and farm scenes—the exhibit reminds the visitor of a way of life obliterated by the Nazi genocide. The pastoral images conveyed by these photographs inspire a sense of loss and, in turn, prompt a longing for an era that is now vanished. It is not insignificant, moreover, that this exhibit is surrounded by gruesome images of, and artifacts from, one of the most traumatic genocidal events recorded by history: for example, it is placed in close proximity to a collection of shoes confiscated from the

140 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature inmates of Nazi concentration camps. It is necessary, that is, for the visitor to the museum—especially the Jewish visitor—to first acknowledge the devastation wrought by the Holocaust in order to recognize the value, once taken for granted, of communal Jewish life destroyed by the Nazis. In turn, the exhibit subtly advocates the reclamation, albeit in a new, contemporary context, of thriving Jewish communities. The kind of nostalgia that motivates diasporic myths of near-death, then, can be characterized as what Svetlana Boym calls “restorative nostalgia.” Nostalgia, Boym points out, derives from two Greek terms: “nostos—return home, and algia—longing” (xiii). Restorative nostalgia, she continues, places emphasis on nostos: that is, on the ideal of returning home, or recuperating a once commonly shared past. Significantly, this type of nostalgia does not deny the more painful moments in the past, but elevates it in order to facilitate a sense of solidarity and belonging. Writing specifically about national nostalgia, but also implicitly gesturing toward diasporic nostalgia, Boym states, The nostos of a nation is not merely a lost Eden but a place of sacrifice and glory of past suffering. . . . [In] the national ideology, individual longing is transformed into a collective belonging that relies on past sufferings that transcend individual memories. Defeats in the past figure as prominently as victories in uniting the nation. The nation-state is at best based on the social contract that is also an emotional contract, stamped by the charismas of the past. (15) The “emotional contract” Boym perceives at work in nostalgia allows for the consolidation of the collective, which strives to recuperate the “totality of existence”16 retroactively imagined in the past. The sense of loss, in Boym’s view, is an effective catalyst for attempted social reintegration—especially, one might add, when a diasporic community faces further disintegration in a new, foreign context. Of course, as Boym makes clear, the attempt to reconsolidate a group identity through appeals to a past that is at once epic and tragic involves certain ironies. Citing Eric Hobsbawn, she maintains that the traditions recuperated through communal nostalgia are often more “invented” than they are authentic: the new traditions, she continues, are “characterized by a higher degree of symbolic formalization and ritualization than the actual peasant customs and conventions after which they were patterned” (42). In one of her chapters, for example, Boym surveys the apartments of Soviet Jews living in New York City that have been rendered “personal memory museum[s]” (328). These homes, she explains, contain national and religious artifacts that the immigrants never would have thought of displaying while living in St. Petersburg or Moscow: it is only when they find themselves at a distance from their native cities (and the traumas and indignities that drove them away from these cities) that diasporic subjects attempt to shore up their lost identities by

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 141 displaying these fetishistic objects. As Boym suggests, however—and as The Hunger implies—the irony involved in such nostalgic acts of reclamation are often lost on members of immigrant communities. The problem of communal survival, it seems, is urgent enough to prompt improvised traditions and quotidian mythologies of the past. Not insignificantly, the epic/tragic mythologies of the past, and the nostalgia that motivates them, share certain elements that also characterize second-generation memory. Indeed, Boym’s classification of nostalgia bears an uncanny resemblance to my own formulation of second-generation memory. Boym describes nostalgia, for example, as a “double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life” (xiv). In effect, she characterizes it as a ghost image—precisely that term I use to describe second-generation memory. Certainly, in their capacity (or willingness) to engage the past and the present simultaneously, the nostalgic and the bearer of second-generation memory share much in common. This is not to say, however, that second-generation memory is merely a variant of nostalgia. Second-generation memory is distinguished, for example, by the relational process it implies. That is, its development is contingent upon an individual’s interpellation within a specific genealogy which in turn prompts her to recognize how her subject position has been shaped by the recollections and habit memories of those to whom she is intimately bound. Nevertheless, second-generation memory may be inflected by nostalgia, not the least because it involves a desire for proximity to an ever-receding past; moreover, in some instances, such as the one represented by The Hunger, it involves fantasies of the past’s recuperation. Indeed, Boym identifies several instances in which younger generations’ orientations to their elders’ traumatic pasts are bound up with nostalgia. Reflecting upon her interviews with recent immigrants to the U.S., Boym maintains, I realized that for some nostalgia was a taboo: it was the predicament of Lot’s wife, a fear that looking back might paralyze you forever, turning you into a pillar of salt, a pitiful monument to your own grief and the futility of departure. First-wave immigrants are often notoriously unsentimental, leaving the search for roots to their children and grandchildren unburdened by visa problems. (xv) According to Boym, then, the perceived responsibility of imagining a mythological past, and thus restoring a threatened community in the present, falls to younger generations—whose relative proximity to their elders’ memories motivates their will to recuperate and interpret them, but whose distance from others’ lived pasts loosens energies no longer possessed by the wounded first-generation. Little wonder, then, that The Hunger should place so much emphasis on the youthfulness and physical health of its protagonist, for it is precisely the sound

142 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature body and alert consciousness of this younger member of a diasporic community which might permit its survival. Indeed, it is significant that Skrypuch’s protagonist is female. At first glance, Skrypuch’s gendering of her main character appears relatively straightforward: after all, anorexia-bulimia is conventionally considered a disorder suffered by young women.17 However, this protagonist’s gender plays a significant role in the novel’s concern with the restoration of diasporic communities. Once cured of her anorexia, whose symptoms often include the arrest of women’s reproductive cycles, Paula is now fit not only to rejoin her peers in everyday social interactions but also to enjoy potential motherhood. Her bodily health, that is, is implicitly an index of her capacity for biological reproduction; likewise, the relative health of a diasporic community is measured against its potential for future survival or self-reproduction. Moreover, it is not insignificant that Paula’s first meaningful interaction with her grandmother—an interaction that occurs at the beginning of her physical convalescence—should take place in a cemetery. At this moment in the narrative, the diasporic myth of “near death” is most effectively dramatized. It is precisely in a setting that marks the death of former generations that a member of the youngest generation—now newly infused with physical vibrancy—should receive a charge to live on and to restore what has been lost. Standing at Marta’s gravesite, Paula is called to resuscitate and re-embody the memory of the great-grandmother whose experiences she witnessed in her time-traveling “dream.” Here, the novel exposes its particular interest in second-generation memory. According to the logic of Skrypuch’s narrative, the bearer of such inherited or vicarious memory is expected to be a “go-between” who channels the memories of a past generation and uses such memory to feed or restore a currently imperiled community. Crucially, as a conduit between the past and the present, the bearer of such memory is not expected to reflect critically upon her role; nor, unlike Lowry’s Jonas, is she called upon to re-imagine her community in any way that might be radically transformative. Rather, Paula is called only to restore what has been lost, thereby ensuring a seamless continuity between the past and present instead of admitting their crucial difference.

The Problem of National Identity Even as The Hunger implicitly addresses the health and survival of diasporic communities, it also puts to question the status of the larger, encompassing community into which diasporic groups are tempted to assimilate, and which ostensibly threatens their autonomy. Indeed, as Boym’s aforementioned arguments make clear, the longing for the past experienced by younger members of diasporic communities ultimately works in the service of larger national ideologies. According to Boym, nostalgia—not unlike second-generation memory—has the potential of increasing “emancipatory possibilities and

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 143 individual choices, offering multiple imagined communities and ways of belonging that are not exclusively based on ethnic or national principles” (42). Citing the works of such literary nostalgics as Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Nabokov, she argues that nostalgia may take a “reflective” form that is focused “not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time” (49). The narratives of the past that such reflective nostalgia produces are often “ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary” insofar as they remain conscious of the tension between “affective memories” of the past and the need for “judgment or critical reflection” (50). Moreover, she argues that such nostalgia “remains an intermediary between collective and individual memory” that tests the boundaries of individual “affective recollection” and the affective bonds produced by “collective frameworks” of memory (54). Nevertheless, Boym argues, such critical or “reflective” nostalgia remains in opposition to a more conservative, “restorative” nostalgia which can “be politically manipulated through newly created practices of national commemoration with the aim of reestablishing social cohesion, a sense of security and an obedient relationship to authority” (42). Ultimately, it is the latter use of nostalgia that is apparent in Skrypuch’s novel, which seeks to cultivate and reaffirm—rather than reflect upon or critique— the social formations it represents. It is necessary, then, to study the ways in which the novel’s exposition of the problem of teenage anorexia may be motivated not only by a longing to restore the mythical past of diasporic identities but also by a desire for a sense of national wholeness. Paula’s body might just as well be read as an expression of mid-twentieth-century anxieties concerning the Canadian body politic as it is a call to preserve the constituent communities within this federal body. That is, Skrypuch’s narrative subtly echoes the concerns of Canadian critics writing during the 1970s and ’80s, who warned that Canada, in its valiant attempt to deprive itself of perniciously tempting American-brand consumer culture, had ended up starving itself for want of any “healthy” domestic culture. Just so, Paula’s “solution” of nourishing herself through a connection with her Armenian past, even as she cultivates a functional and productive physical body, resembles the conventional, state-supported image of Canada as a loosely organized collection of various ethnic groups that are ultimately bonded together within a federal body. In turn, the ideal of (individual) physical wholeness promulgated by the novel gives expression to a “restorative” image of national unity potentially threatened with fragmentation. The cultural logic that informs The Hunger therefore ultimately confirms the contention that the YA problem novel is more concerned with upholding conventionally accepted notions of the individual’s status within existing social structures than it is with questioning or changing such structures. To the U.S. American reader, there might not seem, at fi rst glance, to be anything particularly “Canadian” about Skrypuch’s novel, save for a few

144 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature differences in spelling and the occasional mention of place-names such as Toronto or Guelph. The turns of phrase employed in the novel’s dialogue are immediately recognizable to those familiar with American lingo; the consumer items mentioned within the narrative, such as CoCo Puffs and Hershey bars, are American in origin; and the problem of eating disorders with which the novel is partially concerned is one to which American magazines and other artifacts of popular culture continually return. This is precisely the problem. Conventionally, Canada is viewed—by Americans and Canadians alike—as a simple extension of the U.S., with Canadians separated from their southern neighbors only by the degree of their politeness, their affi nity for ice hockey, and their general tolerance for American draft dodgers. These conventional images particularly vexed Canadian cultural and literary critics writing during the 1970s and ’80s, who were concerned that aesthetic pieces produced in Canada do not sufficiently represent a shared national ethos. Such critics lamented that they were hard-pressed to identify anything particularly “Canadian” within Canadian aesthetic objects, and tended to focus instead on either American influences on Canadian culture or on disparate “ethnic” literatures that cannot be easily subsumed—as American “multicultural” artifacts allegedly can be—into a larger “melting pot” of national culture. When, for example, in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Margaret Atwood poses the question, “What’s Canadian about Canadian literature, and why should we be bothered?” she responds, with characteristic matter-of-factness, that such a question “shouldn’t have to be answered at all because, in any self-respecting nation, it would never be asked. But that’s one of the problems: Canada isn’t a self-respecting nation and the question does get asked” (14 emphasis in original). Significantly, when the question of a particular Canadian culture or aesthetic does get asked, the response is often articulated through medical analogies. Atwood admits, for example, that “Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is not to see whether the patient will live well but simply whether he will live at all” (33). The American aesthetic, Atwood argues, involves an optimistic vision focused squarely on the “Frontier”—on the “imagined ideal Golden West or City Upon a Hill” (“in that case Heaven is a Hilton hotel with a coke machine in it”) (32). Likewise, she continues, the British aesthetic entails a vision directed inwardly on the “Island” or body politic (32) The Canadian aesthetic, however, is reflective of its own self-perceived poverty: it involves, quite simply, “Survival” (32). Threatened variously with American cultural takeover, Québécois secession, the remnants of British colonialism, and the natural adversity of its own harsh climactic elements, Canadian culture is, for Atwood, one that is perpetually on the brink of death, and thus one that finds expression in successive accounts of snowstorms, shipwrecks, and otherwise failed expeditions. The Canadian, she writes, emerges in the figure of the survivor who “has no triumph but the fact of his survival: he has little after his ordeal that he did not have before, except for gratitude for having escaped with his life” (33).

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 145 If Atwood’s image of Canadian culture is one of an inert, barely enduring body forever monitored by the dubious gaze of cultural critics, literary scholar Stanley Fogel’s image of his native country is equally grim: Canadian culture, according to Fogel, is quite simply “anorectic” (9). In his comparative study of Canadian and American literature, published in 1984, Fogel questions why deconstruction, and what he calls deconstruction’s “essential weapon,” (32) metafiction,18 has thrived in the U.S., whereas “Canadian writers, on the other hand, create characters as if the metafictionist and/or poststructuralist theories do not exist or at least if they do not impinge on their own theories of fiction, specifically, and of society, generally” (21). Although Fogel recites certain predictable explanations for this trend—including the glut of American doctoral students searching for new and exciting tickets to publication and academic appointment—he concludes that the divergence of interest in post-structuralism and metafiction is due greatly to ideological differences between the U.S. and Canada. The U.S., he argues, has an excess of grand narratives to subvert. Populated with “larger than life” characters such as John Wayne, Davy Crockett, and Daniel Boone—not to mention an assortment of colorful presidents and founding fathers—American literature, according to Fogel, has no need to develop new characters. Unlike Canadian authors, whom Fogel alleges resort to the plodding work of the Bildungsroman, American authors need only revisit their nation’s already existing stock of characters in new, and often parodic, ways. Moreover, Fogel argues, utopian myths of rugged individualism and endless exploitable opportunity have become so instilled in the American popular imagination that they allow for their own subversion and deconstruction: indeed, he maintains that even pre-postmodern works of American literature, such as those by Dreiser and Ginsberg, “challenge, in various ways, all facile assumptions that in America the ideal has been embodied in the real, that . . . Pittsburgh is indeed Utopia” (15). However, Canadian literature, Fogel contends, has no heroic figures or foundational myths to begin with, and thus, it has no need for theories and literary practices that might disrupt them. What Fogel calls “anorectic Canada” is a “country which has not yet, in the minds and works of its most pre-eminent writers of fiction (as well as most of its government officials and citizens), formed and sustained those same entities, both concrete and abstract, that give a country its definitive and distinctive character” (9). Hence, what Fogel describes as a characteristically stubborn Canadian adherence to verisimilitude, realism, and the Bildungsroman: Canadian writers are still in the process of “nurturing what is thought to be a malnourished Canadian identity” by conjuring up a “realistic” portrayal of a country and its people. In a contemporary North American culture saturated with images of waifish young women, the metaphor of anorexia has certain loose associations with the metaphor of adolescence, and although Fogel claims to distance his study from any attempt to characterize Canadian literature as an adolescent one, the figure of adolescence nevertheless pervades his diagnosis. For example,

146 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature when he problematizes the recurrence of nature imagery in Canadian fiction, Fogel likens these works of fiction to those of early nineteenth-century American works, written before a clear sense of American identity was clearly in place. “Just as nature and the battle with it obsessed many nineteenth-century American novelists, Cooper for one,” he writes, “it remains important because the climate and the land have not been subdued and supplanted by a strong, anthropomorphic, distinctively Canadian entity” (23). Fogel’s equivalence of twentieth-century Canadian literature to nineteenth-century American fiction implies Canadian literature’s junior status to its American counterpart’s presumably more mature and developed tradition. Such an equivalence is implied, moreover, in Fogel’s account of American literature’s response to its complicity in such twentieth-century crises and injustices as the Dresden bombings, the execution of the Rosenbergs, the Vietnam War, and the mid1970s oil embargo—events that have caused it to question the “naturalness” of sunnily optimistic American myths (14). It is almost as though, in Fogel’s formulation, the U.S. is figured as a middle-aged man who looks back on his youthful indiscretions and perceives how ultimately at odds they were with his childish ideals; Canada, however, is still mired in an identity crisis, struggling to figure out what its ideals are in the first place. It should be noted, however, that Fogel’s diagnosis of Canadian postmodern literature (or its supposed lack thereof) has been highly disputed by contemporary Canadian literary and cultural critics; his thesis is now considered outdated, if not intrinsically flawed. As Linda Hutcheon argues in The Canadian Postmodern (1988), the post-modern tradition is particularly vibrant in Canadian letters, not the least because Canada’s “own particular moment of cultural history does seem to make it ripe for the paradoxes of postmodernism” (2). Because, Hutcheon argues, “the periphery or the margin might also describe Canada’s perceived position in international terms, perhaps the postmodern ex-centric is very much a part of the identity of the nation” (2). Adam Lowenstein makes a similar argument in his analysis of the horror fi lms of Canadian native son, David Cronenberg. If, as Lowenstein argues, the Canadian “national body is imagined as fragmented, fragile, even colonized,” then its perceived fragmentation renders it particularly wellsuited to the postmodernist vision of Cronenberg’s fi lms, which “give shape to this phantasmatic, fractured national body through stunning images of the unstable, metamorphosing bodies of individuals” (149). More generally, critics such as E. D. Blodgett, Sarah M. Corse, and Jonathan Kertzer19 have demonstrated that the Canadian literary tradition—including but not limited to its more recent post-modernist expressions—is a rich and vibrant one that is dramatically different from U.S. American literature and that demonstrates the complexity of the community from which it emerges. Corse, for example, argues that Canadian literature is especially distinguished from U.S. American literature in its focus on “interpersonal connection” rather than on rugged individualism (76); its representation of the middle class rather than the

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 147 highest or lowest rungs of society (86); and the delicate balance it manages in its expression of pessimism and “contained affirmation” (91). As flawed and multiply contested as Fogel’s thesis might be, however, its dependence upon the twin tropes of hunger and adolescence with reference to Canadian cultural identity is nevertheless not anomalous. For example, more than a century before Fogel diagnosed Canadian identity as “anorectic,” the writer Catharine Parr Traill bemoaned what she perceived to be Canada’s imaginative impoverishment. “Here there are not historical associations, no legendary tales of those that come before us,” she wrote in The Backwoods of Canada (1836). “Fancy would starve for lack of marvellous food to keep her alive in the backwoods” (Kertzer 38 emphasis mine).20 Likewise, in an essay published a little over a decade before Fogel’s own intervention, Robert Fothergill described Canadian cinema as a “younger brother” to U.S. cinema: this “younger brother,” he argues, “has grown up with a painfully confined sense of his own capacity for self-realization” (243). To support the analogy that undergirds his thesis, Fothergill identifies specific male character-types that recur within Canadian cinema—“cowards,” “bullies,” and “clowns”—which he describes in terms otherwise applied to adolescents. Canadian male protagonists, he writes, often exhibit either a “goofy sexual incompetence” (238) or an “attempt to assert . . . dominance through displays of brutal inconsideration and sullen rage” (238–239). Thus, even though contemporary critics have made convincing arguments for Canada’s strong cultural and literary identity(s),21 literary texts, critical conversations, and national discourses continue to be haunted by what Kertzer calls the “ghost” of “our peculiar identity crisis” (38). It may not be insignificant, then, that Skrypuch’s novel manages to incorporate all of the major tropes that literary scholars of the 1970s and ’80s associated with such an identity crisis. The Hunger’s protagonist, after all, is not just an adolescent, but an adolescent who struggles with continual (self-imposed) hunger. Moreover, this teenaged protagonist’s “anorectic” state ultimately precipitates her struggle for mere survival—throughout which her worried elders wring their hands as they question not so much “whether the patient will live well but whether [she] will live at all.” Skrypuch’s heroine, therefore, appears to embody all the anxieties about Canadian identity that were already in heavy circulation before the moment of The Hunger’s publication. This is not to argue, of course, that Skrypuch consciously intended her protagonist as an allegorical figure of Canadian cultural identity that corresponded directly with previously articulated critical tropes. Indeed, the earnestness, directness, and relative naïveté with which her novel approaches and swiftly resolves immediate questions of adolescent eating disorders suggest that her narrative is concerned with nothing more than the immediate social concern of clinical anorexia-bulimia and the remembrance of the Armenian genocide. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that Skrypuch, although she intended her novel to be read by adolescents in turn-of-the-century Canada, was an adult when she published her

148 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature manuscript. Although she may not have intended it, the national discourses that saturated the political moment of her own, earlier coming-of-age—discourses that depended upon the tropes of anorexia, adolescence, and survival— reappear in uncanny form within her literary intercession. It may be argued, therefore, that The Hunger incorporates—if only unwittingly, or if only through a process of cultural osmosis—discourses of nationhood that were already circulating before or during its moment of production. To be sure, moments within Skrypuch’s text posit, if only inadvertently, a relationship between Canadian identity and an impoverished diet. When, for example, Paula’s grandmother narrates her migration from Armenia to Canada, she describes the dietary adjustments she had to make. She explains, for instance, that the staples she imbibed in her newly adopted home were most unlike the hearty courses she once enjoyed in her native Armenia: “Canadian bread back then was all white store-bought stuff. It had no taste” (30). Here, Gramma Pauline’s reference to the lack of “taste” in Canadian bread implies a lack of an identifiable national identity—a lack of cultural flavor, as it were. Moreover, her contention that Canadian bread was “all white store-bought stuff” suggests not only the predominance of Anglo- and French-Canadian (or “white”) affi liations, but also the increasingly corporate or capitalistic character of Canadian culture (“store-bought stuff”). Likewise, Skrypuch’s protagonist, an anorexic-bulimic, is conflicted by her simultaneous desire for and rejection of the “white store-bought stuff” that her grandmother associates with Canada. On the one hand, Paula wants nothing more than to consume the brand-name foodstuffs that her fellow assimilated Canadians do. Indeed, her appetite is especially piqued during her morning jogs through her suburban and blandly North American neighborhood, when she detects familiar breakfast scents wafting from individual households. On the other hand, however, Paula forcefully and literally rejects the very diet she desires: on those occasions in which she allows herself to consume the items that her neighbors do, she ultimately regurgitates them. Not insignificantly, the very items that Paula at once covets and rejects are often American brands such as CoCo Puffs. Here, Paula’s dilemma most clearly resembles that which Canadian cultural critics such as Atwood and Fogel diagnose: even as she denies the (admittedly seductive) provisions offered her by extra-territorial (American) sources, she becomes starved from want of native nutrients, even to the point of bare survival. It is precisely in this respect that Skrypuch’s problem novel offers a pragmatic resolution to both the immediate and figurative conundrums it addresses. On an immediate and literal level, The Hunger demonstrates how its protagonist’s time travel to famine-ravished Armenia convinces her not to take for granted the sources of nourishment immediately available to her in present-day Canada. More subtly, however, the narrative employs the symbolic economy of food in order to reconcile Paula’s “ethnic” Armenian identity with her legal Canadian identity. Indeed, the solution Skrypuch’s novel

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 149 implicitly proposes to the problem of the “anorectic” civil body resonates with that which it suggests in response to the question of the emaciated diasporic body—a response that depends on the sustenance provided to the present by the past. That is, the novel proposes that a Canadian sense of identity might achieve some degree of health through its self-articulation as a civil body joined loosely together by several different ethnic and diasporic communities, each bound by their own traditions, languages, and collective memories, but each mutually invested in the general welfare of the greater social whole. This conception of national identity—which, as I will presently demonstrate, is markedly different from an American national identity—is expressed in The Hunger through the gradual convergence of the novel’s dual narratives. When she first awakens from her coma, Paula immediately requests a notebook so that she may record the details of her recent time travel to Armenia. As she gains strength, however, she begins to devote her journal writing as much to her documenting her physical recuperation as she does to piecing together the elements of her comatose dream. “Every chance she got,” the narrative informs, “Paula would curl up on her bed by the window and write in her journal. There were two parts to it now: one about her past life experiences and one about the regimented life she was now living [in the eating disorders treatment center]” (175). Here, one of the central dilemmas of the novel becomes clarified: Paula, it is implied, has lived two separate lives, or has inhabited two separate “parts,” that, up until this point, have remained at odds with one another, and thus need to be reconciled in order for her to achieve some sense of “wholeness.” On the one hand, as “Paula,” the twentieth-century North American high school student, the protagonist is so insecure about her tenuous position within her academic and social community that she becomes in danger of literally wasting away to nothing. On the other hand, as “Marta,” Paula’s early twentieth-century counterpart, the heroine is faced with the double threat of being forcibly starved to death and becoming all but forgotten to history. However, once the protagonist is safely enclosed in the neutral confines of a place of convalescence, where she is ostensibly secluded from both of the contexts in which she was endangered, she has the opportunity to weave these once-separate narratives together so that, eventually, they might appear as complementary, although liberally connected, halves of a single text. Significantly, just as Paula’s renewed relationship with her grandmother and her Armenian past is mirrored by her willingness to eat, Paula’s increased interest in reconciling the “two parts” of her life through her journal occurs in the midst of her recovery. Thus, according to the logic implied within the novel’s structure, her body becomes situated as the measure of a more subtle recuperation—that of the two aspects of civic identity which, although relatively weak and insubstantial on their own, contribute to a stronger sense of selfhood once they are retrieved and brought together. As a Canadian raised in a sheltered and essentially bland suburban neighborhood that is generally evacuated of any strong sense of history, Paula, the

150 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature novel implies, is starved of any family or ancestral memory, and thus of any sense of place or belonging. The novel does little to describe the ostensibly middle-class area in which she lives, save for mentioning the community center where she takes aerobics classes, the health clinic where she fastidiously weighs herself, and the neatly tended lawns she passes on her way to school. Given this dearth of detail, Paula could be from either Ontario or Alberta—or, for that matter, from Ohio or Oregon. In other words, there is nothing in the novel that either confirms or negates any outstanding national quality or character in her way of life or surroundings. However, when she takes the place of Marta, Paula enjoys a strong sense of belonging and rootedness in history. Nevertheless, this sense of identity is precarious, insofar as Paula/Marta’s rights as a citizen are categorically erased. The implication, then, is that the two separate “parts” of the national body cannot exist healthily while independent of one another. On the one hand, the Americanized, suburbanized Canadian landscape becomes dull and “anorectic” without the flavorful sustenance of rich, lived memories that thriving immigrant communities might infuse into it. On the other hand, it is similarly implied, through Gramma Pauline’s immigration narrative, that such diasporic communities would not be able to exist in the first place were it not for the protection of the Canadian state. It would seem, therefore, that some kind of reciprocal relationship is demanded, whereby Paula’s “civic” and “ethnic” identities remain distinct but complementary aspects of her identity. Here, the solution that The Hunger offers Paula (and its readers) is not unlike that offered by official Canadian discourses of multiculturalism. Unlike the U.S., whose mythology of the “melting pot” encourages the gradual assimilation of disparate cultural identities, Canadian national identity is structured through the myth of the “cultural mosaic.”22 That is, the myth that undergirds Canadian identity imagines the mutual coexistence, rather than the coalescence, of separate cultural identities. As Crose argues, the “concept of ‘nation’ in Canadian discourse is used to refer (1) to a pan-Canadian nation; (2) to the ‘nation’ of English Canada; and (3) to the ‘nation’ of French Canada” (38). That is, if, as Benedict Anderson has famously argued, a nation is an “imagined community” whose existence depends less on legal or political discourse and more on the affi liations imagined by its constituent members, Canada is comprised of two separate nations—one Anglophile and one Francophile—united under one federal government, or state.23 Moreover, these two nations—or imagined communities—are further subdivided by the disparate communities that survive within them and that differentiate themselves from dominant Anglo or French national discourses. “PanCanadian” identity is profoundly distinguished, for example, by a thriving community of indigenous North Americans, or First Nations. Moreover, it is constituted by immigrant communities comprised of Africans, Armenians, Eastern European Jews, Middle Eastern Arabs, South Americans, Southwest Asians, and Ukrainians.

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 151 Moreover, unlike the U.S., whose melting pot narrative demands the assimilation of immigrant communities, Canada promulgates an official policy of multiculturalism. First implemented by Prime Minister Pierre Eliot Trudeau in the early 1980s, at a moment characterized by profound tensions between Anglo- and French-Canadians, this policy recognized Canada as a multiethnic, rather than a monolithic, state. Initially codified by the 1982 Section Twenty-Seven of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadian multicultural policy sanctioned the equality of variously defined cultural demographics; guaranteed rights of expression and religion; and ensured the rights of aboriginal citizens. Later, under the prime ministership of Brian Mulroney in 1987, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act further proclaimed the protection of Canada’s multicultural heritage by further ensuring the equality of Canada’s plural communities and recognizing citizens’ rights to communicate in languages other than the official French or English. As a result of such legislation, various cultural communities within Canada are permitted not only to preserve their disparate languages, traditions, and religions, but are entitled to state support: for example, the Canadian government funds not only state-run schools but Catholic schools, Islamic schools, and Anglo-French schools, among others. According to such policy, therefore, disparate communities are encouraged to preserve their cultural traditions, so long as their constituent members acknowledge their ultimate subjection to the Canadian federal government.24 In other words, Canadian multicultural policy allows for the preservation of what Skrypuch’s narrative characterizes as “two parts”: a cultural or national self and a self determined by state citizenship. It is important to recognize, however, that the Canadian multicultural discourse that novels such as The Hunger implicitly reaffirm is ultimately one that has been created and cultivated from above—that is, by the state. As Himani Bannerji argues in her essays on Canadian multiculturalism, nationalism, and gender, the Canadian policy on multiculturalism was produced by officials who had a vested interest in preserving a preordained vision of a unified Canadian state and who were interested in protecting “ideologies and practices already in place” (37). According to Bannerji, there were “no strong multicultural demands on the part of third world immigrants themselves to force such policy” (44). Rather, she argues, this policy was constructed by representatives of the federal state who sought to manage immigrant demographics—particularly South Asian communities—whose difference from the traditional Anglo-French narrative of Canadian identity potentially unsettled unifying national myths. The official Canadian “language of diversity,” Bannerji writes, is ultimately a “coping mechanism for dealing with an actually conflicting heterogeneity, seeking to incorporate it into an ideological binary which is predicated upon the existence of a homogenous national, that is, a Canadian cultural self with its multiple and different others” (37). Such a “coping mechanism,” she further argues, is more symbolic than it is politically effective. That is, the Canadian policy of multiculturalism reduces

152 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature immigrant communities to the position of ethnic others marked only by “symbols of religion [or] so-called tradition” that must be tolerated by a white Canadian majority. According to Banerjii, such an emphasis on symbolic identities, rather than on the actual “material concerns” (46) of constituent immigrant communities, allows the state to disregard larger structural “questions of social justice, of unemployment and racism” immediately faced by such communities (45). Ultimately, Bannerji argues, official Canadian multicultural policy is not so much a progressive program as it is what Louis Althusser would define as an “ideological state apparatus” (43), which can be any of a range of cultural institutions or discourses which reproduce ideology—or the “imaginary relationship of individuals to the real conditions of their existence” and their consequent lived practices within such an imaginary relationship (Althusser109). Ideological state apparatuses such as the school, church, family, systems of political parties—and, one might add, discourses of ethnic identity—work to interpellate (or “hail”) persons as individual subjects, fostering within each individual a sense of uniqueness and free consciousness, and consequently a sense that she exists in the company of other subjects whom she recognizes and who in turn recognize her (96–98). Such a sense of autonomous subjectivity—such a sense of exerting free agency within the world—is crucial to the operation of ideology, insofar as it allows the individual to adopt a requisite orientation to her larger community as if it were of her own making, rather than that which is mediated by various cultural institutions. Although a society may as well function through explicit coercion—that is, through the workings of “repressive state apparatuses” such as the police and the prison—it functions just as smoothly, and certainly less demonstrably, when it relies on the tacit consent of its constituent members who mistake the state’s desires for their own. According to Banerjii, then, the Canadian discourse of multiculturalism is an ideological state apparatus insofar as it is initially promulgated by the state but ultimately internalized, with little protest or criticism, by its constituent members. That is, the Canadian state “contains” and “manages” an immigrant labor force that is needed but nevertheless “not wanted” by promulgating a narrative that insists that such communities may be tolerated only to the extent to which they remain subject to, and bound by, the demands of a federal state (43). Not insignificantly, it is precisely this process that is allegorized—and reaffirmed—by Skrypuch’s narrative. Indeed, The Hunger dramatically—and most likely unwittingly—demonstrates the extent to which a reconciliation between the “two parts” of cultural and state identification is not one that can somehow be spontaneously achieved but is rather one that requires the mediation of social institutions. It is significant to note, for example, that the final reconciliation between Paula’s “two parts”—that is, her ethnic Armenian identity and her normative Canadian identity—takes place in a treatment center. Such a reconciliation

“The Past Is a Foreign Country” • 153 happens within the confines of a correctional institution whose purpose is to instill within its clients those habits and behaviors that render her most likely to become a productive member of the society in which she lives. Moreover, the novel concedes to the fact that Paula’s enrollment in the program— impressively called a “collaborative weight normalization treatment program consisting in ten phases” (170)—demands a degree of sacrifice of personal independence. Paula’s admission to the program depends upon her signature of a contract which specifies that “she would eat the food they gave her, and participate in the counseling sessions, the weighing sessions, the leisure sessions, and everything else they suggested” (170). Consequently, Paula feels, on various occasions, “humiliation” (173), an “invasion of privacy” (174), and a certain loss of “control” (178). At one point, for example, the protagonist reacts defensively when a nurse who is weighing her refuses to disclose the results, asking Paula instead to turn around so that she cannot see the scale. “Why should you know something about me that I don’t?” Paula asks “incredulously”—to which the nurse replies, tersely and defi nitively, “It’s the rules, Paula. You signed the contract” (172). This moment points to a certain irony inherent in the treatment program: although its primary objective is to instill within the patient a certain sense of independence from her debilitating problem, it must accomplish this aim by first depriving her of any personal agency. The treatment center intends, in other words, to render Paula dependent upon the strict regime it imposes until such a regime becomes, in effect, “second nature.” As the conclusion to The Hunger makes clear, Paula ultimately comes to recognize that the “contract” to which she has subjected herself is, in fact, “for her own good.” Indeed, she begins to “misrecognize” the center’s intentions as her own, just as Althusser argues that the subject “hailed” by ideological state apparatuses “misrecognizes” the desires of ideology for his own. It may not be merely coincidental, then, that Paula begins to stitch together the “two parts” of her identity—her Armenian heritage and her Canadian citizenship—in precisely this institutional context. In effect, the “solution” she comes to propose to the “problem” of her fragmented self—a solution she imagines is of her own making—uncannily resembles the state-supported narrative of multi-culturalist Canadian identity that Banerjii insists was initially proposed “from above” in order to be internalized by the greater populace. Certainly, one might imagine that Skrypuch’s depiction of her protagonist’s convalescence is made in good faith: after all, Paula’s condition is urgent enough to require medical intervention. Nevertheless, the coincidence of Paula’s physical recuperation and her civic reintegration within the narrative suggests a tacit reaffirmation of larger, encompassing state narratives. Ultimately, it matters little whether Skrypuch consciously intended such a coincidence and its consequent implications; as I have argued above, her narrative, like any literary narrative, draws into itself culturally and historically contingent notions that are already circulating within its moment of production. To this

154 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature end, The Hunger itself serves as an ideological state apparatus, insofar as it not only consciously intends to influence young readers’ responses to specific problems (e.g., eating disorders and divergent cultural/civic affi liations) but also reaffirms the existence of ideologically-sanctioned institutions as possessing solutions to these problems. In this respect, Skrypuch’s representation of second-generation memory appears particularly problematic. Unlike the other texts I have studied thus far, The Hunger does not ever once question the ideological context in which its character lives and its narrative events take place; rather, it merely confirms the ostensible “naturalness” of such a context. Not unlike The Giver’s Community, the institutional setting that Skrypuch’s narrative establishes exists only for the “own good” of its citizens; therefore it requires little critique from those whose intimate interactions with the past might prompt them to interrogate the ways in which structural injustice might carry over into the present moment. To this end, The Hunger circumscribes the potential of second-generation memory, suggesting that an individual’s engagement with her elders’ traumatic past may only take place within a carefully delimited setting in which questions of difference are resolved once and for all. If Skrypuch’s narrative imagines its protagonist as a “go-between,” then, it does so only to suggest that the bearer of second-generation memory carries within herself past memories that might be easily reclaimed by and rectified within the present.

Chapter Five “Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” Mordecai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between Two Towers and Second-Generation Memory after September 11

Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s The Hunger serves as a particularly effective case study of how literary representations of ostensibly individual problems are nevertheless bound up with larger national and cultural concerns. The analysis of an apparently straightforward and naïve narrative such as Skrypuch’s exposes the extent to which literary depictions of second-generation memory are mediated by larger ideological investments that characterize their moment of production. Certainly, one should be especially mindful of how representations of individual mnemonic acts are mediated by encompassing ideological concerns when one considers the representation of such multiply mediated contemporary events such as the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on 11 September 2001. Indeed, the question of how culturally circulated images, and the national and ideological values that accompany them, eventually become grafted onto an individual’s immediate mnemonic repertoire becomes especially urgent in the discussion of memory after the event that has come to be called “9/11.” To be sure, much has been written—in the popular press, scholarly publications, and literary works published in the wake of this tragedy—concerning how the hypermediated nature of this event rendered television viewers and Internet users “second-hand witnesses” to the terrorist attacks. Indeed, the live coverage of this event complicated what it means to be a witness at all. It could be argued, for example, that early morning television viewers who watched live as United Airlines Flight 175 collided into the South Tower of 155

156 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature the World Trade Center could just as much be considered first-hand witnesses to the event as those who were physically present in Lower Manhattan. Likewise, the constant televised replay of images of the attacks, as well as their easy availability on the Internet, made it possible for viewers in such far-away places as Iowa City or San Francisco—or, for that matter, Tokyo or Santiago—to claim vicarious experience of the event. As Michael Bernard-Donals has observed, the frequent claim, made by direct and indirect witnesses alike, that the attacks on the World Trade Center were “like a movie” suggests that “witnessing has become so mediated as to make us unsure of where testimonies end and representations of the event begin” (340–341). Although much has been written about how the events of September 11 have particularly complicated the distinctions between fi rst-hand and secondhand witness, comparatively little has been written about the relationship between this hypermediated event and second-generation memory—specifically, the second-generation memory of the U.S.’s youngest citizens. At the moment at which I write this chapter, children who were infants at the time of the attacks are now entering junior high school; still millions more American children have been born in its wake. Although these young people may not consciously remember the attacks, or even their initial mediated reports, they nevertheless have been profoundly affected by the long-ranging consequences of the event. Indeed, it may be possible to say that children born under what Art Spiegelman has called the “shadow of no towers”1 are uniquely shaped by the aftermath of September 11. The child’s subjectivity, as Marah Gubar has observed, is always in some sense “belated”: young people, she argues, “are born into a world in which stories about who they are (and what they should become) are already in circulation” (6). Although this belatedness is to some extent true to the experience of all young people—arguably, it may be the only “universal” attribute of childhood—it is perhaps especially perceptible or identifiable in children born in the immediate aftermath of war or other radically significant historical events. Children born belatedly into post–September 11 American society, for example, are compelled to internalize practices and beliefs structured by a violent event they do not understand, or with which they may not even be familiar. Some young people experience the aftershocks of September 11 on an especially intimate level. For example, a great many children had to cope with their parents’ own attempts to grapple with the event, and thousands, if not millions, of American children currently have family members who have served (or who are currently serving) in one or both of the wars waged in response to the terrorist attacks.2 Others, meanwhile, are more indirectly affected by such aftershocks through their obligatory participation in such banal routines as airline security checks or through their exposure to media coverage of wartime casualties and “terrorist threat levels.” Moreover, it seems as though these young people will not be able to ignore the continuing urgency of this event, because rituals commemorating the attacks have all but become an institution in most American communities.

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 157 Thus, not unlike the child protagonists of the texts discussed in the previous chapters, members of the post-9/11 generation occupy an ambiguous position. On the one hand, they were born too late to claim themselves as witnesses—or even to relate mediated “flashbulb memories” of the attacks.3 On the other hand, their births in the immediate aftermath of the event will most likely prevent them from entertaining the kind of detached, albeit reverent, perspective that their own future children may have. Eventually, it seems fair to say, the date of 11 September 2001 will sound on the same cultural register as, say, 7 December 1941. Although, like the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, September 11 will surely figure importantly in future expressions of American collective memory, the sense of urgency with which this event is remembered, as well as its inflection within individualized, personal narratives, will probably diminish over time. For those young people living during the immediate aftermath of this event, however, September 11 is still a specter that looms at dangerously close range. If children born in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 have been bound to this singular event in ways their future progeny probably will not, then it is useful to study how children’s books attempt not only to represent secondgeneration memory but to produce it as well. The events of September 11 are still so recent that books for young people have yet to feature protagonists who did not witness them either in a direct or indirect manner—although it is likely that children’s literature will take on the representation of secondgeneration 9/11 memory within the next decade. However, children’s books published in the U.S. already have begun to address a very young audience in whom they seek to produce what Marianne Hirsch calls an “affi liative” orientation to an unexperienced traumatic event (114). These texts invite readers to empathize with, internalize, and critically interpret the memories of those with whom they may have no immediate (essential or adopted) family connection, but with whom they perceive ethical or analogical points of connection nonetheless. The “affiliative” connections that such texts aim to foster are thus “horizontal” rather than “vertical” (114). That is, they feature characters whose experiences are “broadly appropriable, available, and, indeed, compelling enough to encompass a larger collective in an organic web of transmission” (115). In this way, texts that seek to produce second-generation memory are significantly different from those that attempt to represent it, insofar as the former imply that an individual’s affective relationship to the past might be achieved just as much through lateral acts of empathy and analogy as they are through the maintenance of vertical or family-structured genealogies. Some of these books, for example, explicitly prompt young readers to reflect on their feelings about this event and to consider how its occurrence may have influenced their own lives; in this way, these books not only work to maintain September 11 within collective memory, but they also direct audiences to regard this event as worthy of intimate and affective attachment. Other 9/11-themed children’s books, although they may be less heavy-handed in

158 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature their interpellation of young (U.S. American) readers, nevertheless attempt to solicit their audience’s identification with the characters and settings of their narratives; in doing so, they impose upon their audience certain expectations that they imagine individual readers will fulfi ll. They desire that the youngest generation of young Americans, although they might have been born in the aftermath of this national event, might inherit and vicariously experience, initial responses to September 11 through their internalization of and affective response to representations of this event. Moreover, just as those texts that represent a familial—or in the case of Zlata’s Diary, quasi-familial—second-generation memory do so in a manner that suggests a necessarily creative interpretation of the past within new historical and cultural circumstances, books that attempt to produce an affi liative second-generation memory assume that their readers’ imagined and affective investment in the past is contingent upon their position within a dynamic present. However, because many of these books were published within a political and ideological climate in which the memory of September 11 was closely aligned with specific discourses of patriotism and state fantasies such as the preservation of the “homeland,” they tend to be more prescriptive and conservative than “representational” novels such as Lowry’s or Blume’s novels are. Consequently, these texts demonstrate a desire to prompt readers toward an affi liation with, and internalization of, dominant cultural narratives of the recent past. The ultimate mediation of these texts might call one, then, to question the various ideological forces that motivate the commemoration of September 11 in children’s books and the subsequent (attempted) production of second-generation memory in their readers. Moreover, when one considers the idealization, in second-generation-themed children’s books, of this order of memory as a product of the child’s unique perception and independent agency, one might be prompted to question the extent to which they actually invite such critical engagement in their own readers. In order to address these questions, I will focus primarily on Mordecai Gerstein’s Caldecott-winning picture book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (2003). Gerstein’s book serves as a particularly intriguing case study because, unlike other September 11–themed children’s books, it does not directly depict the events of that day, nor does it address its causes or its political implications. Rather, Gerstein’s book takes on a considerably more lighthearted topic: the successful attempt made by French acrobat Philippe Petit in 1974 to perform a tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The primary objective of the book is to commemorate a spectacular work of performance art: it includes a series of full-color images whose use of vertigo-producing perspective communicate the awe-inspiring nature of Petit’s venture. It is nearly impossible to read this book, however, without recalling the ultimate destruction of the Towers Petit once merrily traversed. The book includes, for example, images of pedestrians’ alarmed responses to Petit’s performance that uncannily resemble photographs and videos of

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 159 shocked bystanders reacting to the sight of the burning Towers. Moreover, the book concludes with an equally eerie image of ghost-like, translucent Towers superimposed onto the present-day empty New York skyline. Illustrations such as these thus prompt the reader to see from the perspective engaged by second-generation memory: as veritable ghost images, these illustrations demand a perception of the past commingled with the present. Initially, the visual rhetoric employed by Gerstein’s text seems to reaffirm conventional responses to the events of September 11. The illustrations appear, that is, to confine memory of this event solely to the memory of the Towers in such a way that they fetishize these structures. Thus, they aim to detach the memory of the World Trade Center and its eventual ruin from the memory of encompassing national and international history. Read from this perspective, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers engages in a project not unlike that pursued by Skrypuch’s The Hunger, insofar as it aims to preserve conventional discourses of nationhood. Through its fetishization of the Towers and its celebration of a childlike popular idol,4 Gerstein’s text appears to reaffirm the conventional post-9/11 conception of the nation as an innocent and blameless victim in need of a hero’s rescue. Once read from another perspective, however, Gerstein’s book appears to challenge the very sentimental and nationalistic notions it would otherwise seem to uphold. Although the book initially seems solely to commemorate the loss of a well-known cultural monument, it subtly uncovers images of war and violence that were repressed by the media, ostensibly to protect the sensitivities of the young and the impressionable. Illustrations of Petit’s tiny body precariously suspended in space, for example, bear an uncanny resemblance to an iconic photograph of an unknown World Trade Center employee tumbling to his death during the terrorist attacks—an image that was immediately censored by dominant media sources. Moreover, pictures of Petit’s vulnerable body not only imply the precarious position of the American body politic in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, but also suggest its melancholic state of suspension during (and beyond) this critical period. Finally, the curious set of historical coincidences that frame Gerstein’s narrative of Petit’s walk call attention to ghosts of former (inter)national traumas that eventually reemerged in critical discussions of September 11. Indeed, just as Gerstein’s illustrations provoke a sensation of physical vertigo in the reader, they may also prompt an intellectual or political vertigo as well, insofar as they tacitly challenge the reader to occupy ideological perspectives quite different from her own. Multiple readings of this picture book, then, expose a tension within it that is as taut as Petit’s tightrope wire. If it is indeed the case that a book such as Gerstein’s ultimately seeks to produce an affi liative second-generation memory of September 11 in young readers who were not immediately present during (or conscious of) its occurrence, it is nevertheless difficult to ascertain its investment in creating such memory. On the one hand, the book may be

160 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature interpreted as a reaffirmation of ideological concerns; on the other, it may be read as an invitation to counter-hegemonic5 criticism. Ultimately, then, the ambivalence of Gerstein’s perspective might place into relief the ambivalent nature of second-generation memory itself, whose unique perspective might be placed into the service of competing discourses and claims. In this way, a reading of this text suggests that the ghost-image-like character of secondgeneration memory might be understood not only through the overlapping of present and past, but through the coincidence of ideological positions as well.

“In the Shadow of No Towers”: Representations of September 11 in Children’s Literature The events of September 11 have inspired numerous literary meditations on the nature of terrorism and its effect on the Western imagination, including Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005), and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006). Not insignificantly, some of these 9/11themed texts have employed the figure of the child in order to elaborate specific perspectives on the attacks. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), for example, features a precocious nine-year-old protagonist who scrupulously combs residences of New York City for evidence of his father’s death during the attacks on the World Trade Center. Likewise, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) includes in its cast of characters a band of children who become intent upon hunting down Osama Bin Laden, whose name they have misheard as “Bill Lawton” (73). Novels such as Foer’s and DeLillo’s have demonstrated the usefulness of the child’s perception and imagination to a critique of post–September 11 historical consciousness. For example, Foer’s use of a well-read and politically astute nine-year-old narrator disrupts his readers’ Romantically inclined perceptions of childhood innocence and naïvté—and in so doing, it also challenges conventional perceptions of the U.S. as an innocent and blameless victim. DeLillo’s Falling Man, for its part, depicts childhood play in much the same way as Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself does, insofar as it portrays such ingenuous and malapropladen play as an intriguing and potentially productive strategy for mourning. Children’s authors, too, have drawn on the events of September 11 in order to engage their own audiences; indeed, a great number of picture book authors and illustrators have collaborated to represent the attacks in both word and image. Unlike authors of “adult” or mainstream texts, however, these authors and illustrators have shied away from critiquing or analyzing the historical contexts in which these events occurred. Rather, their texts are more therapeutic and commemorative than they are critical or analytical. Instead of investigating the complex of international and cultural relations that the terrorist attacks disrupted or placed into relief—and instead of examining the subsequent ideological consequences of the attacks—children’s books that

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 161 constitute what Paula T. Connolly has called the “9/11 canon” of children’s literature generally have been focused primarily on “healing” young readers whom they imagine to be particularly traumatized by the event (289). Indeed, the very first children’s texts to be published in the aftermath of the event were veritable “self-help” books aimed at schoolchildren. Some of these texts, as Richard Flynn has observed, were produced by corporate entities. The national chain Toys “R” Us, for example, offered young consumers a booklet titled, First Aid For Healing, whereas the children’s publishing company Scholastic Inc. created a website intended for presumably traumatized children and their anxious teachers and guardians (Flynn 6, 9). Individual authors, too, tried their hands at balming the psychic wounds of young people. Carole Marsh’s The Here and Now Reproducible Book for the Day That Was Different (2001), for example, is “written as a workbook, with exercises like ‘Dear Diary: A Page to Record Your Feelings,’ ‘Resolve Versus Revenge,’ and ‘What Will America Do Next?’ which asks readers to tick a box if they agree with the suggestion that we should ‘punish those who took part in the attack’” (Lampert 19). Likewise, Latania Love Wright’s coloring book A Day I’ll Never Forget: A Keepsake to Help Children Deal with September 11, 2001: Attack on America (2001) is advertised as a “resource for children’s safe expression and release of feelings” (back cover). The titles of these books, which characterize the event as unique and thus worthy of remembering, suggest their coercive nature. If many young people—especially those living far away from the crash sites in New York City; Washington, DC; and Shanksville, Pennsylvania—initially might have considered September 11 as “just another day,” these books work to ensure that they have a properly affective response to the event. To be sure, these books are invested in eliciting feelings, rather than any kind of critical response. As Kenneth Kidd has argued, Not one of these books seems to grapple with the historical contexts of the attacks and certainly not with the United States’s own bullying practices or support for such. Instead, young readers are urged only to express their feelings and to appropriate September 11 as a personal trauma—no matter what their own experiences might have been: Choose (and color in) your own September 11 adventure. (176) Certainly, texts written for adult readers also demonstrate a therapeutic element: one has only to do a quick search on Amazon.com in order to find a number of titles offering self-help advice to those struggling with this national trauma. Children’s books, however, appear to be particularly concerned with administering “first aid” to ostensibly damaged young psyches. To a certain degree, this is because, as Flynn argues, trauma has come to be imagined in the West as a “universal feature of childhood” which calls for adult intervention; the “trope of trauma,” he continues, “is particularly well-suited to the overwhelming events of 9/11 because it standardizes and naturalizes idiosyncrasies

162 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature and individual reactions by applying a blanket explanation that explains very little” (4, 5). Moreover, as Flynn also observes, the self-help genre is intimately linked to a logic of consumption. It is not merely coincidental, he argues, that manuals for “healing” were immediately produced by corporations like Toys “R” Us and Scholastic Inc., who, like President Bush, equated recovery with shopping.6 Such conglomerates, Flynn states, were quick to attend to “wounds requiring first aid, so that the child may quickly reenter the fun zone” (9). Not surprisingly, perhaps, these first, “therapeutic” interventions advocate displays of patriotic sentiment—such as the wearing of national colors—as adequate steps toward psychic mending. Although the nationalistic leanings of these texts are painfully transparent and certainly superficial, they are present as well in later, more “literary” depictions of September 11 for young audiences. According to Jo Lampert, a majority of 9/11-themed children’s books are concerned with “protecting a more defined, more insulated set of identities” available to young American citizens living in the wake of the attacks (43). These books, Lampert continues, provide an image of the world as “more divided and less fluid than previously thought”: a world that, according to the logic evident in Bush’s initial response to the attacks,7 is clearly defined by an “us” (the U.S. and its allies) and a “them” (the terrorists and their sympathizers) (43). Thus, for example, Nancy Carlson’s picture book, There’s a Big Beautiful World Out There! (2002) subtly equates the image of America with that of a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed child. Even when Carlson’s text attempts to advocate a need for tolerance and inclusiveness in post– September 11 America—for example, when it prompts the reader to accept “people who look different than you” (12)—it nevertheless depends on a logic of exclusivity. Not only is the “you” addressed by the text presupposed as a white, acculturated U.S. citizen who must deign to recognize representatives of “othered” demographics, but the illustration that accompanies this admonition also features multicolored and less-than-friendly faces that appear to elicit fear rather than respect. Later in her study, moreover, Lampert demonstrates how even those children’s texts that seem more accepting of difference ultimately subscribe to an “us/them” binary mentality. In Joseph Geha’s short story “Alone and All Together” (2002), for example, the reader is introduced to a pair of Arab-America teenagers whose cultural identity appears to challenge notions of American identity as strictly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and that seems to undermine an easy equivalence between Arabs and terrorists. As Lampert’s analysis of this story demonstrates, however, Geha’s narrative ultimately suggests that “ethnic” identity is ultimately subordinate to a larger and more pervasive “American” identity: one of his characters, for example, comes to feel fully “American” only when she joins a candlelight vigil held by an undifferentiated mass of New Yorkers. Thus, according to Lampert, the majority of 9/11-themed children’s texts advocate a notion of “good citizenship” that depends upon a negation of difference and a necessary “choice about ethnic loyalty” (43).

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 163 The presentation of cohesive American identity in these September 11-themed children’s texts in turn reveals a narcissistic conflation of American experience with global experience. Andrea Patel’s picture book On That Day (2001), for example, rather disingenuously suggests that the “world” was “pretty peaceful” until the attacks—a statement that, as Connolly suggests, is “inaccurate to the actuality of many children’s lives” (290). Patel insists, moreover, that this “world got badly hurt” only in the aftermath of September 11—as though this terrorist event operated in exclusion of, say, IRA bombings in Britain, explosions on Israeli buses, or various state-supported invasions of any number of countries. According to representations such as Patel’s, then, the attacks of September 11 constituted something of an historical anomaly—and one that, as such, can be easily ameliorated by the reader’s commitment to “playing and laughing . . . [and] by being kind to people” (9, 11). Indeed, even children’s books that seem more sophisticated than Patel’s, such as Maira Kalman’s Fireboat (2002) and Jeanette Winters’s September Roses (2004), offer relatively “quick fi xes” to an otherwise phenomenally complex event, insofar as they privilege such traditionally American notions of friendliness, tolerance, and a proper work ethic as proper responses to an event of such substantial magnitude. A final shared characteristic of September 11–themed children’s texts involves a certain preoccupation with—and an ambivalence about—the spectacular nature of the terrorist attacks on New York City. Although the complex of events now collectively alluded to through the term “September 11” included an aerial attack on the Pentagon as well as a crash in central Pennsylvania, most children’s books—and for that matter, most 9/11-themed texts more generally—tend to focus primarily on the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers. Certainly, this is not surprising, because the Twin Towers were entirely destroyed whereas the Pentagon was not, and because the obliteration of these iconic edifices already had been eerily foretold in preceding literary and fi lmic texts.8 Moreover, the cinematic character of the New York attacks—popularly described as being “like a movie”—lends itself well to representations by image-rich picture books. Curiously, however, very few children’s picture books actually illustrate the precise collision of planes and Towers. Although, for example, Kalman’s Fireboat includes an illustration of planes drawing ominously near the Twin Towers, it cautiously withholds an image of ultimate impact. Likewise, although Winters’s September Roses offers an image of a post-attack, panic-ridden city, it also refrains from explicitly depicting the event that triggered such anxiety. In contrast to an “adult-oriented” book such as Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close— which includes a series of photographs of a World Trade Center employee falling to his or her death in the immediate aftermath of a collision—such books attempt, in Hamida Bosmajian’s words, to “spare the child” the graphic details of the events they otherwise attempt to represent. In her study of children’s books that attempt to represent the Nazi genocide, Bosmajian argues that such texts often engage in “protective censoring

164 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature and intentional limiting of the reader’s understanding” of the Holocaust (xiv). On the one hand, she argues, texts that depict perpetrators’ involvement in the genocide tend to forgo problematic descriptions of these individuals’ experiences of pleasure in belonging to the Nazi Party; on the other, she continues, those books that communicate victims’ experiences downplay the violence they witnessed even as they privilege stories of heroic survival. In both cases, she maintains, the “didactic motive” that characterizes the texts “is the veneer that hides the unresolved grief in narratives about Nazism and the Holocaust” (xv). A similar case could be made with regard to children’s books written on the topic of September 11. In their attempts to “spare the child” traumatic details of terrorist violence, children’s books that depict September 11 often try to soften its blow by downplaying its national and international implications and instead portraying the attack as exceptional and wholly unmotivated. Consequently, however, they elide the “unresolved grief” that still permeates American culture in the wake of these events; furthermore, they reduce “disastrous history to a set of predictable signifiers intended to facilitate collective historical memory” (Bosmajian xviii). The works included in the so-called “9/11 canon” of children’s literature thus demonstrate a particularly conservative response to the terrorist attacks, insofar as they refuse a critical investigation of its causes and consequences, and insofar as they rely heavily on sentimental and conventional notions of its correct response. Of course, it might be argued that children’s books are limited by their very form and tradition in their depiction of a phenomenally complex event. According to such a view, it is one thing for an author such as Foer to address the traumatic and profoundly political effects of September 11 to mature audiences, and a very different thing altogether for a picture book intended for young readers to address this same event. Indeed, as Kristine Miller argues, children’s fiction written on the topic of war and trauma fulfills needs that are very specific to young audiences. As Miller argues, adults need fiction that may “shock and awaken them”; however, children, in her view, need to be taught “how to construct both personal and social identity in an unstable and war-torn world” (274). According to Miller’s argument, adults are so amply sutured within a given symbolic network that they can sustain, and even require, the “shocks” provided by such authors as Foer and DeLillo. However, as Miller’s argument further suggests, children occupy such a precarious position in a given order that they need to be assured of their place within it and thus cannot sustain the “shocks” that prompt them to critique it. Although one must be always already within a given ideology in order to confront or challenge it, historically, children have been imagined as subjects or citizens who possess at least the potential of sustaining ideological “shocks” and in turn entertaining political discourse. Certainly, as my reading of Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself has demonstrated, Judy Blume was not averse to shocking her readers with grisly depictions of Dachau—much, of course, to the consternation of critics who insisted upon the child’s protection from such

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 165 scandalizing content. Moreover, Blume was not without predecessors. Indeed, Walter Benjamin, writing at a time of considerable turbulence in post–First World War European society, celebrated the possibilities of a “proletarian children’s theatre” which might inspire in both young people and adults reflexive political thought and counter-hegemonic activism.9 Likewise, as Julia Mickenberg has demonstrated in Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (2006), children’s literature was something of a safe haven for radical (and often black-listed) authors who wished to foment dissent among the youngest U.S. citizens against a bourgeois and bellicose status quo.10 It seems, then, that—contrary to Miller’s claims—children’s texts and media do have (and have had) the potential of “shocking” their young audiences and prompting their critical interrogation of contemporary institutions and practices. Miller’s insistence, then, that children’s books should show young readers merely “how to construct both personal and social identity in an unstable and war-torn world” demonstrates a particular (and perhaps unwittingly intended) belief that children’s books are only good for suturing juvenile readers to a stable status quo. In turn, Miller’s argument reaffirms representations of September 11 such as Patel’s, which clearly advocate a superficial stabilizing identity at the cost of calling for the critical engagement that authors like Blume, Benjamin, and early twentiethcentury American radicals clearly believed that children deserve. Miller’s argument, it should be noted, is by no means unique: clearly, it is shared by a bulk of twenty-first-century children’s authors who implicitly insist that young American readers be “spared” the “shock” and pain of posing the question “why” to the nation’s most recent trauma. It seems as though, in the wake of what Time columnist Roger Rosenblatt famously called the post– September 11 “death of irony,”11 very few children’s authors have ventured to explore the nuances and complexities of national trauma—or, for that matter, encouraged their young readers to consider the often-contradictory responses to 9/11 on their own—because doing so would imply that “characters, nationalities, races, or even species cannot be divided into good and evil” (A. Butler 181). It seems enough for these authors and their texts simply to reiterate the claim that the attacks and their perpetrators were “bad,” without explicitly showing how they were “bad” or inviting their readers to interrogate such “badness” as a moral category. It remains to be seen, then, whether Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers subscribes to or refrains from this logic of sparing—or whether, more provocatively, it does both at once.

Naturalizing the Child The Man Who Walked Between the Towers begins with an introduction that should be familiar to readers of fairy tales and their later cinematic adaptations. “Once,” his first line proclaims, “there were two towers side by side”

166 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature (112). Gerstein’s use of the term “once” at this immediate juncture is especially significant: indeed, it calls to mind the familiar fairy tale introduction, “once upon a time.” By employing the term, “once,” Gerstein implicitly places the Towers’ construction and existence outside history. Like fairy tale castles,13 the Towers are implied to have existed in an indeterminate past, and to have been constructed during a time that is ostensibly of little interest to the reader. Although Gerstein is careful to specify the exact dimensions of the Towers— they were “each a quarter of a mile high; one thousand three hundred and forty feet”—he makes comparatively little effort to detail their construction in 1968 and 1969, nor does he explain the commercial uses to which they were put. As far as Gerstein, and in turn his readers, are concerned, the Towers always existed—until, of course, their ultimate destruction in 2001. Once it has introduced its readers to the erstwhile “tallest buildings in New York City” (1), Gerstein’s book then presents its protagonist, the “street performer” Philippe Petit (2). Not unlike the wandering princely heroes of beloved fairy tales, Petit is depicted by Gerstein’s book as a romantic idealist: his love of juggling, acrobatics, and casually dancing between the steeples of Notre Dame Cathedral naturally leads him, according to Gerstein’s text, to pursue a dream of walking between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Although Petit is aware of the opposition he will face in accomplishing his dream (“You must be crazy! they would say. You’ll die for sure!” [6]), he cannot help but pursue it. After all, as Gerstein’s verbal text proclaims, “[if] he saw two towers, he had to walk! That’s how he was” (4). After having introduced its hero—a veritable prince in pursuit of Rapunzel’s tower—Gerstein’s book then provides a detailed and admittedly breathtaking visual account of Petit’s strategy of shooting a “thin, strong line” across the “one hundred and forty feet” that marked the distance between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers (10). In the equally awe-inspiring illustrations that follow, Gerstein depicts Petit’s first daring step onto the tight-rope wire, as well as the acrobatic feats he accomplishes once he obtains a sense of equilibrium between the two towering edifices. “For almost an hour,” Gerstein’s verbal text proclaims, “back and forth, he walked, danced, ran, and knelt in salute upon the wire” (25). The verbal text of Gerstein’s narrative is supplemented by visual images that call attention to the magnificence of Petit’s feat. For example, an illustration of Petit resting prone on his balance beam above the bustling metropolis of New York and below the indifferent gaze of overflying seagulls places into relief the veritable sublimity of his adventure (26–27) The tension that marks Petit’s escapade is finally broken, however, on the following page, which depicts how the funambulist, now “completely satisfied” by his exploits, eventually walks “back to the roof” and holds “out his wrists for the handcuffs” proffered by nervous witnessing police officers (28). Upon an initial reading, the tone of Gerstein’s books appears to be nothing if not joyful. Indeed, even the mortal danger implicit in Petit’s daring feat is undercut by Gerstein’s use of cool colors—the color blue predominates in

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 167 the aerial scenes—that not only call attention to the sublime peace Petit later stated to have felt during his walk14 but that impart this serenity to the reader herself. Moreover, the illustrations that represent Petit’s eventual arrest offset any sense of danger or condemnation. One image, for example, shows Petit playfully balancing on his nose the hat belonging to a police officer charged with leading him away from the “crime scene”; in the background of this illustration, the officer’s colleagues, as well as various onlookers, laugh and point at the mischievous trick (28). On the facing page, a smiling, avuncular judge in a bright and airy courtroom sentences Petit to his “punishment”— performing “in the park for the children of the city”—as others present in the room look on in cheerful approbation (29). The implication is thus that Petit’s feat should be considered, at worst, a playful prank, and at best, a heroic feat that brought together citizens of a notoriously aloof city. Gerstein’s depiction of Petit as a child-like prankster works to endear the protagonist to American readers who are already acquainted with tales of mischievous yet well-intentioned “good-bad boy” heroes such as those depicted by Mark Twain.15 Indeed, if The Man Who Walked Between the Towers has enjoyed considerable popular appeal, this is not only because its colorful illustrations depict an historic feat, but because they present the reader with the comfortably familiar figure of the child. Although Petit was a grown man when he danced between New York’s iconic twin edifices, his diminutive stature and his surname—which roughly translates as “little one” in French—place into relief his decidedly childlike nature. Certainly, Gerstein’s text takes pains to depict Petit not just as a child, but as the idealized, Romantic Child. The aerial illustrations Gerstein uses to portray Petit’s legendary walk, for example, underscore his existence as a veritable Child of Nature. Not unlike Wordsworth’s Lucy, whose metaphoric equivalence with “rocks, and stones, and trees” ensures her utopian, preternatural origins, Gerstein’s Petit appears to commune instinctively with the sky and its natural inhabitants. For example, the many seagulls that appear in the book’s illustrations provide not only a sense of spatial perspective, but remind the reader of how “at home” the hero feels amongst the creatures of the air. Petit’s status as the Romantic Child is underscored, moreover, by his apparent exclusion from the corrupting influence of banal society. His eventual, and certainly flirtatious, acquiescence to the law, for example—figured here as the officers of the New York City Police Department who anxiously await the finale of his performance—suggests his ultimate difference from a pre-ordained, adult-oriented social order. Indeed, he is not unlike Twain’s semi-feral Huckleberry Finn, who matter-of-factly announces that he will “go to hell, then” once he decides to steer the slave Jim to freedom (223). Like Huck, whose moral nobility is placed into relief by his flouting of civic and religious law, Petit’s innocuous curiosity and adventurousness is highlighted through his innocent transgression of provincial, adult common sense. Gerstein’s illustrations of Petit may have such affective resonance, moreover, because they posit him not only as the Romantic Child, but as the

168 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature quintessential American child. As Lampert argues in her reading of The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, Gerstein’s diminutive French hero is appealing because, ironically, he represents ideals that traditionally are considered autochthonously or “essentially” American. In Gerstein’s text, Lampert observes, “there is only the slightest comment on the fact that Petit was French”: its narrator only briefly mentions Petit’s “home city, Paris (p. 5)” and proclaims “that France was too cautious and restrictive for the brave and risk-taking Petit” (111). Lampert continues by claiming that it “is on American soil where in the text [the acrobat] feels ‘absolutely free’ (p. 21). Despite his nationality, then, Petit ironically becomes an exemplary freedom-seeking American, with a go-get-it attitude” (111). To be sure, works of American literature, written for adults and children alike, demonstrate the critical role played by the figure of the child in defining an ostensibly essential American character. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), for example, draws on the figure of the innocent child in its “Camp Laurence” chapter, in which earnest and pure-hearted American contestants engaging in a game of croquet are pitted against comparatively wily, cheating British opponents; the ultimate triumph of the American children, in Alcott’s scenario, testifies to the ingenuous and autochthonous “spirit of ’76” (117). Subsequent works of children’s literature elaborate upon this analogy between the child and the ostensibly innocent and earnest character of American nationhood: Horatio Alger’s Dick Hunter triumphs on account of his “open face” (14); Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Cedric Fauntleroy redeems his corrupt, cynical, and thoroughly British grandfather through a demonstration of his innate kindness; and the eponymous protagonist of Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain struggles against British imperialism by dint of his well-practiced work ethic. In each of these narratives, the innate innocence and “can-do” spirit of the child are tacitly equated with the innocence and pragmatism of the American nation. In the twentieth century—an era not insignificantly termed both as the “American century” and the “century of the child”—the equivalence between the child and an innate American national character persisted, albeit in a more sublimated fashion.16 Early practitioners of American studies, for example, relied heavily (and perhaps unwittingly) upon Romantic descriptions of childhood as they sought to identify an autochthonous, and utterly unspoiled, American character in the works of literature they analyzed. R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), for instance, posits the American as an Adamic figure, existing within a new and unblemished Edenic space, “happily bereft” of the “Old World” legacies of British and Continental political and religious thought (5). Likewise, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) posits the North American continent as uncorrupted territory free for the taking by well-intentioned American settlers. Whether or not these Americanist scholars realized it, their mythologized narratives of America drew upon, and subsequently elaborated, the notion of the child

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 169 as a free, innocent, and uncorrupted being—an orphan, albeit one “happily bereft” of parents or ancestors. These scholars’ representations of America implied an analogy between the U.S. and the Romantic Child, insofar as both the Romantic Child and the “myths and symbols” articulated by Cold War– era Americanists depended upon imagery of innocence, purity, and a Godgiven but otherwise unmediated sense of agency.17 One should bear in mind this implicit analogy, then, in a reading of Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. If Gerstein’s depiction of Petit elicits in its audience a sense of pleasure—a pleasure that is intensified by a thrilling sense of danger or precariousness—such a feeling may be tied to a sense of relief regarding the survival of an idealized and deeply internalized notion of national identity. By presenting the reader with the image of a carefree, innocent, and ingenuously playful protagonist, Gerstein’s text implicitly presents its audience with the image of the U.S. it would like to preserve over and against the images of tarnishment and destruction circulated in the wake of the events of September 11. Gerstein’s illustrations, that is, provide the reader with a feeling of plenitude and innocence that effectively screens out the sense of loss and despair inspired by the terrorist attacks. According to the implicit logic of the picture book, the American “spirit”—personified by Petit, the naturalized American “child”—has survived intact even despite the malicious interventions of terrorists, just as the little funambulist survives (and indeed, thrives as a result of) his perilous walk.

Strange Dislocations Although Gerstein’s text clearly depends upon the symbolic economy of the child in order to suggest the triumphant survival of a national sense of self, it does so by disavowing precisely the traumatic event Americans actually survived. According to Connolly, Gerstein’s collection of joyful images serves as a “counterpoint to the 2001 terrorist attacks” insofar as it “reclaims the emptiness of the lost buildings with the creative act of one man, counters the shock of the attacks with the surprise of this earlier event, opposes destruction with creativity” (293). Moreover, Connolly continues, the book “implicitly replaces—or at least adds to—the now iconically defi ned ‘September 11, 2001’ with ‘August 7, 1974’ as a way to deepen one’s sense of the World Trade Towers, so that the attacks of September 11 do not become the only signifying feature of the buildings” (293). Connolly’s observation of the book’s potential to “replace” one historical event (Petit’s walk) for another (the terrorist attacks) should give a reader pause.18 Indeed, Gerstein’s book grants its readers plenty of opportunity to dwell wistfully and nostalgically upon an earlier, “creative” act in order to seek refuge from a later, and considerably more painful, memory of the destructive act upon the Towers that occurred a quarter-century later. Read thus, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers

170 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature might be considered as presenting a “screen memory” that intensifies one, more attractive, image or interpretation while simultaneously repressing another.19 The book assumes, that is, that readers would much rather dwell in a joyful (“childlike”) memory of American history than remain mired in a more recent and tragic (“adult”) one. Furthermore, the book’s own “creative act” of screening is driven by a sense of nostalgia—a nostalgia that is intensified by its use of a childlike expatriate hero. According to Carolyn Steedman, the figure of the child is intimately tied to nostalgia, or the longing for a lost home. Framing her discussion of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of childhood around an analysis of Wilhelm Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795), Steedman argues that Goethe’s relatively minor child character, Mignon, so fascinated generations of readers because her childhood was implicitly equated with a sense of spatial and temporal dislocation, and thus with an intense longing for home. In the innumerable stage and musical adaptations of Goethe’s original text—adaptations that ultimately came to be more memorable than the novel itself—Mignon’s pitiable desire for her native Italy resonated deeply with adult audiences, who identified with her as they imagined their own childhoods as similarly lost “homelands.” Consequently, as Mignon became increasingly distanced from the context of Goethe’s novel and ever more recognizable as a character in her own right, she came to enfigure the “imagined child” more generally. The “imagined child,” Steedman claims, “embodies the loss and dislocation” felt by adults who imagined themselves severed from childhood and who, therefore, sought to reclaim it by excavating their individual pasts (ix). Steedman argues, moreover, that this imagined child—culled from the image of the literally and figuratively malleable child-acrobat—might be considered precisely as a figure whose symbolic economy might place into relief various modes of cultural perception and feeling.20 Gerstein’s own child(-like) acrobat—who, like Mignon, performs in a country far away from the land of his birth—may similarly resonate, if only on an unconscious level, in the minds of readers who are convinced that the events of September 11 distanced them from an idealized American “homeland.” It is not insignificant, that is, that Gerstein’s text is focused on a literary figure that, since the late eighteenth century, has been associated with homesickness, and whose dazzling and seemingly joyful performances nevertheless inspire a sense of loss in audiences. Of course, as Steedman maintains, the figure of the child-acrobat has been used precisely to convey a sense of individual loss: that is, the child enfigures “something inside: an interiority” (20). Nevertheless, once this figure is placed against the backdrop of a larger, national tragedy, it draws out homesickness for individual experiences of childhood—the inscrutable, interiorized self—in order to inspire nostalgia for a larger, collectively shared, and presumably lost sense of national identity. Thus, the very same figure that Gerstein employs in order to suggest a trium-

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 171 phant survival simultaneously produces a nostalgic longing for that which it is implied to have survived. As I demonstrate in my reading of Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s The Hunger, nostalgia is by no means an apolitical sentiment; rather, it is often strategically manipulated in the service of reigning ideologies or political formations. It is not insignificant, then, that Gerstein’s text was published precisely at a moment in which the Bush administration harnessed the American citizenry’s nostalgia for a previously unsullied and veritably childlike past in order to justify both a battery of strict domestic security policies and a “global war on terrorism.” That is, Gerstein’s virtual and nostalgically infused resurrection of the Towers, as well as his tribute to a child-like hero who played between them, coincided precisely with a tactically enhanced resurgence of American myths of original plenitude and innocence. According to Donald E. Pease, Henry Nash Smith’s formulation of the U.S. as “Virgin Land” enjoyed a considerable renaissance after the events of September 11, not the least because conservative cultural pundits such as Alan Wolfe of The New Republic strenuously lobbied for its rehabilitation (166). The concept of “Virgin Land”—not so far removed from the concept of childhood innocence—depends, Pease argues, on a notion of the American nation as originating within previously “untouched” territory and thus operating according to its own, authochthonously created laws21 (158). The christening of the attack-site as “Ground Zero,” Pease continues, intensified the sensation that once-virginal America had been despoiled—indeed, forcibly penetrated—by ill-willed intruders. In turn, this sense of violation prompted a nostalgic desire for a pre-attack past that depended upon a vision of a previously whole and uncontaminated national community. According to Pease, the rape imagery conjured up by the corresponding concepts of “Virgin Land” and “Ground Zero”—as well as the nostalgia they inspired—was strategically used by the Bush administration as it justified security measures such as the USA PATRIOT Act22 that dramatically diminished civil liberties. Held in thrall by imagery of virginity and violation, Pease argues, American citizens willingly relinquished their cherished rights to privacy, free speech, academic freedom, and assembly (among other constitutional guarantees) in the hope that such a sacrifice would ultimately guarantee the return of a nostalgically constructed national past. The citizenry’s abject act of self-sacrifice was further enabled, continues Pease, through the administration’s characterization of the U.S. as a “Homeland.” The term “homeland”—like the German equivalent, heimat, evoked in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister—suggests a prior, nostalgically imagined state of affairs in which present cultural tensions and antipathies have already been resolved.23 By invoking the concept of “homeland,” Pease argues, the administration “exiled the people from their normative nationality so as to intensify their need for home” (168). In other words, it intensified the already-prevalent nostalgia inspired by the attacks by further distancing Americans from a

172 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature pre-established sense of national identity—and thus amplified their desire for the sense of “home” it professed to guarantee. It would be irresponsible, of course, to argue that Gerstein’s picture book was written intentionally as an apology for, or an affirmation of, the specific post–September 11 policies that drew their strength from a shared cultural sense of nostalgia. Indeed, there is no indication whatsoever in Gerstein’s book of any kind of stance on a “proper” response to the attacks: although his text insists that the World Trade Center should be remembered, it does not offer any indication of how it should be remembered, nor does it explicitly endorse any of the strategic policies offered in the memory of September 11. Nevertheless, Gerstein’s implicit correlation of Philippe Petit and the figure of the Romantic Child suggests that it shares in the same “structures of feeling” that justified the U.S.’s defensive and bellicose response to the terrorist attacks. In other words, the nostalgia produced by Gerstein’s depiction of Petit and “his” Towers coincides with what Raymond Williams, in his elaboration of “structures of feeling,” identifies as emergent “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” in a dominant ideology (132).24 The “structures of feeling” that are evident in Gerstein’s veritable consecration of the Romantic Child are influential as well in his depiction of the World Trade Center. Although Gerstein’s text is nominally “about” the “man who walked between the towers,” it is as much concerned with the Towers themselves as it is with the man who walked between them. Indeed, his narrative is framed not by depictions of its hero, Philippe Petit, but by illustrations of the iconic Towers: Gerstein’s very fi rst illustration depicts the edifices in their heyday, and his very last illustration superimposes the Towers’ spectral images over a now-empty New York skyline. Moreover, although the picture book takes pains to demonstrate Petit’s bravery and technical acumen, it does so precisely by underscoring the grandeur of the Towers and the consequent challenge they posed to the diminutive funambulist. According to Lampert, The towers are illustratively present on every page of the book, from every angle. The reader sees them from the bottom, from the top, as though standing on them, and from a distance. There are also descriptions of the original erection of the buildings, the strategic effect which makes the building of the Towers seem like a much grander effort than the destruction. (112) The Towers, in other words, are as much the heroes of Gerstein’s narrative as Petit himself. Consequently, when Gerstein’s written text ultimately implores the reader to recall the “joyful morning, August 7, 1974,” when Philippe Petit walked between [the Towers] in the air,” it prompts the reader to remember not so much Petit’s brave adventure as the edifices that enabled such an adventure in the first place (38).

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 173 According to Connolly, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers ultimately works to “deepen one’s sense of the World Trade Towers, so that the attacks of September 11 do not become the only signifying features of the buildings” (293). One might inquire, however, as to what exactly is “deepened” by Gerstein’s apparent tribute to this edifice. As has been argued above, Gerstein’s narrative does little to account for the history of the Towers’ construction, save for a technical account of their exact height. Moreover, it offers absolutely no explanation of the various commercial transactions that were made within the twin edifices, nor does it elaborate on such commerce in the realm of global exchange—that is, “world trade.” Nothing, it appears, is “deepened” by Gerstein’s depiction of the World Trade Towers except a sentimental attachment to them. As far as Gerstein’s narrative is concerned, the Towers are worthy of being remembered simply because they were grand, and because they loomed above the skyline of the U.S.’s most iconic and cosmopolitan city. Certainly, Gerstein’s fetishization of the Towers is by no means unique: indeed, not a few restaurants in the U.S. that claim to bake “genuine New York pizza” feature sacrosanct, silver-framed posters of the erstwhile World Trade Center. Nor, it seems, does the commemorative work exemplified by Gerstein’s evocation of the Towers differ in any way from that performed by images featured in neighborhood pizzerias: in both contexts, the Towers are reduced to symbols of geographic place and are thus divorced from the roles they played in housing a complex of global economic relations. If the Towers “mean” anything at all, it is only because, by “metonymic association” they come to be identified “not with Trade or as a center of commerce . . . but as America itself, and even as a sacred, spiritual place” (Lampert 113). The Towers, in other words, are mere “sites of memory,”25 extracted from the flow of history and infused with collectively endowed, sentimental significance. It is not difficult to see, then, how the collective, reified, and thoroughly nostalgic memory of the Towers could be so easily co-opted by conservative interests. Considered from this perspective, then, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers differs little from other contemporary children’s texts that attempt to represent and commemorate the events of September 11. Its ultimate aim, it appears, is to re-erect the Towers, if only symbolically, so that it may “spare the child” the pain of engaging with their actual loss. Moreover, through its depiction of a Romantic and thoroughly Americanized child(-like) protagonist, the picture book presents its readers with an image of stabilized, homogenized American identity that neatly corresponds to idealized identities espoused by such texts as There’s A Big, Beautiful World Out There! Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Gerstein’s fetishization of the Twin Towers, as well as his Romantically inspired characterization of the child-like Philippe Petit, reaffirms the very same images and myths exploited by the Bush administration in its justification of the suspension of freedoms traditionally considered “American.” Thus, it appears as though the memory of the Towers that

174 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature Gerstein’s book appears to inspire in its young readers is inextricably tied to an ideological credence in the U.S.’s exceptional innocence—and, in turn, to a concomitant belief in the equally exceptional measures that might restore such innocence.

The Allegorical Moment—or, Abiding by Vulnerability As Steedman argues, however, the nostalgia inspired by the figure of the child is inextricably tied to the child’s inherent vulnerability. Mignon “meant something—was an idea, an entity” not only because her plaintive appeals for a lost, pastoral home resonated with adults’ own longing for the “home” of childhood (and more generally, their sense of existential homelessness), but also because she was so utterly defenseless. Indeed, Mignon’s vulnerability was amplified by her status as a child acrobat: abused, exploited, and manipulated by the circus producers who had kidnapped her, she signified to nineteenth-century audiences the powerlessness of the child. Moreover, because her (forced) avocation as an acrobat compelled her to subject herself to the adult gaze, Mignon—not unlike actual nineteenth-century child performers—was an object of consumption: by watching her, audiences could imagine, and interiorize, their own sense of vulnerability. It is possible, then, that the appeal of Gerstein’s illustrations of Petit—himself something of a child-acrobat—might not be limited merely to Romantic notions of innocence or reactionary nostalgia. That is, the images might alternatively evoke, rather than dispel or cover over, a sense of vulnerability, and the anxiety-provoking sense of loss that accompanies a recognition of lost or absent power. Thus, Gerstein’s text need not be interpreted exclusively as a reaffirmation of a predominately felt national nostalgia: it might just as well be read as a candid acknowledgement of national loss and vulnerability. To be sure, Gerstein’s images, although often whimsical, also take pains to inspire a certain anxious sense of vertigo in its reader. For example, in what might analogously labeled a cinematic “close-up shot,” an illustration in his picture book depicts Petit’s slippered foot as it makes a first, tentative step onto the wire connecting the North and South Towers (19). The subsequent series of illustrations, moreover, place into relief the considerable risk involved in Petit’s traversal of the space between the Towers. What is particularly striking about this series of images is its attention to both the vulnerability and the grace of the body suspended in space. On the one hand, Petit’s exploit is rendered practically absurd: in one panoramic fold-out page, for example, his slim, black-clad body is dwarfed by an immense cityscape that threatens to swallow him up at any minute. On the other hand, Gerstein’s images convey a sense of sublime freedom: the synaesthetic effect of the illustrations is such that the reader can sense the chilly and deafening wind that blows around the protagonist and renders him radically apart from the bustling metropolis

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 175 that lies below his feet. Here, Petit literally hangs in the balance between two edifices of mythic proportions. Having found his position within the perfect, technically achieved symmetry of the Towers, he assumes the serenity of the ancient mystic poised upon a column. If Gerstein’s images are astounding, this may be in part because, collectively, they bear an uncanny resemblance to the iconic photograph of an unidentified World Trade Center employee falling to his death shortly after the terrorist attack on the second tower. This photograph, taken by photojournalist Richard Drew at approximately 9.41 a.m. on 11 September, 2001 and subsequently published in the 12 September issue of the New York Times, has since earned the title “The Falling Man.” Describing Drew’s iconic image for a 2003 issue of Esquire, Tom Junod notes both its perfect, awful symmetry and its sublime implications: The man in the picture . . . is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else—something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. (2) It is not entirely surprising that, soon after its publication in The New York Times, the photograph would be censored by the majority of the American media and banished to what Junod calls the “Internet underbelly” (6). Not only does the image testify to the fragile human body’s ultimate powerlessness against death, but it also bears witness to the vulnerability felt by the American body politic, more generally, in the wake of an unforeseen attack. Americans, Junod claims, might have been able to sustain the shock of seeing a plane crash into a building, but they were nevertheless not prepared to see their individual compatriots desperately hurling themselves to their deaths. Nor, for that matter, were they prepared to entertain the possibility that the U.S.—an imperial “First World” nation—might find itself in a situation as helpless and desperate as that faced by the nameless worker in Drew’s photograph. Indeed, as Susan Faludi argues in her feminist analysis of the events of September 11, artifacts of American popular culture testify to the extent to which citizens strenuously denied or repressed an immediate recognition of national vulnerability. According to Faludi, post-9/11 trends in political discourse, journalistic rhetoric, and fi lm production constituted a “reenactment of the fifties Western” in which the “women figured largely as vulnerable maidens” in need of saving by strong American men in the mold of John Wayne (5).26

176 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature As Freud argues in his 1919 essay on the uncanny, however, the repressed always returns in uncanny form—and in the case of The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, the repressed acknowledgement of ultimate vulnerability returns through Petit’s resemblance to the Falling Man.27 The perfect symmetry and terrible freedom suggested by Drew’s quickly censored photograph of the Falling Man are indeed re-presented, and rendered strangely familiar, by Gerstein’s text. Admittedly, this picture book never mentions the tragic human costs of 9/11, nor does it in any way directly suggest that Petit’s fi rst daring step over the ledge of the South Tower was equivalent to the urgent last steps taken by the Falling Man or any of the 200-odd other individuals who leapt to their deaths from the skyscrapers. Nevertheless, by repeatedly depicting the enormous chasm between the Towers and by emphasizing the dizzying heights at which both Petit and the Falling Man both once stood, the book inspires an associative connection between the two figures. The representation of 9/11 in this text is strictly allegorical: it suggests a brief, flashing unity between Petit’s own Kierkegaardian leap of faith and that of a desperate victim who simultaneously embraced both death and freedom in his willful leap from the Towers. It is perhaps only through the suspenseful, vertigo-inducing illustrations in Gerstein’s sequence that a reader may begin to get a sense of what it could feel like to stand at the precipice, and what it might mean to take one’s life into one’s own hands. Indeed, the surprising consonance between Drew’s photograph and Gerstein’s illustrations of the suspended Petit may be described by what Adam Lowenstein calls an “allegorical moment” (2). The term, “allegory,” Lowenstein reminds his readers, “is derived from the Greek allos (‘other’) and– agorein (‘to speak publicly’)”; allegory thus “speaks otherwise” as it invites audiences to perceive heretofore unrecognized correspondences at work within a single image (4). Writing specifically about the modern horror fi lm, Lowenstein defines the “allegorical moment” as a “shocking collision of fi lm, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical time are disrupted, confronted, and intertwined” (2). Although Lowenstein’s definition of the allegorical moment is concerned specifically with the history and technical constraints of cinema, it is significantly informed by the writings of Walter Benjamin, whose interests in both childhood perception and children’s literature I have documented in previous chapters. It is particularly informed by Benjamin’s formulation of the “dialectical image” wherein “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (Arcades Project 462). Such a dialectical image—or allegorical moment—may be perceived within the visual rhetoric of Gerstein’s picture book, in which an image of the recent past (the Falling Man, specifically, and the sense of vulnerability produced by the events of September 11, more generally) collides with an image generated in the present (Gerstein’s visual interpretation of Petit’s performance) in such a way that it shocks its audience. In turn, the “shock” delivered by Gerstein’s allegorical images might prompt an orientation to the

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 177 events of September 11 that departs markedly from the one embraced by the Bush Administration and the popular media, more generally. Specifically, the “shock” delivered by Gerstein’s images involves a confrontation with individual and national vulnerability. In her series of essays on 9/11 and its political implications, Judith Butler argues that this event exposed the ultimate but long unacknowledged vulnerability of the U.S.—a “primary” vulnerability that Americans, as humans, share with the rest of the world. Violence, Butler argues, is a “way a primary human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in the most terrifying way, a way in which we are given over, without control, to the will of another, a way in which life itself can be expunged by the willful action of another” (28–29). She continues by claiming that violence, and the vulnerability it exposes, in turn demands a certain “mindfulness” that can “become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions, just as denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery (an institutionalized fantasy of mastery) can fuel the instruments of war” (29). Bemoaning the fact that President Bush, in a 21 September speech to the public, insisted upon an end to grieving and a definitive military response to the attacks, Butler argues that a truly ethical reply to mass violence involves a conscious recognition of vulnerability and its implications. “We cannot,” she argues, “will away this vulnerability. We must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself, a situation in which we can be vanquished and lose others” (29). It is in this process of attending to vulnerability, she posits, that presumably selfpossessed citizens might perceive their ultimate dependence upon “others out there on whom [their lives] depend” (xii). Moreover, it is in the act of “abiding by” vulnerability that members of the so-called First World might recognize the vulnerability of other members of the global community—often, those whose lives have been compromised by the political and economic policies marshaled by the U.S. and other First World nations. The practice of “staying with” vulnerability, Butler continues, by no means implies a passivity or a resignation to inaction; rather, she argues, it “may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself”—a process that facilitates a new political and ethical perspective (30). Indeed, she writes, the “chance to reflect upon injury” in turn offers “a chance to start to imagine a world in which . . . violence might be minimized” instead of continued, as the Bush response would have it (xii). Certainly, Gerstein’s text, with its spectacular illustrations and fold-out panoramas, demands a considerable mindfulness of vulnerability. It is not insignificant, for example, that so many of its illustrations of Petit, much like Drew’s photograph of the Falling Man, call attention to the precariousness of the body suspended in space—for, as Butler insists, the body is the ultimate locus of vulnerability. The body, she states, “implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and

178 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature instruments of all these as well” (26). Petit’s intentionally, and very publicly, exposed body places into relief the exposition of all bodies, which ultimately are not privately possessed, but rather made always subject to (or vulnerable to) the whims and desires of others. Paradoxically, the image of Petit’s isolated body—again, like the Falling Man’s own—calls attention, through its very isolation, to the complex web of relational ties that bind us and ensure our very survival. Individuals need others—safety lines, as it were—in order to be sustained as individual subjects. Likewise, a nation, no matter how autonomous and strong it might imagine itself to be, requires the recognition of its relational ties to the global community: failing to do so hazards an injurious, if not a mortal, fall. Moreover, even those images in Gerstein’s text that do not directly depict Petit communicate a sense of shared, national vulnerability. The illustrations of Petit’s audience, for example, may not be as “joyful” as they initially appear. One fold-out page, for example, features an image of pedestrians pointing skyward at Petit, their open mouths and raised palms suggesting more alarm than delight. Not only do the pedestrians’ gestures bear an uncanny resemblance to those of bystanders photographed on the morning of September 11, but the presence of thick grey clouds billowing up and above the Towers eerily resemble the ashen clouds that blew into the streets of Manhattan on that day. Thus, if the aerial illustrations of Petit’s bid the viewer to see the spectral (albeit subsequent) presence of the Falling Man within them, these street-side images beckon her to perceive, as if for the fi rst time, the alarm of a city under siege. As is the case with the pictures of Petit himself, the sense of suspense and terror conveyed by these street-side scenes is presently undercut by reassuring images of the acrobat’s graceful return to solid ground. And yet, these illustrations demand that the reader linger on them before receiving such reassurance; indeed, the fact that they are printed on fold-out pages slows down the process of reading and invites contemplation. The reader is prompted, in other words, to recognize the vulnerability embodied by Petit and his impromptu audience—and in turn, to acknowledge the much more radical vulnerability felt by the U.S. at the moment of the September 11 attacks.

Crossing Boundaries Read even more closely, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers permits further “flashes of recognition” that illuminate correspondences between the past and the present. In turn, not unlike the games depicted in Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself, the allegorical images contained within Gerstein’s text transmit a “secret signal” of an immanent future: that is, they permit alternative ways of thinking about, and in turn responding to, a traumatic historical event.

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 179 In her reading of The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, Jo Lampert provocatively argues that there are moments in Gerstein’s text in which Petit uncannily resembles a terrorist. Petit, who is a “slippery combination of hero and rebel,” makes a secret plan (p. 7) and dresses up as a construction worker to gain entrance into the building. He enters the South Tower at nightfall to finalize his plan. He then dresses in a black shirt and tights, feeling convinced that, despite the illegality of his act, he is doing it in the name of freedom (pp. 21, 30). Petit was ‘not afraid’ (p. 21). When the police shout at him, ‘you’re under arrest!’ (p. 28), he ignores them and walks the other way until, after ‘almost an hour,’ they catch him (p. 29). He remains happy and ‘completely satisfied’ with his illegal act (p. 32), and in fact his actions hurt no one. (113–114) Lampert is by no means the only person to have commented on the illegality of Petit’s act and its possible post-9/11 connotations. James Marsh, in his documentary fi lm Man on Wire (2008), draws on the conventions of the cinematic thriller in order to depict Petit and his assistants as co-conspirators who craftily subvert security measures in order to hijack, as it were, the Towers—as well as the attention of an entire nation. Marsh’s use of black-and-white reenactments, suspenseful pacing, and a moody “heist” soundtrack create tension and, like Gerstein’s picture book, solicit the viewer’s sympathy with a selfacknowledged law-breaker. Moreover, Marsh’s fi lm repeatedly calls attention to Petit’s characterization of his act as a “coup”—a word that, in the original French, may simply refer to an “act” or a “feat,” but that nonetheless has darker associations with a “takeover” (as in coup d’état). Ultimately, Marsh’s fi lm inspires its audience to view Petit’s “coup” as an act of creative genius carried out by a man who, by his own admission, resembles a fairy-tale prince. Nevertheless, there are moments in his documentary—such as a shot of the Towers’ initial construction, which bear uncanny resemblance to later images of “Ground Zero”—that prompt the viewer to question the fine boundary that exists between “hostile” and “friendly” takeovers. According to Lampert’s reading of The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, this boundary ultimately becomes clearly defined: Gerstein’s Petit, she categorically states, “cannot be read at all as subversive” (114). The picture book’s hero, she maintains, is “repeatedly described” as “loving to dance,” “smiling,” “crazy in a good way,” and “benign; clearly a good guy rather than a bad one” (114). Moreover, she insists, “Petit’s illegal performance, unlike the one on 9/11, was not only ‘astonishing’ and ‘terrifying,’ but also, significantly, ‘beautiful’” (114). There is little doubt that this was, indeed, Gerstein’s intention in characterizing Petit: even once one considers the more solemn implications of his depictions of the suspended body, the overall effect of the book is celebratory, or at least memorial. Certainly, the book can in no way be

180 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature read as an apology for terrorism, no matter what spectacular forms it might take. Nevertheless, the very fact that The Man Who Walked Between the Towers at least grants a potential correlation between Petit’s creative act and the later, destructive acts committed on 9/11, should give readers pause. That is, if the text’s representation of Petit’s plot inspires at least a momentary, and perhaps anxiety-ridden, act of recognition, then it is important to “abide by it” in order to decipher its possible political implications. On the one hand, Gerstein’s text imagines its reader as an American who, by virtue of her national identity, not only mourns the loss of the Towers— here, metonymic expressions of an idealized U.S.—but also implicitly identifies with such stereotypical “American” traits as honesty, openness, and lack of irony (pace Rosenblatt). On the other hand, it prompts this same reader to identify with a hero who, however earnest in his intentions, resorts to subterfuge and conspiracy, and who intentionally trespasses on what later would be called “sacred ground.” Moreover, while it considerably “Americanizes” or naturalizes its foreign-born hero, the book nevertheless calls its readers to sympathize with a native of France—a country so detested by some Americans at the moment of the book’s publication that members of Congress lobbied to change the term “french fries” to “freedom fries.”28 However briefly, then, the book instantiates a moment of cognitive dissonance, whereby the reader perceives the action not through her habitually learned American perspective, but through a defamiliarized point of view. That is, Gerstein’s text prompts its reader to see from the perspective of the stranger—the Other—for whom entrance to even the most iconic of American structures is made difficult. In turn, although it by no means condones terrorist measures, it does nevertheless prompt the reader to reconsider instances in which subversion becomes necessary. Acts of subversion, of course, need not be limited to spectacular acts such as that performed by Petit: they also involve radical ways of (re)imagining one’s material circumstances. The terrorist attacks of September 11, writes Butler, afforded citizens of the U.S. (and the First World, more generally) to question the “us/them” binaries that have so long structured global politics and exchange.29 The “primary vulnerability” exposed by September 11, Butler argues, afforded Americans the opportunity to perceive how such vulnerability is shared by humans in the greater global community; in effect, it allowed Americans to see through the eyes of, say, Palestinians, or Afghans, or Sudanese. In turn, she continues, such a perspective potentially allowed Americans (or, again, residents of the First World) to reconsider the conditions that produce structural violence and consequent vulnerability, and thus to question their complicity in sustaining these conditions.30 What Gerstein’s text does, then, through its subtle estrangement of the coded American reader, is place the “insider” into the position of the “outsider.” Initially inserted into the position of the First World citizen who may not even question such “basic” or “guaranteed” freedoms such as mobility, the reader comes to be re-positioned, through her sympathy with Petit, as

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 181 one whose every move is strategic, covert, and continually subject to potential punishment. Through her identification with Petit, whose otherwise earnest desire to scale the Towers might just as well be read as an intent to terrorism, the reader is placed into the position of other, equally suspect, border crossers: illegal immigrants, displaced persons, and individuals who dare to act against the constraints imposed by socially-constructed views of gender, sexual orientation, class, and race. In turn, it is through her sympathy with an “outsider” who must bravely push his way “in” that the reader is prompted to question the symbolic, yet very real, conditions that determine who or what is deemed “in” or “out” (or, as it were, “with us” or “against us”) in the first place. Thus, if the initial effect of Gerstein’s depiction of vulnerability—produced by its subtle association between Petit and the Falling Man—is a recognition of a national vulnerability, its secondary effect—enabled by a potential equation between the well-intended Petit and the terrorist—involves a reconsideration of who may be vulnerable to marginalization by the State, and what the frightening consequences of such marginalization might be.

Back to the Future The Man Who Walked Between the Towers may prompt such a “subversive” reconsideration, moreover, by reminding its readers of the precise date on which Petit’s “coup” occurred: its concluding statement enjoins the reader to recall the “joyful morning, August 7, 1974, when Philippe Petit walked between them in the air” (34). This detail, of course, may be read as an attempt to amplify the narrative’s historical authenticity. Moreover, as I have argued above, it intensifies discourses of innocence nostalgia by fi xing Petit’s walk within a pre-9/11 era of American history. However, it simultaneously disrupts this same tendency toward nostalgia by placing Petit’s performance into a larger constellation of traumatic national and international events. Although Petit’s coup might have made for a “joyful morning,” it occurred against the backdrop of vexed social and political relations.31 At this moment, the U.S. was reeling from the consequences of its misadventures in Vietnam, which had ended a year before. Moreover, the dissent fomented by the Vietnam War was as focused inward as well, as civil rights leaders and early practitioners of academic multicultural studies posited a relationship between American colonialist interventions abroad and its tactics of confining racial minorities to ghettos and reservations.32 Such a relationship between “domestic” and “foreign” crises was demonstrated as well in the Watergate hearings—occurring even as Petit took to the air—when President Richard Nixon, long reviled by the Left for his expansion of combat missions in East Asia, was ultimately put on trial for supporting a conspiracy aimed at enabling his re-election. Finally, it is not insignificant that Petit’s coup was preceded by another, far more infamous, coup. On 11 September 1973—less than one year before Petit’s walk

182 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature and precisely twenty-eight years before the terrorist attacks on the Towers Petit once scaled—Augusto Pinochet, aided by the CIA and supported by both U.S. and Chilean practitioners of Chicago School–style economics33 — seized the presidency of Chile and swiftly sanctioned the torture of thousands of civilian dissidents. Once placed into historical context, then, the date of Petit’s walk does not seem as “joyful” as it might initially have appeared. Rather, it appears to mark a temporary respite from major political and social crises. More to the point, however, its occurrence in the 1970s-era U.S. and its later representation in Gerstein’s picture book, published in 2003, illuminate the correspondences— rather than the differences—between pre- and post-9/11 American culture. If, in 1974, the U.S. was barely recovering from a failed imperialist adventure, it was embroiled, in 2003, in two wars (one in Afghanistan, one in Iraq) waged, at least nominally, in the interests of promulgating American-style democracy abroad—wars that, as their critics have strenuously maintained, were ultimately informed by the interests of globalized free-market capitalism.34 Likewise, both of these international conflicts were closely intertwined with crises of unbridled U.S. state power. In the early 1970s, as in the years following the events of September 11, the nation was rocked by reports of presidentially sanctioned wire-tapping—although, unlike the earlier Watergate scandal, the latter instances of intrusion and surveillance were carried out in the name of the law, as specified by the USA PATRIOT Act. Additionally, as both the outcomes of the U.S.’s tacit support of the Chilean coup and its far more explicit involvement in Iraqi “regime change” reveal, American interventions carried out in the name of “democracy” continue to be intertwined with state-sanctioned practices of torture. Indeed, if most Americans fail to shudder at the name “Pinochet,” a good many might still might recoil at the mention of “Abu Ghraib” or “Guantanamo Bay.”35 Finally, as the debate over Central American immigration to the U.S. becomes progressively shrill—and the possibility of a wall separating the U.S. and Mexico becomes increasingly evident—one might note that contentious discourses of racial and cultural difference certainly have not disappeared since the racially instigated riots of the 1960s and ’70s.36 What Gerstein’s picture book reveals then—perhaps unwittingly—are the crucial contiguities between an earlier, nostalgically misremembered past and a more recent, traumatically marked present. In making possible such a revelation—again, one that may work against its presumably memorial and conservative intentions—the book betrays the scandal at the very heart of the American mythos. That is, it exposes the ways in which the U.S., even as it jealously guards its status as an “innocent” purveyor of democracy and universal human rights, nevertheless repeatedly exempts itself from the constraints of the very virtues it promulgates. To be sure, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers makes a valiant effort to cover over such a scandal: it focuses, after all, on a “joyful” and ostensibly apolitical aesthetic feat that temporarily united

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 183 a racially, ethnically, and presumably politically diverse audience. And yet, by foreshadowing the events of September 11 within its representation of the events of August 1974—through, for example, telling signs of clouds, smoke, and consternated facial expressions—the picture book nevertheless aligns one historical moment with another, thus positing continuing correspondences between two seemingly distinct historical and cultural moments. It seems, after all, that the “pre–September 11” date of 1974 and the “post–September 11” date of 2003 are not as dissimilar as one might initially imagine, marked as they are by analogous cultural and political anxieties and conflicts. In the final analysis, then, even the jovial and cool-colored illustrations of Petit’s stunning aerial walk cannot entirely paint over, or transcend, the still-simmering conflicts faced by those watching from below. Like the photographic ghost image, the book exposes a disturbing relationship between two, seemingly incommensurate, moments of time. Of course, it may be readily argued that the political implications of Gerstein’s text will be missed by his targeted audience: after all, the intended readers of The Man Who Walked Between the Towers are presumably children with little to no memory of the tragic event which the book subtly commemorates, let alone the still earlier (inter)national conflicts his text implies. Indeed, one could hardly argue that most adults—even the most politically astute adults— would immediately grasp the correspondences implicit within Gerstein’s text. And yet, it is important to recognize that such correspondences are still there, as it were, for the taking. Their recognition, however, ultimately depends upon a mode of perception that is associative rather than strictly rational—a mode of perception that, as I have argued in the preceding chapters, is inherent in the most naïve, and least mediated, forms of second-generation memory. In one of his final essays, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), Benjamin argues that historical events should not be regarded as existing within a fi xed, “eternal,” and ultimately reified past (262). Neither, he maintains, should history be perceived teleologically, as a linear chain of events that progresses “through a homogeneous, empty time” (261). The historian should cease “telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary” (263). Rather, according to Benjamin, the past should be regarded as a “constellation which [the historian’s] own era has formed with a definite earlier one” (263, my emphasis). Past events, in other words, should not be marshaled into a rigid narrative progression. Instead, they should be perceived as corresponding to one another, much like stars can be read in complex geometrical alignments. To read past events in this way, Benjamin maintains, is to apprehend larger patterns that cannot be grasped by simple teleological narratives. Moreover, to approach history in this way is to recognize the extent to which the past—to cite Benjamin’s contemporary, the U.S. writer William Faulkner— “isn’t even past”37 (92). That is, the apprehension of history as a constellation rather than as a linear chain invites one to perceive how one past event might resound within another, later one.

184 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature Of course, as Benjamin concedes, such an anti-teleological (or “historical materialist”) approach to history is heterodox, to say the very least. Indeed, he argues, the past remains largely regarded as a chain of distant, immutable, and reified events precisely because this mode of interpreting history best serves those in power. History, he maintains, is written by a “triumphal procession” of victors who seek to control the present and the future by promulgating scrupulously modified narratives of the past (256). Crucially, however, there exist key moments—or, as it were, apertures—in the dominant historical narrative that allow one to “brush history against the grain” (257). These instances, which Benjamin calls “dialectical images” (and which Lowenstein later labels “allegorical moments”) are those in which a long-repressed memory “flashes up at a moment of danger” (255). At these critical moments, potential within both historiographical and aesthetic texts, “thinking suddenly stops” and one is confronted by a “configuration pregnant with tensions” (262). In such moments of “shock,” one apprehends the past’s insistence within, rather than its removal from, the immediate present; one perceives, in other words, the past and present “crystallize[d] into a monad” (262–263). So fleeting are these moments, however, that they might just as easily be overlooked or forgotten: the past, Benjamin warns, “can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (255). Thus, if there exist certain “dialectical images” or “allegorical moments” within The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, this does not necessarily guarantee that readers will “seize hold” of them. Indeed, it is much more likely that audiences will recognize, and in turn internalize, the familiar national myths that the book reproduces than it is that they will question, for example, the uncanny resemblance between Petit and the Falling Man, or the complementary relationship between the book’s 1974 setting and its 2003 date of publication. Child readers, whose knowledge of U.S. history is presumably scanty, may be particularly inclined to allow the book’s subtle and obscure allusions to the present-past to “flit by” them (255). And yet, as Benjamin maintains in his writings on childhood perception—and as children’s books like Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself reiterate—children are nevertheless more likely than their adult counterparts to challenge the received truths of dominant cultural narratives. By asking such presumably naïve questions as “how?” and “why?” children unselfconsciously, and unwittingly, “brush history against the grain.” The moment at which the child asks such questions—say, of a picture book such as Gerstein’s—is a moment rich with potential. If the adult with whom the young person reads the book is at all sensitive to both the child’s native intellectual capacities and the historical implications of the text, then the childlike questions “how” and “why” might engender productive intergenerational discussion—discussion that may in fact enhance the child’s critical perception of the past, present, and future. Then again, the inquiry might fall on deaf ears, and thus the aperture in the narrative might close up, “never to be seen again.”

“Remember, Remember, the Eleventh of September” • 185 Epilogue: “Remember, Remember . . .” For over four centuries, schoolchildren in England and the greater Commonwealth have been urged to “remember, remember the fifth of November” in observance of the thwarted Gunpowder Plot of 1605—a coup that, had it succeeded, would have ended in the material destruction of Parliament, the assassination of King James, and the accession of James’s Catholic daughter, Elizabeth. Today, the familiar chant is generally regarded as little more than a nursery rhyme, and the bonfires at which it is still recited have largely lost their pronounced, if not violent, anti-Catholic fervor. What was initially a severe injunction to remember vicariously a traumatic historical (near-)event has been absorbed and diluted by collective memory and celebratory tradition. It would be difficult—if not impossible—for a twenty-first-century British subject to claim anything like a vicarious memory of the event. Even despite discourses of heritage, the preservation of original documents, novelistic and fi lmic depictions of the plot, and other such endeavors to bring modern audiences into closer contact with Guy Fawkes and his contemporaries, the memory of the event seems distant and conspicuously mediated. To paraphrase L. P. Hartley, the early seventeenth century has come to be considered a foreign country: the gulf of time that lies between that era and our own is enough to convince us that they did “things differently there” (5). In the early twenty-fi rst century U.S., however, it is still plausible to argue that schoolchildren who are taught in effect to “remember, remember the eleventh of September” will respond to the events of September 11 on a profoundly intimate level—even if they were not yet born at the moment it occurred. Certainly, their memory (as well those of their elders) is no less mediated than that of a far more distant event such as the Gunpowder Plot; indeed, it may be even more so, given the predominance of television and the Internet. And yet the event feels more immediate, more “personal,” not only because it is obviously more recent, but also because its collective memory remains figuratively and literally electric. Photographic images of the flaming Towers, as well as the strategically rhetorical uses to which the term “September 11” has been put, still have the power to charge public sentiment and to effect policy decisions. Such images and allusions maintain such electrical charge, moreover, because they rely on the presumption of shared, direct experience, even if such “experience” may have been mediated and simulated—and, in the case of the nation’s youngest generation, never actually existent in the fi rst place. Thus, it is crucial not to discount the role that children’s books such as The Man Who Walked Between the Towers have played, for better or for worse, in sustaining the aura of experience, for their efforts to superimpose the memory onto young readers’ individual mnemonic repertoires will no doubt influence that generation’s ethical and political orientations. As my reading of Gerstein’s text suggests, however, it remains to be seen just what form such influence may take.

186 • Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature Indeed, collective memory—and the second-generation form of such memory that I have addressed—is complex, ambiguous, and often myopic. To be sure, the haziness of collective memory is more easily perceived and corrected through greater hindsight, and with the assistance of a critical (and often more skeptical) historical lens. The Gunpowder Plot, for example, may not have been as grave of a threat as it has been collectively imagined. As Antonia Fraser argues in her popular history of the plot, the conspiracy was troubled at every turn by dissent and distrust; the legendary Guy Fawkes, whose effigy continues to be burned in commemoration of the event, was only a minor player in the coup; and details of the plot were most likely exaggerated or fabricated by members of Parliament eager to fan the flames of anti-Catholicism to their own political advantage. No doubt, future histories of events such as September 11 will likewise attempt to dispute the affective claims of its collective memory—placing into starker relief, for example, the ways in which popular perceptions of and reactions to this event (like the earlier “terrorist” event of 160538) were harnessed by pundits and policy-makers toward strategic political ends. And yet, as valuable (or not) as these anticipated historical diagnoses might be, one need not passively await them. Indeed, an historical critique of events such as September 11—or even earlier, but no less affectively resonant events such as the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide—may be immanent within their contemporarily felt, collectively shared memories. It is precisely because such events remain so vivid within the collective imagination—so vivid, indeed, that those born after their occurrence may claim intimate or vicarious access to them—that their memory might illuminate the desires, allegiances, and anxieties that framed their occurrence and that subsequently shaped their re-presentation within a more contemporary moment. The study of second-generation memory, then, might tell us as much about the present as it does about the past. Moreover, inasmuch as it enables specific ethical and political lived practices with far-reaching consequences, secondgeneration memory may also be considered a spectral image of the future.

Notes

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According to Dale Townshend, Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell “express their admiration for at least one prudent mother who scrupulously policed, and then removed with a sharp pair of scissors every offending word, line, or passage from book prior to making it available for the perusal of her young children” (24). Similarly, writer and pedagogue Sarah Trimmer proposed that a “pair of scissors [sic] will easily rectify [the] error” of unacceptable material for children (25). Townshend’s essay “The Haunted Nursery: 1764–1830” charts the processes through which works of fantastical and/or Gothic fiction, once dismissed as the purview of “Old Wives,” (17) became associated with children’s literature. See, for example, volume 33 of Children’s Literature (2005), which includes a forum on trauma and children’s literature edited by Kate Capshaw Smith. See also the edited collection, Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War (2008), edited by Elizabeth Goodenough and Andrea Immel, which was inspired both by a 2000 special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn and a 2003 conference, “Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War” at Princeton University. Bosmajian’s Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and the Holocaust (2001) addresses the ways in which accounts of the Holocaust in children’s literature tends to “spare the child” the most excruciating details of this event by simultaneously downplaying the complicity of its perpetrators and the sufferings of its victims. Kertzer’s My Mother’s Voice: Children, Literature and the Holocaust (2002) further examines the ways in which Holocaust-themed texts for young people interpellate their audiences. Finally, Lydia Kokkola’s Representing the Holocaust in Children’s Literature (2003) analyzes the thematic and generic trends within Holocaust-themed children’s books. Published in short succession, these three books demonstrate the increased attention given to representations of the Holocaust in children’s literature. Of the 187

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three, Kertzer’s project is perhaps the most closely aligned with my own, insofar as it interrogates children’s literature as a distinct genre, and insofar as Kertzer—the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—is particularly attentive to the second-generation memory of the Shoah. Kidd writes specifically about the appeal of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1976), which “gave pop-intellectual affirmation to the now commonplace idea that fairy-tale reading amounts to self-help or bibliotherapy” (170). In her study of the U.S.’s intervention (or relative lack thereof) in key moments of modern genocide, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (2003), Power characterizes the twentieth-century century as the “age of genocide.” See Paul Connerton’s How Societies Remember (1989), which I discuss below. Furthermore, Henri Bergson’s foundational work, Matter and Memory (1896), although it does not explicitly address the topic of collective memory, is particularly influential insofar as it posits that memory involves not only active recollection but embodied habit memory—precisely the kind of memory that scholars such as Connerton address in their own studies of social or collective memory. See also Jeffrey C. Alexander et al.’s Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity and Jeffrey K. Olick et al.’s edited collection, The Collective Memory Reader. In so-called “Golden Age” novels such as J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1906) and A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), the narrators explicitly address their audiences, thus calling attention the generational difference between themselves (adults) and their readers (children). Jacqueline Rose is especially attention to this mode of address in Barrie’s Peter Pan, calling attention to the ways in which it “sets up the child as an outsider to its own process, and then aims, unashamedly, to take the child in” (2). As Rose argues in her reading of Alan Garner, children’s books make possible a “moment of discovery when the child realizes that he or she is being addressed by the forces of a mythical past which the child is being asked to relive or repair” (44). Such a “moment of discovery” extends to the adult reader as well, who, as Valerie Krips argues, returns to beloved childhood texts in order remember her youth and thus articulate a coherent, stable sense of self. In this process, Krips continues, the adult encounters a reformulated and coherent representation of the past—of which she is implicitly a part—that “shore[s] up the damage” wrought by cultural and political change (19). Both the adult and the child reader, then, become subjects in an uncanny tableau facilitated by narratives intent upon superimposing the past upon the present and reorienting those living within such a present. Bosmajian, for example, argues that we “can expand the concept of postmemory and claim that the master narratives of Holocaust survivors, be they oral or written, have an authoritative ethos that a historical or

Notes • 189 fictional post-memory narrative cannot equal” (185). Kertzer draws on Hirsch’s study of the relationship between postmemory and photography in her (Kertzer’s) analysis of Holocaust photographs contained within children’s picture books (258–259). 10 Halbwachs posits an analogous relationship between the individual who seeks to recount the memories of her lived past and the person who desires to recount her dreams. In both instances, he maintains, the subject encounters what amounts to raw data—“a pile of rough-hewn materials with superimposed parts heaped one upon the other, only accidentally achieving an equilibrium” (42). Likewise, in both cases, the subject must retrospectively place these “rough-hewn materials” into a narrative that gives them shape and coherence. Such a narrative “edifice,” Halbwachs argues, is in turn viable only if it is in turn supported by a “whole armature” of culturally recognized narrative frameworks (42). It is only in effect “after the fact,” therefore, that memory might be posited. 11 As McClintock argues, the proliferation of “‘post-’ words,” which can be traced throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, may be regarded as a “symptom” of a millennial anxiety concerning Enlightenment narratives of progress (96). It is not merely coincidental, she maintains, that the explosion of such prefi xed terms was roughly coterminous with the late twentieth-century “collapse of both capitalist and communist teleologies of ‘progress’”—a collapse, she argues, that motivated such quasi-apocalyptic narratives such as Francis Fukuyama’s neo-liberal prognostication of the “end of history” (96). The sense of “historical abandonment” occasioned by the collapse of material structures and the myths that supported them, McClintock argues, resonates as well in the “apocalyptic, time-stopped prevalence of ‘post-’ words” which announce a definitive break with past traditions even as they fail to envision an alternative, cohesive vision of the present or future (96). The term “post-colonial,” McClintock maintains, is but one example of such millennial ambivalence or anxiety. On the one hand, she argues, this term implies a set of relations that extend beyond historically specific moments of decolonization; that is, it implies a certain breakage with prior geo-political formations. On the other hand, however, the term’s dependence upon the prefi x “post-”—a prefi x that implies linear subsequence, and that therefore depends upon teleological narratives of time and history—is “haunted by the very figure of linear ‘development’ that it sets out to dismantle” (85). The term “post-colonial,” then— like other “‘post-’ words,” according to McClintock—is an expression of a greater cultural ambivalence effected by larger geo-political crises. To a certain extent, Hirsch’s elaboration of her term “postmemory” acknowledges the historical and philosophical context that McClintock addresses. Hirsch maintains, for example, that postmemory “shares the layering of these other ‘posts’ and their belatedness aligning itself with the practice of citation and mediation that characterize them, marking a

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particular end-of-century/turn-of-century moment of looking backward rather than ahead and of defining the present in relation to a troubled past rather than initiating new paradigms” (“The Generation of Postmemory” 106). What Hirsch’s frank and self-conscious qualification does not appear to take into account, however, are the political and ideological implications of such a backward glance—implications that McClintock addresses in her own critique of what she calls “post- words.” Shohat argues that the term post-colonial “inadvertently glosses over the fact that global hegemony, even in the post-cold war era, persists in forms other than overt colonial rule”: it elides, for example, the U.S.’s ongoing adventures in the Middle East, as well as the “oppression of blacks by Anglo-Dutch Europeans in South Africa and the Americas, [and] the oppression of Palestinians and Middle Eastern Jews by Euro-Israel” (105). According to Shohat’s formulation, the prefi x “post-”—insofar as it signals an “alignment” with previously posited associations between post-ness and beyond-ness—does not so much signal a continuation of colonial structures as it does a negation of them. In Family Frames, Hirsch writes that photographs, “in their enduring ‘umbilical’ connection to life are precisely the medium connecting first- and second-generation remembrance, memory and postmemory” (23). Here, she posits an analogical relationship between first-generation remembrance and memory and second-generation remembrance and postmemory. To be sure, Hirsch admits, in a footnote to her essay, “The Generation of Postmemory,” that other “contexts besides the Holocaust and the Second World War in which intergenerational transmission has become an important explanatory vehicle and object of study include American slavery, the Vietnam War, the Dirty War in Argentina, South African apartheid, Soviet and East European communist terror, and the Armenian and Cambodian genocides” (104). According to Suleiman, the act of delineating specific generations involves a certain encounter with “messiness” (289). Generations, she argues, ultimately cannot be perceived as “tidy categories” (289). Rather, she argues, one might only distinguish “clusters . . . of resemblance among [generations] based not only on age at the time of trauma and on the kind of trauma . . . but on a wide range of biographical, historical, geographical, and linguistic factors” (289). Certainly, Suleiman takes the contingency or “messiness” of generation difference into account when she offers her own term, the “1.5 generation”: to be sure, she qualifies this category by admitting that Holocaust scholars might consider a “1.3 or a 1.7 generation, depending upon distance from adulthood” that marked the experiences of child survivors (281). As Suleiman’s play with decimals suggests, the delineation of generations—and therefore a study of narratives of memory offered by different (sub-)generations—is slippery indeed. “The

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theoretical point to take to heart,” she maintains, “is the need for flexible but fine distinctions—hence, for narrow if shifting boundaries—in delineating Holocaust generations or generation-units” (284). Sendak originally made this statement in an interview with the Associated Press. I first came across this citation, however, in his obituary in the Christian Science Monitor published on 8 May 2012. Many of Sendak’s picture books include subtle allusions to the Holocaust. In the Night Kitchen (1970) features a child who is baked in an oven; Dear Mili (1988) includes an illustration of Anne Frank; and We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993) includes an image of a factory that bears an uncanny resemblance to a crematorium. Sendak’s most explicit address of Holocaust themes, however, appears within Brundibar (2003), co-authored with playwright Tony Kushner. Brundibar is based on the opera of the same title once performed by child-inmates in the Terezin concentration camp. Here, the illustrator signals this context through such visual notations as yellow stars, a sign that reads “Arbeit Macht Frei,” and a villain who looks suspiciously like Hitler; moreover, Sendak uses the medium of crayon, possibly to allude to the famous illustrations produced by child-inmates in the same camp. In the original Hebrew, tikkun olam translates as the “repair of the world.” Anthologized in Raphael’s collection Dancing on Tisha B’av (1991). As Berger observes, this story is complicated by the fact that the survivorfather of its gay protagonist “is unable to confirm either the son’s sexual preference or his Jewish identity” (117). Berger considers Raphael’s works of fiction as examples of “Jewish universalism” Universalists, he argues, “do not abandon Jewish specificity, but strive for tikkun olam, the moral improvement or repair of the world, and struggle against all forms of prejudice and racism, ranging from antisemitism to homophobia” (4). I should note, at this point, that although I am indebted to Berger’s study of second-generation witness, my own study of second-generation memory departs significantly from the one he offers in Children of Job. First, Berger subscribes to a stricter understanding of the second generation; that is, he analyzes texts that are written by and/or depict the immediate progeny of survivors. My own study, as I have made clear, involves a more figurative interpretation of the term “second-generation.” Moreover, my own project departs from Berger’s insofar as it employs the term “memory” instead of “witness.” In using the term “memory,” I call attention to the categories of perception and imagination that undergird an individual’s relationship to an unexperienced but nevertheless influential traumatic event. Berger, however, employs the term “witness” to signal the discursive acts of testimony that are articulated in the wake of an event (the Holocaust, specifically). Indeed, Berger’s study concerns not only testimony to the Holocaust, but to Jewish identity in the wake of the Shoah. He

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writes, that is, about a specific second generation that “employs traditional images—albeit in attenuated form—as theological and psychic markers in their search for a post-Shoah Jewish sense of themselves” (9). Moreover, Landsberg’s concept, like my own, relies heavily on representations of childhood: for example, many of the cultural artifacts that Landsberg analyzes, including for instance Julie Dash’s fi lm Daughters of the Dust (1992), depict the child’s mimetic and bodily engagement with the past. Landsberg’s analysis of Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, a fi lm she argues “dramatically illustrates the child coming to own and inhabit memories of events through which she did not live” (97), especially coincides with my own interest in the ghost image. In this analysis, Landsberg pays particular attention to a scene in which a character that the script names the “Unborn Child” emerges mysteriously in the photograph of an AfricanAmerican family soon to be severed by northern migration. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “optical unconscious,” Landsberg argues that ghostly appearance of the Unborn Child not only “makes . . . visible” the relations between multiple generations but also makes visible the “process of remembering” (98). Admittedly, Landsberg’s second chapter, on immigration narratives, insists that prosthetic memory “does not always produce utopian results” (22). In this chapter, she studies both cultural artifacts and staged events (e.g., the Ford Motor Company’s “melting pot” pageant, which I note in my fourth chapter) that reaffirm assimilation and “mass subjectivity” (69). This chapter, however, marks a sole departure from a narrative that otherwise celebrates the progressive potential of prosthetic memory. Moreover, like other analyses that Landsberg offers, this one suggests a certain determinism: it implies, that is, that these cultural texts are received by audiences in the ways their producers intended. In his essay “Behold Now Behemoth” published in Harpers in 1993, Philip Gourevitch provocatively calls the U.S. Holocaust Museum “one more American theme park” (55) and suggests that its exhibits might produce “titillation” rather than radical empathy (61). To this charge, Landsberg responds that a “person’s experience is not meant to ‘thrill’ or to recreate the experiences of victims of the Holocaust. Instead, its purpose is to teach visitors about the kinds of dispossessions that were central to the Holocaust experience” (131, emphasis mine). Certainly, Landsberg is correct when she argues that the museum is not “meant” to “thrill”—and that it instead serves a larger educational and political “purpose.” Nevertheless, museum-goers’ responses to exhibits are not determined by the curators’ intentions, just as readers’ interpretations of literary texts are not determined by authors’ intentions. According to a report published in the Los Angeles Times on 11 June 2009, an eighty-eight-year-old Maryland man named James W. von Brunn entered the museum on 10 June 2009 and opened fire, killing thirty-nine-year-old

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Stephen Tyrone, an African-American security guard. Von Brunn was “described by the Anti-Defamation league and other watchers of hate groups as a longtime white supremacist and anti-Semite” (A-1). Adrienne Kertzer reaches a similar conclusion when she argues that diary entries such as those composed by Filipović “suggest that, even if giving children Frank’s Diary does not stop a war, it may well produce children who will learn how to imitate her voice” (136). Although—as my third chapter makes clear—I disagree with Kertzer’s assessment of Zlata’s Diary as a derivative text, I nevertheless agree with her overall contention that the simple act of giving a child a text such as Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl will result in a reader’s immediate transformation or, for that matter, accomplish much “in terms of actual protection” of imperiled children (136). According to Robert P. Doyle, who annotated the American Library Association’s list of the most challenged books of 2010–2011, Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl was most recently challenged in Culpeper County, VA, by a parent who objected to its “sexual material and homosexual themes.” Maik Arets makes this argument in his essay “The Darker Side of Prosthetics: A Less Optimistic Reading of Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory.” In his critique of Landsberg’s reading of the 1908 Vitagraph fi lm The Thieving Hand, Arets argues that the prosthesis depicted in this fi lm—a prosthesis that Landsberg reads as a figure of prosthetic memory—“implies a parasitic relationship more than anything else” (5). Once a prosthetic memory becomes internalized by—or attached to—a subject, it might carry that individual in directions she might not desire, and that its producer might not have intended. In his essay “Old Forgotten Children’s Books” (1924), Benjamin argues that “artists and children swiftly came to an understanding” of picture book illustrations that was “over the heads of the pedagogues” who sought to employ such texts within specific educational settings (409). Benjamin writes, for example, about alphabet books that include “objects that begin with the same letter—apple, anchor, atlas, and so forth.” These books are used by educators to train children in categorical thinking: for example, to associate objects such as apples and anchors with the letter “A.” Benjamin argues, however, that children are able to create new narratives about the “motley collection of objects without any pictorial connection between them” (409) that defy the “tedious and absurd reasons that induced rationalist pedagogues to recommend them in the first place” (411). It would not make much sense, for example, to speak of “life lessons” imparted by Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930). What would such “life lessons” involve? “Don’t bury your mother too far away from home”? “Don’t set a bone with cement”? “Don’t stay up too late tilling a field so that you can buy your own horse because your efforts might result in exhaustion”? If such interpretations of Faulkner’s classic text seem absurd, so too do many pragmatically oriented responses to children’s literature.

194 • Notes 30 See, for example, my discussion of Bosmajian’s formulation of “sparing the child” in my fifth chapter. Kertzer also addresses the degree to which children’s texts address the exceptionality of survival in her discussion of Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992), which cautions readers against survivors’ testimonies as “fairy tales” that conclude with satisfying happy endings (67). 31 I use the term “memory/trauma studies” intentionally, in order to gesture toward the ways in which critical examinations of representations of historical trauma involve critiques of individual and collective memory. See, for example, Dominick LaCapra’s History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998). Chapter One 1

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For example, in an issue of The English Journal, secondary school teacher Donna Mahar describes how she incorporated The Giver into a unit on social justice. The novel is also often taught in conjunction with Lowry’s Holocaust novel, Number the Stars (1989). A January 2007 article in the Washington Post documents a sixth-grade art exhibition at Roberto Clemente Middle School inspired by Lowry’s novel and other dystopian narratives, and both The Buffalo News and The Kansas City Star review performances of Eric Coble’s stage adaptation of the novel. In an interview with the Kansas City Star, Lowry reports having received an email “from an artist who wanted to do a ‘Tai-Chi ballet’ based on it” (1). In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979). It may be particularly crucial to distinguish Nora’s interest in the past from Benjamin’s. Nora’s project is motivated by his interest in French identity and the preservation of national heritage. Benjamin’s work, especially his last essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) rejects notions of the past as eternal and fully recoverable. Moreover, Nora’s three-part volume on French heritage, which was compiled during the presidency of François Mitterand, when notions of French identity were particularly contested, has been characterized as a neoliberal project; Benjamin’s work, for its part, was informed by his radical and heterodox interpretations of Marxism and Jewish theology. Like Plato’s Republic, which is ruled by sage philosopher-kings, Jonas’s Community is ruled by Elders whose collective wisdom presumably precludes the need for democratic rule. Moreover, like the Republic, the Community depends for its survival on repression and censorship. In Books IV and X, Socrates—through Plato—insists that fictions should be banned from the Republic because they are “lies.” Likewise, Jonas’s Community scrupulously monitors its members for prevarication and bans all books and other aesthetic works. Only the Giver has access to works of art.

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Carter F. Hanson also perceives parallels between Jonas’s Community and Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which envisions a “highly regimented and disciplinary society” (2) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), which insists that an American utopian society might be created by “cutting itself loose from the past” (2). In Atwood’s Republic of Gilead, a dystopian and futuristic version of America, ecological disaster has left most women infertile; thus, those women who remain fertile are enslaved as “handmaids”—or surrogates— for wealthy couples. According to Stewart, Lowry’s representation of Sameness is not as critical as it appears, or should be. Stewart notes, for example, that Jonas’s “pale,” implicitly blue eyes, as well as his fair complexion, are privileged over the eye colors and complexions of his fellows. “The community attempts to erase difference, to make the Other invisible,” she writes, “but difference reappears in the form of two males, both of whom have light skin and pale eyes. Ultimately, Jonas and the Giver are superior to the remainder of the community” (28). In Ross’s fi lm, a pair of twins is magically transported onto the set of a black-and-white ’50s sitcom. Although the twins initially exist in blackand-white, they become colorized as they transgress the strict moral boundaries of their fictive community; so too do their new neighbors as they follow the twins’ example. Although Lowry’s exposition of an amnesiac dystopia has been lauded by readers and reviewers who fi nd it provocative and potentially instrumental in “a child’s political development” (Hintz 263), it has not been without its critics. Susan Louise Stewart, for example, argues that The Giver’s dystopic vision, while it “initially appears to be a radical approach to adolescent literature actually reinforces cultural norms” (23). According to Stewart, one of the chief problems of Lowry’s novel is that its futuristic and fantastical setting lulls readers into believing that their own, very real, world is different from, and ultimate superior to, that of the Community. “In The Giver,” she argues, “we are encouraged to critique Jonas’s culture and not our own” (33). Stewart’s argument is a convincing one, and one that bears up in light of certain readers’ claims that The Giver “forces us to question values taken for granted.” Indeed, as one of my undergraduate students shrewdly observed, it is not insignificant that The Giver is often assigned to students currently engaged in a battery of standardized tests: for some administrators, it appears, the novel’s token message of resistance and critical thought might compensate for the relentless attempts to subjugate students’ wills to institutionally sanctioned views of “excellence.” Taught in such an isolated context, The Giver’s hopeful concluding message functions as little more than an opiate, just as its dark vision of a brave new world serves merely to confi rm that things could be a lot worse.

196 • Notes 10 However, one need not necessarily read Lowry’s novel in the manner Stewart condemns: rather than being dismissed as a vision of an alternative society, The Giver could just as well be considered a harrowing diagnosis of the present. Indeed, as Paul Ricoeur argues, the “most formidable questioning of what is” often springs from the “nowhere” of utopia (132). After all, M. T. Anderson’s National Book Award–winning YA novel Feed (2004), although it is set in an alternative, futuristic universe, is unmistakably a devastating critique of the rampant consumerism enabled by Internet culture. Similarly, the early twenty-fi rst-century trend of comparing the policies of the George W. Bush administration to Big Brother—a trend that was demonstrable not only in the U.S. but in other national communities—made clear many readers’ willingness to identify the contemporary applications of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. Indeed, as Don Latham demonstrates in his Foucauldian reading of The Giver, an analysis of the disciplinary techniques employed by Jonas’s Community places into relief the functioning of power in the reader’s own world: the “community depicted in The Giver,” he argues, is in many respects “much like our own society” insofar as it involves the regulation of quotidian practices (137). Thus, it is certainly plausible to argue that a critique of Jonas’s world enables, rather than obstructs, a critique of our own. 10 In his critique of Western historiography, Michel DeCerteau argues that the current “historical operation consists in classifying the given according to a present law that is distinguished from its ‘other’ (the past), in assuming a distance in respect to an acquired situation, and thus in marking through a discourse the effective change that precipitated this distancing” (85). DeCerteau’s use of the term “operation” to describe the process of “othering” the past is well chosen: earlier in his study, he compares the relationship of the historian to the past to the relationship between the doctor and the body. “Thanks to the unfolding of the body before the doctor’s eyes,” he writes, “what is seen and what is known of it can be superimposed or exchanged (be translated from one to the other). . . . An analogous change takes place when tradition, a lived body, is revealed to erudite curiosity through a corpus of texts. Modern medicine and historiography are born almost simultaneously from the rift between a subject that is supposedly literate, and an object that is supposedly written in an unknown language” (3). 11 Kundera also addresses similar effects of the “acceleration of history”: “The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything” (9–10).

Notes • 197 12 When he discusses his newly discovered capacity to see color with the Giver, Jonas remarks that he sees shades of red, and thus initially assumes that his neighbors must all be red. To this, the Giver replies, “No, flesh isn’t red. But it has red tones in it. There was a time, actually—you’ll see this in the memories later—when flesh was many different colors. That was before we went to Sameness” (94). The Giver’s statement suggests that the citizens’ skin color is uniformly white, or “red-toned.” On the one hand, this detail might demonstrate the novel’s critique of uniformity. On the other hand, however, it might support Stewart’s critique of Lowry’s insufficient address of questions of difference. 13 As Marianne Hirsch notes in her essay “The Generation of Postmemory” (2008), it is important to recognize that Epstein never qualifies her relationship to her parents’ past as indicative of memory; moreover, she does not use the term “second-generation” (109, emphasis in Hirsch). Rather, Epstein argues that “children of the Holocaust” are possessed by a “history they had never lived” (109, emphasis in original). Moreover, Epstein does not use the term “second-generation” because, as Hirsch argues via Ernst van Alphen, such a term “implies too close a continuity between generations that are, precisely, separated by the trauma of the Holocaust” (109, emphasis in original). Although Hirsch is careful to respect the critical distance Epstein posits between herself and her survivor-parents, her essay nevertheless suggests that experiences such as those narrated by Epstein might be qualified by the term “postmemory”—or what I here call “second-generation memory”—insofar as they draw on immediate family memories as well as cultural sources that inform family memory. 14 Epstein’s comparison of her parents to “other parents” uncannily resembles the question posed by the youngest child at the traditional Passover supper: “Why is this night unlike other nights?” Indeed, Epstein’s preoccupation with the survival of the past within the present is informed by the Jewish practice of ritualizing the past (e.g., when the exodus from Egypt is re-enacted by participants in the ritual supper). However, as I presently argue, it is not determined solely by cultural practice, as is evident in Epstein’s interest in the Holocaust and her brothers’ relative disinterest in it. 15 As Hirsch maintains, the term “cultural memory” is used in an AngloAmerican context to designate the “social memory of a specific group or subculture” (“Generation” 110). However, in Continental studies of memory, such as those offered by Jan and Aleida Assmann—whom Hirsch quotes extensively—this term refers to “an institutionalized, hegemonic, archival memory” (110). In this particular instance, I draw on the AngloAmerican use of this term. 16 In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), literary scholar Felman and psychoanalyst Laub author individual chapters. The chapter I cite was written by Laub.

198 • Notes 17 It is not insignificant, for example, that Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting offers loosely connected stories of erotic affairs and illicit border-crossings to examine the nature of memory. 18 As Hanson notes, Jonas’s father “good-naturedly euthanizes a new-born baby with no understanding he has taken a life. Significantly, it is only due to having begun his training as a Receiver that Jonas, who views the killing of the newborn, understands its meaning. Lowry thus posits memory both as critical to human development, and through Jonas’s apprenticeship with the Giver, as the novel’s one source of Utopian impulse for a different future” (4). 19 In her collection of short stories, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Ursula LeGuin acknowledges her debt to Dostoyevsky in her well-known story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (275). In the “Mutiny” chapter of Dostoyevsky’s novel, the atheist Ivan proclaims that salvation is “not worth one single small tear of even one tortured little child that beat its breast with its little fist and prayed in its foul-smelling dog-hole with its unredeemed tears addressed to ‘dear Father-God’” (281). Likewise, in LeGuin’s tale, the happiness of the city of Omelas (“Salem equals schelomo equals salaam equals peace” [276]) is contingent upon the torture of a child locked in a basement. 20 In the Book of Jonah, Jonah proclaims, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh will be overthrown!” (3:4). What the pessimist Jonah does not anticipate, however, is that the citizens of Nineveh will actually heed his warnings and abandon their “evil” and repent (3:9), thus forestalling the wrath of God. 21 For a concise introduction to the literary and historical aspects of ancient Hebrew prophecy, see John W. Miller’s Meet the Prophets: A Beginner’s Guide to the Books of the Biblical Prophets (1987). 22 The title is a Yiddish word meaning “inevitable” or “pre-destined.” 23 In this context, Ricoeur writes specifically of the metaphor, which produces a “shock between different semantic fields” (121). Chapter Two 1

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“Copyright© 2008 Hollins University. This article, “Sitting Shivah: Holocaust Mourning in Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself,” first appeared in Children’s Literature, 36(2008), 88–114. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press. See Dominick LaCapra’s Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994) and History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998) for analyses of belated cultural responses to the Shoah. See György Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937) for an account of historical realism. Not insignificantly, this is precisely the manner of depicting the past that Benjamin argues against in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Notes • 199 (1940). Citing the historian Leopold von Ranke, Benjamin writes that to “articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255). No text, Benjamin suggests, can render a realistic image of the past; rather, the past can only be perceived allegorically, and within fragments. See my first and fifth chapters for further discussion of this argument. 5. According to Rose, the child—and the child’s questions regarding origins—threatens adult credence in a coherent subjectivity. “When we speak,” Rose writes, “we take up a position of identity and certainty in language, a position whose largely fictional nature only the occasional slip, and at times the joke, is allowed to reveal” (16). Language thus constitutes a problem for the adult’s assuredness of identity, and it is with the greatest care that the adult answers the child’s questions concerning origin. Behind such questions, argues Rose, “is the idea of the moment when the child did not exist, and behind the question of [sexual] difference is the recognition that the child’s sexual identity rests solely in its differentiation from something (or someone) which is not. There is a level, therefore, at which these questions undermine the very identity that they simultaneously put in place. We answer for the child at the cost of deceiving ourselves” (16). 6 Sally’s vision of torture at Hitler’s hands bears a certain resemblance to the torture suffered by fairy tale heroines: like Sleeping Beauty, Sally’s fi ngers are pricked, and like Rapunzel, her hair is cut. Although such an allusion to fairy tales might potentially prompt further outcry regarding Blume’s supposed “trivialization” of the Holocaust, it is significant to note that Sally is one of a considerable number of Holocaust texts written for children that draw on the plot and structure of fairy tales. For example, Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992) draws heavily on “Sleeping Beauty in the Woods” as it tells the story of a survivor of Chelmno who is saved by a kindly Polish aristocrat who kisses her back to consciousness. However, as Adrienne Kertzer notes, Yolen ultimately subverts the fairy tale form when, in her author’s note, “Yolen deliberately takes away both the kiss and the happy ending by reminding [the reader] that the story . . . is a fairy tale . . . [and that] ‘no woman . . . escaped from Chelmno alive” (67). Additionally, in “The Hansel and Gretel Syndrome,” U. C. Knoepfl macher draws on Bruno Bettelheim’s analysis of fairy tales and their uses in his study of such Holocaust texts as Maurice Sendak’s Brundibar (2003) and Louise Murphy’s The True Story of Hansel and Gretel: A Novel of War and Survival (2003). 7 It may be important to note that Mulvey has since revisited and revised her original arguments in her 1990 essay, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun.” In “Afterthoughts,” Mulvey elaborates on the role of the feminine spectator, arguing that her identification with the male hero is due, in part, to her “oscillation, her

200 • Notes

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inability to achieve stable sexual identity”; ultimately, she argues, the “female spectator’s phantasy of masculinization [is] at cross-purposes with itself, restless in transvestite’s clothes” (25, 35). Although it is important to make note of this essay, I will nevertheless confine my study to Mulvey’s 1975 text, primarily because its publication was roughly contemporaneous with that of Blume’s novel. Here, I do not mean to imply that Mulvey’s essay, published two years before Sally, had a direct effect on it; rather, by evaluating the novel through the interpretive frame of the essay, I gesture toward the views of gender and its cinematic representation emerging at a specific historical moment. Here, Sally’s and Lila’s “reunion” resembles the romantic reunions represented in 1940s-era “home-front” fi lms, which—as Schatz demonstrates in his reading of John Cromwell’s Since You Went Away (1944)—typically involve a heroine who is separated from, and later reunited with, her soldier-sweetheart (although not before having been “utterly transformed by the war”) (258). Indeed, as I have suggested above, the trauma Sally suffers has as much to do with her own future death as it does with Lila’s murder—a future death Sally reads in Lila’s photograph. In her discussion of Holocaustera photographs, Marianne Hirsch argues that such images are so compelling because they “elicit an affi liative and identificatory as well as a protective spectatorial look” that is mediated by Western notions of childhood (“Projected Memory”13). The children in these photographs, Hirsch writes, are “less individualized, less marked by the particularities of identity”—and thus their less-defi ned (and more “universal”) features allow viewers to project themselves into the image, and to imagine how they, as children, might have responded to the events experienced by the photographed subject. Such identification is effected, in part, by a culturally mediated practice of remembering childhood as a shared experience (13). Hirsch adds, however, that the adult viewer approaches such photographic images from a distance: the adult, now no longer a child, sees in the photographed child what s/he “once was”; moreover, s/ he is prompted by culturally inscribed notions of the child as “vulnerable” and “innocent” to feel protective of—and therefore in a relation of power to—the photographed figure. In Blume’s novel, such a relationship of identification and distantiation is inverted: Sally sees Lila not as “what she once was” but as “what she might be.” Sally, who wants to “grow up to look just like Lila,” sees in Lila’s photograph a mirror image of herself. Although she retains some distance from Lila (an adult-other who occupied a different space and time), she nevertheless projects upon Lila’s photograph an image of her own latent womanhood, and thus comes to identify with her second cousin (Blume 104). Thus, Sally’s acknowledgement of Lila’s death in turn leads to her acknowledgement of her own future death.

Notes • 201 10 In History and Memory After Auschwitz, LaCapra critiques tendencies to characterize the Holocaust as a “sublime” event—that is, one that, following Kant’s account, is “incomparably or absolutely great [and] surpasses any standard of the senses” (35). Such characterization, argues LaCapra, poses the question of the “extent to which the sublime may be interpreted as a displaced secular sacred” (37). The veritable sacralization of the Holocaust, he continues, is dangerous indeed, insofar as it leads to a reification and mythologization of an historical event, and insofar as it points, pace Benjamin, to fascism as an “anesthetization of politics” (37). 11 This passage in “One-Way Street” appears verbatim in Benjamin’s earlier essay, “Old Forgotten Children’s Books” (1924) (408). 12 According to Susan Buck-Morss, Benjamin’s “appreciation of childhood cognition did not imply the romanticizing of childhood innocence” (265). Rather, she maintains, “he believed that only people who were allowed to live out their childhood ever really grew up—and growing up was clearly the desired goal” (265). 13 “Brechtian epic theatre” refers to a methodological approach to theatre, particularly associated with German playwright Bertold Brecht, that involves montage, frequent narrative interruption, and the breaking of the “fourth wall.” Works of epic theatre sought to remind the audience of its participation in, and complicity with, the spectacle performed on stage; it also sought to expose the socially scripted “performances” in which the audience took part on a daily basis. Benjamin’s interest in the child’s naïve, expository “gesture” was related to his interest in the equally expository “gesture” made possible by Brechtian epic theatre. See his 1939 essay, “What Is Epic Theatre?” in the anthology Illuminations. 14 In September 2002, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, what is now U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) instituted a program of “special registration” of males over the age of sixteen from Arab or Muslim countries. The official objective of this program was to identify and isolate individuals who might have ties to anti-U.S. groups such as Al Qaeda. Civil liberties and immigrant rights groups, however, perceived the program as an exercise in ethnic and religious profiling. 15 See Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004)—which I discuss in my final chapter—for a critique of U.S. policy concerning stateless prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. 16 On her website, www.judyblume.com, Blume admits that Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself is her “most autobiographical novel.” She cites Sally’s proclivity for fantasy, her curiosity about her grandmother’s Yiddish expressions, and her experience in post-war Miami as especially autobiographical elements of the novel. “Sally’s world is the world as I perceived it, at age ten,” she writes. “A world of secrets kept from children, a world of questions without answers.”

202 • Notes Chapter Three 1

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Although excerpts of the diary were first published by UNICEF in 1992, Zlata’s Diary became an international bestseller in 1994 when readers learned of the plight of its young author, who recorded her two-year experience of the siege of Sarajevo before being airlifted to safety in Paris in December of 1993. In the course of this chapter, I refer to Zlata Filipović and Anne Frank as “Zlata” and “Anne,” respectively. I do this not to imply some intimate knowledge of these individuals, but rather to gesture toward their status as narrator-protagonists of specific texts—that is, to their status as literary constructs. Zlata concedes that her diary is “about the war” rather than about her personal affairs and secrets (89–90)—a concession I will return to later in this chapter in order to evaluate the degree of adult mediation in its production. Here, I use the term “cultural memory” to designate an “institutionalized, hegemonic, archival memory” (Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory” 110). Indeed, Anne Frank’s Diary has been made subject to cultural memory insofar as it has been “institutionalized” by popular works of literary fiction and fi lm, and insofar as it has been employed within various pedagogical contexts. Zlata is careful never to identify her cultural and religious background. Although the fact that her diary was originally written in Croatian might suggest that she is of a Croatian Roman-Catholic background, she also notes celebrating the Muslim holiday of Bairam (29) and considers leaving on a Jewish convoy organized to transport refugees to safety (84). Zlata’s refusal to identify herself as belonging to any specific cultural or religious group points to the easily overlooked sophistication of her text. Although the aim of her diary may be, in part, to produce a self-portrait of sorts, she insists upon doing this squarely on her own terms: to “out” herself as belonging to any specific group would be to allow herself to be “marked” by the same political discourse she critiques. Anne’s descriptions of birthday celebrations especially make life in the secret annex appear “homey” or otherwise not so removed from “ordinary” life: for example, she notes that, on his sixteenth birthday, Peter Van Daan receives a cigarette lighter that makes him look “distinguished” (61) and that, on her own birthday, her father composes a witty poem in her honor (103–104). Similarly, her account of the families’ celebration of St. Nicholas Day and Hannukah—holidays that they anticipate with improvised decorations, gifts, and poems—contribute to her depiction of the attic’s more “cozy” atmosphere (73). The most ingenious description of the attic is one in which Anne likens the secret annex to a hotel or resort—an exercise in parody that

Notes • 203

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simultaneously places into relief the bleak conditions of attic life and makes light of otherwise depressing circumstances. Under the title, “Prospectus and Guide to the Secret Annex: A Unique Facility for the Temporary Accommodation of Jews and Other Dispossessed Persons,” she lists the annex’s “features” and “rules.” Her mock-tourist-pamphlet, for example, explains that the residence—situated in “beautiful, quiet, wooded surroundings in the heart of Amsterdam” can be “reached on foot” by “those whom transportation has been forbidden by the German authorities” (66). Furthermore, it euphemistically characterizes menu choices as “low fat” (66) and casually announces that “free time activities” are not “allowed outside the house until further notice” (67). Of course, as I demonstrate in the following sections, Zlata obstinately neglects the constructed character of perceived reality in her articulation of childhood as a “natural” category; such neglect may place into more immediate relief the particular trauma instantiated by her recognition of the “loss” of her childhood. The (perceived) tendency of readers—especially young adolescent female readers—to “over-identify” with Anne Frank to the point of neglecting the differences between their contemporary historical moment and that of the diarist is a problem Susan David Bernstein takes up in her essay, “Promiscuous Reading: The Problem of Identification and Anne Frank’s Diary” (2003). “Promiscuous reading,” Bernstein writes, is an “unreflective assimilation of the read subject into an untroubled unitary reading of self”; such reading, moreover, “highlights a correspondence between textual and historical subjects that champions an uncomplicated resemblance, one that displaces a vexed and more productive non-resemblance” (146). Although Bernstein never mentions Zlata’s Diary—her critique is confined to YA novels such as Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1998), Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld’s Anne Frank and Me (2002), and the Disney fi lm, Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001)—her argument that readers tend to relate uncritically to Anne Frank’s image could potentially be used to bolster a critique of Zlata’s Diary (although, as I argue presently, Zlata’s identification with Anne is not as naïve or uncritical as it might initially appear). To a certain extent, Bernstein’s analysis is a useful one, especially in its insistence that readers remain vigilant to the processes by which they read memoirs, diaries, and other historical artifacts. Nevertheless, I wish to distance my analysis substantially from her own on several counts. In arguing that the image of Anne Frank has been, in effect, diluted by successive literary and filmic representations of her, Bernstein argues (quite naively) that “‘reel’ knowledge has displaced real knowledge,” thus implying that direct access to or “knowledge” of the past would be possible if it were not for the mediation of other, interfering, textual sources. In making such an argument, Bernstein neglects to admit that all “knowledge” is

204 • Notes necessarily mediated; moreover, she does not make a critical distinction between Anne Frank (the historical personage) and Anne Frank’s diary, which itself is multiply mediated (as I argue below). 9 Additionally, the capitalized words may remind a reader of newspaper headlines; such resemblance calls further attention to the intertextual dimension of Zlata’s diary. 10 The term “thick description” is one used by Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (1973). According to Geertz, culture is a “system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms [e.g., anything from a wink to an exchange by bartering] by which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (6). In order to interpret the symbolic forms in which culture is expressed, Geertz argues, the anthropologist or ethnographer must take note of even the most minute details that characterize that “symbol” and, moreover, account for the context in which it occurs. One may qualify Anne’s more detailed observations of attic life as examples of “thick description” especially insofar as such entries are intended for the benefit of a reader—if only Anne’s imaginary interlocutor, Kitty— who is unacquainted with the habits, exchanges, and rigors that life in hiding entails, and who thus requires Anne (who implicitly posits herself as an anthropologist of sorts) to explain this “culture” to her. 11 In “The Death of the Author” (published in Image-Music-Text [1977]), Barthes challenges the assumption that statements within a text can be attributed to the intentions of the individual author; rather, he argues, meaning exists solely in the text’s language, which itself is a “tissue of quotations” from antecedent texts (146). According to Barthes, “it is language that speaks, not the author; to write is . . . to reach the point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me’” (143). As Barthes demonstrates in S/Z (1970), it is the reader, rather than the author, who grants meaning to the text. Barthes’s writings on authorship and reading have been particularly influential on contemporary literary criticism and theory; “The Death of the Author” in turn influenced Foucault, who, like Barthes, dismisses the idea of the author as originary genius and guarantor of meaning, but nonetheless preserves the notion of an author as a “function” or category under which to organize bodies of work (“What Is an Author?” [1969]). 12 The term “round character” is one coined by E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel (1927). Forster introduces the concept of the round character by first distinguishing it from that of the “flat” character—which, according to Forster, is “constructed round a single idea or quality” and whose general defining features can be “expressed in one sentence” (103–104). By contrast, a character “curve[s] toward the round” when there is “more than one factor in them” (104) and when he or she is “capable of surprising in a convincing way” (118).

Notes • 205 13 For example, in an entry dated 28 January 1944, Anne writes that she fears her imaginary interlocutor, Kitty, will find the “monotonous fare” Anne offers her to be as “dull as dishwater” (177). Having lived, at this point, in the attic with the same people for two years, Anne confesses to “how sick and tired I am of hearing the same old stuff.” She continues, If the talk at mealtime isn’t about politics or good food, then Mother or Mrs. Van Daan trot out stories about their childhood that we’ve heard a thousand times before, or Dussel goes on about beautiful racehorses, his Charlotte’s extensive wardrobe, leaky rowboats, boys who can swim at the age of four, aching muscles or frightened patients. It all boils down to this: whenever one of us opens his mouth, the other seven can finish the story for him. (177) This speaks to the literary merit of the diary: Anne transforms even the most mundane and “boring” details into interesting and amusing facts. Of course, there is an extent to which Anne is aware of this—the apology for being as “dull as dishwater” can just as well be read as a self-conscious excuse to make amusing comments on otherwise unamusing subject matter. 14 As an example of a soldier’s war diary, I might cite a journal kept during the Second World War by my great-uncle, Colonel Emil M. Ulanowicz, who survived a prisoner-of-war death march from Manila to Takao, Japan. The fi rst part of his journal details, among other events, his participation in the U.S. seizure of Corregidor, an island located west of Manila: 29 DEC 41: First bombing of Corregidor. Raid lasted about 2.5 hours. Approximately 30 killed, 13 Japanese planes downed. Approximately 54 heavy bombers, and 10 dive bombers overhead at any given time. Battery area hit. Much damage to surface buildings. Antiaircraft did very well. USAFFE moved into tunnel. 2 JAN 42: Command Post of L-battery 60th Coastal Artillery Regiment, Phillipine Scouts, received direct bomb hit killing Captain Hamilton and several enlisted men. Captain Bovee and I helped in rescue work. Way Hill area also hit. Several men killed and wounded. 6 JAN 42: Battery Geary disaster, 34 killed, several wounded. 14 JAN 42: End of first period of bombings. (2) Here, as in other passages, there is no attempt to embellish details—only necessary, technical facts are reported. Moreover, the constant vigilance and work necessitated by battle ostensibly makes impossible any time for personal reflection. The second part of the diary, which documents the march to Takao, is even more spartan in its narration—although, significantly, it does involve more personal commentary. An excerpt reads thus: 16 DEC [44]: 1333 survivors ashore out of 1619. No clothes, torrid sun, no food. Nine US dive bombers strafed and bombed Olongapo area. Several men injured from bomb fragments.

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17 DEC [44]: Sun terrible; four deaths. 2 ½ spoons dry rice. Thank God we could get water. 18 DEC [44]: Same. 19 DEC [44]: Men are getting so weak they can hardly walk. We are scorched by the sun during the day, and freezing at night. Four spoons dry rice and water (almost a banquet?). (7) Not insignificantly, the phrase “imitation of life” serves as the title of Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film, Imitation of Life (itself a remake—or “imitation”—of John M. Stahl’s 1934 film of the same title, which, in turn, was based on Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel). All three of these texts involve two intertwining mother– daughter conflicts—one between a faded movie star and her teenage daughter, and the other between an African-American maid and her daughter who prefers to pass as white. Although Zlata may not be consciously referencing these texts, their themes of cinematic representation, racial conflict, and intergenerational bonds clearly resonate within her text. The reader may be reminded of Barbie Zelizer’s critique—cited in Chapter 1—of the news media’s tendency to “recycle” terms such as “Holocaust, genocide, massacre, [and] ethnic cleansing” in order to document contemporary moments of atrocity; Zelizer critiques, as well, the tendency to describe events of the more distant past in terms of those occurring in the present (as in the New York Times’s retrospective article on Cambodia entitled “Before Bosnia, Before Rwanda”) (204–205). According to Zelizer, “while the continual references [to terms such as ‘Holocaust’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’] keep atrocity in the public imagination, they also abandon it there. Employing familiar terms in so many new contexts of barbarism flattens the original term’s resonance and denies the complexity of the events to which it refers” (205). Since the publication of Zlata’s Diary, Filipović has edited a collection of children’s wartime diaries, entitled Stolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries from World War I to Iraq (2006). Thus, just as Frank’s text authorizes Filipović’s, Filipović’s text now authorizes or legitimizes those of formerly unknown child-authors. The reference is, of course, to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911). The Neverland is the home of Peter Pan, who—as the very fi rst sentence of the novel states—has the distinction of being the only child who never grows up; the Neverland is a place so distant and hidden that “even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted” it (56). This particular photograph might be staged, but it is apparently a faithful depiction of Anne’s writerly concentration. In her memoir, Anne Frank Remembered (1987), Miep Gies describes interrupting Anne at her work: I saw that Anne was writing intently, and hadn’t heard me. I was quite close to her and was about to turn and go when she looked up, surprised, and saw me standing there. In our many encounters over the years, I’d

Notes • 207 seen Anne, like a chameleon, go from mood to mood, but always with friendliness. . . . But I saw a look on her face at this moment that I’d never seen before. It was a look of dark concentration, as if she had a throbbing headache. The look pierced me, and I was speechless. She was suddenly another person there at that table. (Cited in Prose 6–7) 20 According to the afterword contained in the defi nitive edition of Frank’s diary, after an SS raid on the attic on the morning of 4 August 1944, Anne Frank, along with her sister Margot, was transported to Bergen-Belsen in October 1944 and died there shortly before the camp’s liberation by British troops on 12 April 1945 (339–340). The afterword also lists the camps to which other attic-members were transported, as well as their probable dates of death. Only Otto Frank survived; he died in Basel, Switzerland on 19 August 1980. 21 Admittedly, depictions of the child’s death precede the nineteenth century’s romanticization of children. According to John Rowe Townsend, eighteenth-century Puritan books for children generally provided their young readers with harrowing images of death and the afterworld in order to inspire them (or, as it were, scare them) toward good behavior in the present mortal realm. Thus, for example, one finds in 1727 edition of The New England Primer the following poem: I in the Burying Place may see Graves shorter there than I; From Death’s Arrests no Age is free, Young Children too may die. (Townsend, 8) However, Townsend notes, some decidedly more sentimental representations of children’s deaths did circulate in eighteenth-century literature. For example, Benjamin Colman remarks in his Devout Contemplation on the Meaning of Divine Providence, in the Early Death of Pious and Lovely Children (1714) that an “abundance of the Children of Men, and of our most hopeful, pious, and promising Children Do Die Young . . . What brittle and tender Things are our Babes, and what Multitudes die in Infancy!” (Townsend, 9). According to Gillian Avery, these pious tracts had an immense effect on the “morbid pleasure” that Victorians, a century later, derived from “contemplating [children’s] slow and morbid extinction” (102). “One might guess,” Avery notes, “that Dickens, when he came to describe the deaths of Paul Dombey and Little Nel, remembered something of the emotion he had felt as a child reading tracts about the deaths of children who, unlike him, were admired and valued” (34). 22 Beth’s death has generated a great amount of controversy among Alcott scholars—although, generally, such debate has had more to do with the effect of Beth’s demise on her sister, Jo, than it has with Beth as a character in her own right. For example, Elizabeth Lennox Keyser argues that, despite her proto-feminist inclinations, Alcott was most preoccupied with

208 • Notes

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women’s ability to sustain the close domestic circle; thus, according to Keyser, Beth’s death is a necessary precondition for Jo’s return to the privileged, self-enclosed space of the family and thus the survival of this institution (89–90). Michelle A. Massé, however, contests such readings that posit Beth as a “sacrificial maiden”—or, as it were, as a martyr to the cause of domestic bliss; according to Massé, Jo’s return to a state of dependence family following Beth’s death should be read as “a stage and not a permanent resting place” (337). A. Robin Hoffman’s essay “Socialization and Saying ‘Cheese!’: School Picture Day in Children’s Books” offers an especially astute analysis of the visual rhetoric of the school portrait and its ideological uses. The definitive edition of The Diary of a Young Girl includes individual photographic portraits of Anne taken from 1935 to 1942, although it does not specify in what context these portraits were taken. Most likely, these portraits were privately commissioned, rather than taken in the school setting. The tradition of taking individual school photographs is a relatively recent, and largely American, phenomenon (indeed, the one school photograph contained in Zlata’s Diary is a group portrait of her fifth-grade class, rather than an individual shot of Zlata alone). Thus, the similarity this closely cropped cover photograph of Anne bears to a school portrait demonstrates the ways in which her image has been co-opted and re-contextualized for a more recent generation of (American) readers. For example, Bruno Bettelheim condemns Stevens’s universalization of the Frank family, which renders its depiction of the family’s two years in hiding a mere domestic drama. “While play and movie are ostensibly about Nazi persecution and destruction,” he writes, “in actuality what we watch is the way that, despite the terror, lovable people manage to continue living their satisfying intimate lives with each other” (“Surviving” 250). Similarly, Susan David Bernstein, following Cynthia Ozick, critiques the fi lm’s “Americanization” of Anne Frank (142). Johann Wyss’s novel The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) tells the story of a family—a minister, his wife, and their four sons—who, after being shipwrecked on an isolated island, created a new, ingeniously improvised life for themselves and share various adventures. The manner in which Stevens’s fi lm bears a strong resemblance to The Swiss Family Robinson—or, indeed, the way in which the diary itself may be read as such—is taken up in Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer (1979). In the course of Roth’s novel, his recurrent hero, Nathan Zuckerman, becomes attracted to a young woman he imagines is Anne Frank in disguise and subsequently imagines “Anne’s” reflections on her diary and its necessary predication on her supposed death: This was the lesson on the journey home she came to believe she had the power to teach. But only if she were believed to be dead. Were Het Achterhaus known to be the work of a living writer, it would never be more than

Notes • 209

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it was: a young teenager’s diary of her trying years in hiding during the German occupation of Holland, something boys and girls could read in bed along with the adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson. But dead she had something more to offer than amusement for ages ten to fifteen; dead she had written, without meaning to or trying to, a book with the force of a masterpiece to make people finally see.” (145–146) Here, Nathan’s imaginary Anne believes her death prevents her diary from being read merely as a pleasant story (i.e., something akin to The Swiss Family Robinson) and instead exposes the tremendous losses incurred by the Holocaust. However, the novel suggests that the opposite is in fact the case: the ways that Anne Frank’s posthumous image has been used, it implies, are not any less driven by fantasy than the cozy Robinson-esque image of attic-life the diary might inspire. Throughout the novel, various characters co-opt and romanticize the image of Anne Frank to suit their own desires. For example, Nathan’s neighbors use her as a mascot of sorts in their defense of the American Jewish community they believe Nathan has slandered; Nathan, for his part, daydreams about bringing Anne Frank home to meet his family and neighbors so that they may fi nally believe he is a “good” Jew capable of marrying a “good” Jewish wife. The title-character of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) is an angelic child whose sweetness and charm (embellished by Burnett to perhaps a nauseating degree) wins over even the most resistant and skeptical of adults. By contrast, the title character of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1876) epitomizes the “good bad boy” who, despite his constant mischief-making, is a largely sympathetic character. Admittedly, these are male protagonists. One might be tempted to compare Perkins’s rendition of Anne to Jo March, the exuberant heroine of Alcott’s Little Women—but, sadly, Perkins captures the intellectual and emotional depth of neither Anne nor Jo. The definitive edition of Frank’s diary, as well as Francine Prose’s account of its publication, identify three separate versions of the diary. The first, “version a” involves the passages Frank initially composed. The second, “version b,” includes the revisions Frank made as she prepared her manuscript for potential publication. The third, “version c,” was edited by her father, Otto Frank, and the publisher in the wake of her death. Until recently, “version c” was the one that most readers encountered. For a detailed and riveting account of the production and publication of Frank’s diary, see Francine Prose’s Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife (2009). The second section of Freud’s Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1905)—“Infantile Sexuality”—counters the popular belief that children are asexual until puberty; rather, Freud argues, young children are innately sexual, and although their early sexual inclinations lapse into “sexual amnesia” during the later years of childhood, “the very impressions which

210 • Notes we have forgotten have nevertheless left the deepest traces in our psychic life” (549–550). Drawing heavily on Freud’s essay, Rose argues that adults are threatened by the anarchic potential signified by childhood sexuality and thus seek to retain control over childhood by repressing a recognition of childhood sexuality and putting in its place a nostalgic image of childhood purity (12–20). Chapter Four 1

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In Orientalism (1978)—arguably the foundational text of post-colonial theory—Edward Said argues that the Orient (specifically the Middle East, but also East and Southwest Asia) occupies a “special place in European Western experience” insofar as it provides the West with “recurring images of the Other” against which the West has defined itself (1). Although the West’s characterization of the East is a discursive construction, Said argues, it is one with definite material and political consequences; the work of theory, therefore, is to examine “Orientalism as a discourse” in order to “understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period” (3). Hartley’s characterization of the past as a “foreign country” suggests an analogical “othering” of a time, rather than a place—and it is one that is tacitly supported by the novel’s frequent allusions to the Boer War and European colonization of Africa. Thane Rosenbaum’s novel The Golems of Gotham (2002) features an exchange between a Holocaust survivor, reincarnated as a golem, and an anorexic gentile model who conflates her eating disorder with the hunger suffered by inmates of Nazi concentration camps. In response to this woman’s complaints, the survivor tells the woman that, “[y]ou are not eating food, but you are consuming images that don’t belong to you. . . . Anorexia is painful and real, but it has nothing in common with a death camp” (190). Later, the survivor, Lothar, assures the woman that the simplistic analogy she has posited between eating disorders and experiences in “the camps” is “not [her] fault” (190). “It’s all too common nowadays,” he explains. “We live in a world that has internalized the phrases and images of atrocity” (190). This episode in Rosenbaum’s novel thus warns against the uncritical and ahistorical conflation of different experiences of human suffering—a conflation that, arguably, Skrypuch’s novel overlooks, precisely because it has uncritically “internalized the phrases and images of atrocity.” According to Guy, mid-nineteenth-century British thought was heavily under the sway of Utilitarianism, Adam Smith’s theory of the “invisible hand” of capitalism, and Malthusianism—all of which privileged a view of society as composed of individual parts. It was only later in the century,

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she argues, that Marxist thought offered an alternative image of collective action—and by this time, she continues, an atomistic view of society was already firmly entrenched within the Victorian imagination. Walter Benjamin often returns to the “hand-me-down” nature of children’s culture in his essays, especially in those on children’s toys. In “The Cultural History of Toys,” (1928), for example, he argues that toys were the by-products of materials produced by specialized guilds (wax figures, for instance, were made by candle-makers, and carvings by woodcutters) that finally found their way into the hands of children. In “Toys and Play” (1928), moreover, he argues that “so-called folkart”—for example, fairy tales and games—“is nothing more than the cultural goods of a ruling class that have trickled down and been given a new lease on life within the framework of a broad collective” (119). Benjamin’s latter comment, although made with specific reference to popular culture, nevertheless supports his former comment concerning the inheritance by children of cast-off forms originally intended for adults. Such inheritance and appropriation, I argue, is evident in the young adult novel’s uses of a former, Victorian, form. In his essay, “Why Won’t Melinda Just Talk About What Happened? Speak and the Confessional Voice,” (Spring 2009), Chris McGee admits that, although he admires Speak’s literary crafting and general avoidance of familiar problem novel formulas, he nevertheless perceives within its conclusion a reaffirmation of adolescents’ subjection to cultural institutions. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s elaboration of the “confession” in the History of Sexuality (1977), McGee argues that Anderson’s novel makes the act of speaking—and thus individual subjection to power—an imperative (182– 185). Thus, despite its initial, ostensible objective of critiquing institutional power, Speak ultimately reaffirms it, as a problem novel typically does. Go Ask Alice is a particularly notorious example of the problem novel and its pedantic and ideological aims, not the least because its author, Beatrice Sparks, originally published it under the pseudonym “Anonymous”—thus disguising her didactic motives with the veil of “authenticity.” It was only later that Sparks, a youth counselor, admitted she composed the book, although she insisted it was based on the confessions of actual recovering drug addicts. Sparks’s book is additionally provocative because it subtly equates its protagonist’s incipient interest in the peace movement of the early 1970s with drug addiction, thus suggesting that (leftist) political action is as dangerous as illegal drug use. It should be noted that Sommers, although he recognizes its limitations, still “find[s] the problem novel defensible, particularly when considered as a subgenre defined along gender lines” (259). Problem novels such as Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970), Sommers argues, foster a “sororal dialogism” that invites the reader’s active engagement with the text and thus with the “problem” it surveys.

212 • Notes 8

DePalma’s Carrie—based on the novel by Stephen King (1974)—begins with a gym-class sequence in which the eponymous heroine is taunted for her lack of physical prowess. It is followed, moreover, with a sequence in which Carrie experiences menarche and is subsequently mocked by her peers for her ignorance of this biological rite of passage. Skrypuch’s novel likewise begins with a scene that demonstrates an adolescent’s profound physical vulnerability. However, unlike Carrie, who can exact revenge upon her peers through telekinetic acts, Paula may only internalize her anger and frustration by enforcing upon herself strict and unobtainable standards. 9 In his influential study “The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant,” originally presented in 1938 but published in Commentary in 1952, historian Marcus Lee Hansen posits the “third generation hypothesis” which suggests that the assimilative process that tends to characterize second-generation immigrant experience begins to reverse with the third generation. The third generation, he argues, often begins to reincorporate the traditions and markers of ethnicity from which their parents had distanced themselves. 10 During the 1930s, Soviet efforts at farm collectivization involved the imposition of such high grain quotas on Ukrainian and Southern Russian agrarian populations that entire villages expired from famine; the death toll from this famine is estimated to be between five and seven million. According to both Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian historians, this manmade famine was motivated not so much by efforts at collectivization, nor by class-based efforts at “de-kulakization,” but by Soviet efforts to liquidate a national minority. See Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1987). On an additional note, it is curious that The Hunger does not reference this famine, because Skrypuch is a Ukrainian-Canadian whose second book, Hope’s War (2001), explicitly references early twentieth-century Ukrainian history. 11 According to Madhusree Mukerjee’s investigative text Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (2010), the Indian famine not only was caused by Churchill’s mismanagement of resources, but could have been eased by the shipment of emergency provisions to India. Mukerjee’s argument—which provoked significant controversy upon its publication—is that Churchill consciously redirected emergency shipments to Europe and Britain in order to starve a population deemed threatening to British imperial interests. 12 The Hunger’s publication coincided, for example, with protests at the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference of 1999 in Seattle, Washington, where thousands of protestors (representing student activist groups, interfaith organizations, labor unions, and environmental advocacy groups) called attention to the effects of free trade policies on

Notes • 213 developing nations, labor, global hunger, and the environment. Although The Hunger may have been written before this event, the conflicts and discourses that motivated the protest were long in circulation before the novel’s production. 13 According to Carolyn Steedman—whose study of childhood and interiority I discuss in further detail in the next chapter—a figure is a literary trope that acts as “an organising principle, a set of political convictions, an emblem . . . subject to multiple uses and many transformations” (17). Writing specifically about the figure of the child, Steedman argues that that this figure involved a personification that “helped shape feelings, and structure feelings into thought” (19). A figure, then, is not so much a symbol (which implies a consubstantial relationship between object and meaning) but a means of thinking through and with cultural ideas and processes. 14 In Armenia: A Historical Atlas, Robert Hewsen includes a map of the U.S. and Canada which contains information regarding Armenian Apostolic and Uniate parishes, Armenian outreach centers, and populations of Armenian-Americans/Canadians by state/province. For example, according to Hewsen’s map, California has the highest (U.S.) population of Armenian-Americans (151,340 in 1990). According to a listing of Armenian genocide monuments in www.armeniapedia.org, California also has at least three major monuments to the massacre. 15 One might further qualify the myth of “near-death” as what Barthes calls a “myth of inoculation.” According to Barthes, French social institutions as the Army and the Church, Barthes argues that such entities are preserved, paradoxically, by their own admissions of weakness or failing (41). Such self-deprecating discourse, Barthes argues, functions as a “kind of homeopathy” in which a “little ‘confessed’ evil”—for example, about the fanaticism of the Army or the self-righteousness of the Church—“saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil” and instead posits certain advantages that might be gleaned from such institutions “in spite of” their willingly confessed imperfections (42). To a certain extent, the means by which diasporic communities articulate a commitment to their survival and cohesion by harkening back to the memory of their catastrophic near-demise follows the logic Barthes observes in myths of “inoculation.” That is, the sense of pride and dignity that unites a diasporic community—which is precariously surrounded on all sides by a larger, dominant culture that threatens to subsume it—is upheld by its conviction that it has survived “in spite of” larger dangers and evils, and thus must keep the memory of its past vulnerability perpetually in sight in order to safeguard against imminent threats in the present. Like a vaccine that temporarily incapacitates a patient, only to protect her from a much more grave and perilous illness, the unsettling memory of past traumatic events, once absorbed by the diasporic body, serves to ward off the imminent danger of disintegration.

214 • Notes It is not insignificant that the problem novel itself has been characterized in similarly curative terms. The proto-feminist problem novelist Sarah Grand, for example, stated that her main objective in writing The Heavenly Twins (1893) was to “compound an allopathic pill for [the reader] and gild it so that it would be mistaken for a bonbon and swallowed without suspicion of its medicinal properties” (xii). This also seems to be Skrypuch’s objective in writing her own novel—although her text might be viewed more as a homeopathic, rather than an allopathic, remedy. Clearly, it is this particular myth of inoculation that guides the narrative of Skrypuch’s novel. An allopathic cure involves the prescription of drugs whose effects are opposite to their symptoms (e.g., Grand’s novel presents equitable marriage as an alternative to the sexual double standard a homeopathic cure). A homeopathic cure, however, involves a small dosage of substances that would otherwise cause illness in order to heal an afflicted symptom. The metaphor of homeopathy—or inoculation, as it were—appropriately describes the strategy of employed by a young adult problem novel such as The Hunger: its own heroine actually suffers directly from the problem(s) at hand. In turn, Skrypuch’s reader, who ostensibly suffers along with Paula as it is exposed to brief but graphic images of her affliction, is prompted to recognize, as though by proxy, the inadvisability of her more problematic actions and the virtues of her solutions. 16 Boym’s reference to the perceived “totality of existence” that inspires nostalgia is informed by her reading of George Lukács. In both The Theory of the Novel (1920) and The Historical Novel (1962), Lukács argues that, during the classical age (characterized by the epic), the individual and society were inextricably bound together, whereas in later eras (characterized by the tragedy and, later, the novel) the individual became alienated from his environment. Boym studies Lukács and other theorists in her chapter on nostalgia and modernity; modernity, she observes, gave rise to a sense of what Lukács called “transcendental homelessness” (22). 17 Although she points out that “approximately 90 percent of sufferers [of eating disorders] are girls or women” (50), Bordo rejects contentions that such disorders are biologically determined by sex. “Men do develop eating disorders, by the way,” she counters, “and strikingly, those who do so are almost always models, wrestlers, dancers, and others whose profession demands a rigid regime of weight control” (53, emphasis in original). Bordo’s argument here is that such disorders are contingent upon cultural expectations and frameworks rather than on biological determination. 18 In the context of Fogel’s study, deconstruction “refers to Derrida’s attempt to undo metaphysical schema or constructs, to demonstrate the flimsiness of the overviews and arguments as well as the logocentrism of the Western world’s foremost philosophers. It devalues and denigrates, among other concepts, idealism, transcendence, self, and origin” (9). Fogel attributes “the popularity of Derrida and what have been called his poststructur-

Notes • 215 alist writings” to the “experiments of the metafictionists” with whom Fogel believes “deconstruction has many affinities”: the interest of both deconstruction and metafiction, he writes, involves the undoing of “holistic, integrated modes of understanding the world” (9). Thus, according to Fogel, deconstruction “also implies the undermining of established meaning generally, whereas construction entails the opposite, the creation and development of such meaning” (9). 19 Blodgett’s Five Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (2003) traces Canadian literary history from 1874 to present; in so doing, it accounts for Canadian nationalism, the tension between Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian nationalisms and literatures, multicultural expressions in Canadian literature, and the relationship between Canada and Europe. Sarah M. Corse’s Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Canada and the United States (1997) traces the intersections of and differences between U.S. and Canadian national literatures and canon formations. Jonathan Kertzer’s Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada (1998) problematizes (or “worries”) the perceived identity crisis in Canadian literature; in so doing, it examines the relationship between nationalism and literature through an examination of the Romantic sources of these two concepts. 20 The use of the trope of hunger to diagnose the relative health of a national literature is not limited to Canadian discourse. For example, T. S. Eliot—a native of Missouri, but more widely regarded as a British poet—lamented, in his edition of the Cambridge History of American Literature, what he perceived to be the relative impoverishment of American culture and literature. Writing of Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman, he argued that the “originality, if not the full capacity, of these men was brought out, forced out, by the starved environment” in which they wrote (Tanner 73, emphasis in original). He continues by arguing that Hawthorne “sucked every germ of nourishment out of his granite soil; but the soil was mostly granite” (73). In response to Eliot’s contention, Tony Tanner argues in his essay, “American Canon,” that the “complaint that American soil is innutrient for art is at least as old as Irving and Cooper and was famously articulated by James” (73). Thus, if the trope of hunger has been used to mark a crisis in national and cultural identity, then the crisis it marks has been felt not only by Canadians but—perhaps ironically—by their American “elder brothers.” 21 Scholars such as Sarah M. Corse are careful to identify Canada as a state composed of (at least) two nations: English and French Canada. Corse also recognizes the influence of First Nations, or indigenous North Americans, to Canadian identity, as well as Canada’s strongly pronounced multicultural make-up. Indeed, as I will demonstrate below, Canada is defined not merely through one national identity but by several united under one federal state.

216 • Notes 22 In her elaboration of what she calls “prosthetic memory,” Alison Landsberg studies the ways in which early twentieth-century immigrants to the U.S. adopted mass-produced “memories” of American history as they strove to assimilate—or were coerced into assimilating—into greater American society. Landsberg cites a particularly provocative example in which the Ford Motor Company attempted to literalize the myth of the “American melting pot” by enacting an elaborate ritual performance in which immigrant employees, each “dressed in foreign costume” and bearing the flag of his native country, descended into a giant “melting pot” set in the middle of the stage, only to emerge later dressed in “American clothes” and waving the American stars and stripes (49–50). According to Landsberg, this pageant—which adopted the “logic of the assembly line”—is evocative of the more implicit processes by which immigrants to the U.S. have been encouraged to “escape from stigmatized ‘otherness’” and to adopt instead the “fantasy of becoming a ‘typical American’” (50–51). This is a process Landsberg sees dramatized in immigrant narratives such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912) and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1962), in which immigrants engage in “kinds of creative editing . . . that were continually used to imagine oneself as American and to make the future tense inhabitable” (51). Of course, as Landsberg observes, the proverbial leap into the melting pot is a costly action, for “while many immigrants might have longed to assimilate, the prosthetic memories they took on in that process were coercive and homogenizing. Instead of producing difference and thereby enabling empathy and perhaps even counterhegemonic politics, in this case prosthetic memories produced only sameness and the ‘typical American’” (51). 23 Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) is one of the most oft-cited, and often contested, studies of nationhood. According to Anderson, the nation is a socially constructed entity, or idea, that is shared by individuals who have little contact with one another and who otherwise might have little in common. Anderson associates the rise of nations or “imagined communities” with the rise of “print capitalism.” 24 For a fuller account of Canadian multicultural policy and its significance within children’s literature, see Miriam Verena Richter’s Creating the National Mosaic: Multiculturalism in Canadian Children’s Literature from 1950 to 1994 (2011). Chapter Five 1

Spiegelman’s graphic narrative In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) depicts the New York City native’s experience of, and response to, the terrorist attacks of September 11; in doing so, it also interprets cultural and political responses to the event. Additionally, not unlike Maus— Spiegelman’s second-generation depiction of his father’s experiences in

Notes • 217 Auschwitz—this text interrogates the complex relationship between individual and collective memory. 2 The official reason for the United States’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to topple the regime of Iraqi Sadaam Hussein, whom the U.S. suspected of harboring weapons of mass destruction. At the time, however, many Americans believed there was a direct connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks—a correlation that the Bush administration did not actively deny. 3. The term “flashbulb memory,” originally coined by R. Brown and J Kulik in a 1977 study published in Cognition, has come to be applied, popularly, to the collectively shared memory of singular historical events—for example, the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion of 1986, and the terrorist attacks of September 11. 4 Not insignificantly, Petit became a popular idol after the attacks on the World Trade Center; before 2001, his feat was all but lost to the American popular imagination. It was only after his interview with CNN’s Larry King on 27 October 2001 and the subsequent publications of his memoirs in 2002 that Petit’s name reentered popular consciousness. Petit’s notoriety grew still after the publication of Gerstein’s picture book and James Marsh’s fi lm documentary, Man on Wire (2008). Thus, as I will argue below, Petit’s growing status as a popular idol may be a consequence of the sentimentalization of the (now absent, but very much commemorated) Towers he once scaled. 5 In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci elaborates on the concept of hegemony as the power exerted by one dominant (cultural, political, economic) group over others. Counter-hegemonic criticism, then, involves the identification and critique of hegemonic influences in cultural texts. 6 In a speech in Atlanta, Georgia given on 8 November 2001, Bush reassured his audience that life should continue as usual, even in the wake of a national tragedy. “People are going about their daily lives,” he stated, “working and shopping and playing, worshipping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and baseball games.” A transcript of this speech is available on www.whitehouse.gov. 7 In his address to the Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001, Bush stated that “every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” A transcript of the address is available on www.whitehouse.gov. 8 In Life Between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (2009), Philip E. Wegner analyzes images from 1990s cultural texts that uncannily resemble later images of the World Trade Center attacks; Wegner notes, for instance, scenes in fi lms such as Independence Day (1996), Titanic (1997), and Fight Club (1999). According to Wegner, these images—produced in the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist attacks of 2001—“all signal the depths of the collective desire for

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the repetition of the original cataclysmic Event, this time within the other half of the Cold War dyad, that would signal a new Symbolic Order being set in place” (37). That is, the fall of the Berlin Wall brought into motion a radical historical shift that would not be consciously recognized until the later attacks of 9/11; popular texts, once read in retrospect, give us some indication of a collective anticipation of the second trauma or “death.” See my discussion of Benjamin’s “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre” in Chapter 2. Mickenberg takes up this analysis in her fourth chapter, titled “‘PinkTinged Pages’?: McCarthyism and Children’s Literature” (125–144). Not insignificantly, the cover of Mickenberg’s text features artist Lydia Gibson’s illustration of a group of children clustered around an open book and framed by insistent reiterations of the single word, “WHY?” In his essay, “The Age of Irony Comes to an End,” published in the 16 September 2001 issue of Time, Rosenblatt claims that, for “some 30 years— roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright—the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.” He insists, however, that the attacks of September 11 have ushered in a new era, wherein the “wise guys” must acknowledge “real” tragedy. Because Gerstein’s book is unpaginated, I have affi xed numbers to pages. Lampert also observes the ways in which Gerstein’s verbal and visual texts depict the Towers as fairy-tale castles (109). According to Lampert, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers “prepares readers, in a kind of narrative contract, who are positioned to read the book as a legend” (108). For example, in his memoirs, To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk between the Twin Towers (2002), Petit invokes the “gods of the towers” as he describes his walk (190). Petit’s narrative is lyrical: “I glide in,” he recounts, “feel the width of the abyss, I slide down and taste its depth, with delight I brush by the marble plaza at street level, then I hurtle back up along the silver facades into the dazzling surprise of my sight landing exactly where it started” (191, italics in original). See, for example, Judith Fetterley’s essay, “The Sanctioned Rebel” in the Fall 1971 issue of Studies in the Novel. In this essay, Fetterley argues that the Tom Sawyer is an essential element of the town of St. Petersburg, which relies on his naughtiness to confirm its own self-righteousness. To be sure, the “good bad boy” was a central element in nineteenth-century American fiction, more generally. The term “century of the child” refers to the title of a book written by Swedish activist Ellen Key in 1909. Long before Dr. Spock, Key advocated child-centered modes of parenting and pedagogy that would foster the individual development of children. The term “American century” was coined by Time editor Henry Luce in 1941 to describe the U.S.’s rising dominance on the global theater.

Notes • 219 17 The Myth and Symbol school of American studies, co-founded by scholars including Henry Nash Smith, Leslie Fielder, and Leo Marx, established the method of identifying recurring myths and symbols (e.g., “Virgin Land” and the “American Adam”) in U.S. literature. The methodology employed by the school survived into the 1980s, whereupon it became the object of critique by scholars in multicultural and postcolonial studies. See Henry Nash Smith’s essay “Can American Studies Develop a Method?” (1957). See also Pease’s The New American Exceptionalism (2009). 18 It should be noted, however, that Connolly goes on to consider an alternate reading of the text: she argues, for example, that “some of its images seem to dissonantly reflect the 9/11 attacks” (293). 19 The term “screen memory” was originally used by Freud in 1899 to designate a memory (or fantasy) that substitutes for and represses another, far more traumatic memory. 20 A figure, Steedman explains, is a trope that involves a “cognitive act of personification” which in turn entails the “bestowal of qualities upon a pre-existing entity that has other meanings besides the ones bestowed” (18). The child-acrobat, then, has become a figure insofar as it has come to embody the “idea of the child” that “provided the largest number of people living in the recent past of Western societies with the means for thinking about and creating the self: something grasped and understood; a shape, moving in the body . . . something inside: an interiority” (20). 21 Of course, as Pease demonstrates, such a myth was predicated upon a disavowal: what seemed to be “virgin land” was, in fact, occupied for centuries by indigenous populations whom white settlers peremptorily eradicated. Nevertheless, this credence in a “virgin land,” carefully maintained although it might have been by acrobatic acts of disavowal, enabled a corresponding sense of horror at its subsequent violation by foreignborn terrorists. 22 The complete name of the USA PATRIOT Act is Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. Signed into law by President George W. Bush in October 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act permits, for example, the seizure of personal communications that might aid the state in capturing terrorists; additionally, it allows for the detainment of immigrants, activists, and other persons suspected of terrorist activities. 23 The term “homeland,” Pease notes, was originally used by the Supreme Court in 1831 as a “rationale of the state’s right to dispossess the Cherokees of their land”: as occupants of a “homeland,” the Court ruled, the Cherokees were occupants of a “domestic dependent nation” which owed its existence to, and ultimately answered to, the greater U.S. (169). The Bush administration, Pease argues, seized upon this notion of “homeland” in order to enfigure the American citizenry as a dispossessed, dependent population subject to the whims of an exceptional State.

220 • Notes 24 Not insignificantly, Steedman draws on Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling” to characterize Western cultural modes of thinking and feeling about children that emerged after the publication of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. 25 See my discussion of Pierre Nora’s “sites of memory” in Chapter 1. 26 In the course of her study, titled The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, Faludi cites as supporting examples President Bush’s machismo post-attack rhetoric (e.g., “We’ll smoke him out” [4]), sensational media coverage of the “rescue” of Private First Class Jessica Lynch, pundits’ tendency to equate Afghanistan to “Indian Country” (5), and the trend, in television and fi lm, to reassign once “swinging-single” female characters to traditional roles of wives and mothers). 27 In this essay, Freud characterizes the uncanny as the “unheimlich”— literally, the “un-home-like”—or the strangely familiar. In Strange Dislocations, Steedman discusses the figure of the child in terms of both nostalgia-for-home and the un-home-like/strangely familiar. 28 In March 2003, Representatives Bob Ney (R-Ohio) and Walter Jones (R-NC) petitioned that the House cafeteria change the term “french fries” to “freedom fries” in protest against French opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq (“House Cafeterias”). 29 In her study, Butler decries not only the efforts made by American conservatives to vilify so-called “Islamo-fascists” but the statements of selfflagellating liberals who insisted that the events of 9/11 were categorically “our fault”: both perspectives, Butler maintains, offer “closed explanations, simply other ways of asserting US priority and enclosing US omnipotence” (9). 30 Butler is quick to point out that “conditions” cannot be directly equated with “causes.” Social and economic conditions, she argues, “do not ‘act’ in the way that individual agents do”; nonetheless, she points out, “no agent acts without them” (11). What Butler proposes, then, is a reevaluation of global conditions—prompted precisely by a recognition of shared vulnerability—that structure an artificial (yet materially consequential) order of power within an increasingly globalized world. 31 Marsh’s documentary, for example, immediately forefronts the national and international context surrounding Petit’s walk by opening with footage of the Watergate hearings, which were currently taking place. Similarly, Colum McCann’s fictionalized depiction of Petit’s performance, Let the Great World Spin (2009) makes numerous references to the Vietnam War and to social tensions within the U.S. 32 For an account of multicultural studies in the 1970s, see Malini Johar Schueller’s essay “Area Studies and Multicultural Imperialism: The Project of Decolonizing Knowledge” (2007). 33 In her 2007 book, Shock Doctrine, journalist Naomi Klein documents the influence of the Chicago School of Economics on American international

Notes • 221

34

35

36

37

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policy, specifically, and global economic policy, more generally. The Chicago School, associated with the University of Chicago economics department and free-market champion Milton Friedman, trained economists and policy-makers who promulgated laissez-faire economics and the privatization of public-sector resources and services. Klein’s thesis is that practitioners of Chicago School economic policy took advantage of—or created—national disasters that disoriented the general populace and in turn created opportunities for sudden, sweeping economic reforms. In the second section of her book, Klein documents the roles played by the socalled “Chicago Boys” in facilitating the 1973 Chilean coup. In the sixth section of Shock Doctrine, Klein argues that the U.S. military policy of “shock and awe” in Iraq was aimed toward disorienting the nation’s citizens and destabilizing its national economy in preparation for swift corporate takeovers of once-nationally held resources and services. Sites of U.S.-sponsored torture. See, again, Klein on the relationship between so-called “enhanced interrogation” of enemy combatants and the large-scale shock tactics employed, for example, in the U.S. policy of “shock and awe” in Iraq. See also Butler’s Precarious Life for a discussion of torture, mourning, and Western categories of the human. In Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992), Richard Slotkin draws parallels between the Vietnam War and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” According to Slotkin, Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” gradually came to resemble a “war on the poor” (497) to such an extent that violent state-supported responses to riots in Detroit and Watts were justified by the same claims the military used as it argued that Vietnamese villages should be destroyed in order to be saved (535). One of Faulkner’s most famous lines, in Requiem for a Nun (1951). In the first act of the play, Gowan Stevens, a man attempting to rescue the fallen woman Temple Drake (also the protagonist of Faulkner’s earlier novel, Sanctuary [1931]) declares that the “past is never dead. It’s not even past” (92). According to Fraser, the co-conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot “decided on a course of action which would cause them, in the late twentieth century, to be described as terrorists” (103).

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Index

1984 196n10 9/11: see September 11 “9/11 canon of children’s literature” 161, 164 ABC News 121 Abu Ghraib 182 “Acceleration of history” 31, 34, 59, 196n11 “Acting-out” 77, 78, 80 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 29, 167, 230 Affiliative connections 157, 158, 159 Afghanistan War (U.S.) 182, 220n26 “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun” 199–200n7 “age of genocide” 3, 188n5 “The Age of Irony Comes to an End” 218n11 Alcott, Louisa May 112, 168, 207–208n22, 209n27 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 188n6 Alger, Horatio 168 Alice in Wonderland 2 “Alone and All Together” 162 Allegory 26, 32, 38, 55, 126, 176, 178, 199n6 Allegorical moment 174, 176, 184 Al Qaeda 201n14, 217n2 Althusser, Louis 152, 153 Amazon.com 161 The American Adam 168, 219n17 American Black Holocaust Museum 139 American century 168, 218n16 American exceptionalism 23, 174, 219n17 American Library Association—list of most challenged books, 193; prize for best book for young adults 29

American studies 168–169, 219n17 Amsterdam 203n6 Amusing Ourselves to Death 35 Analogy 17, 44, 57, 58, 60, 81, 86, 106, 114, 116, 147, 157, 168, 169, 190n13, 210n2 Anderson, Benedict 150, 216n23 Anderson, Laurie Halse 128, 211n5 Anderson, M.T. 34, 135, 196n10 Anne Frank and Me 203n8 Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife 206–207n19, 209n29 Anne Frank Remembered 206–207n19 Anne Frank: The Whole Story 203n8 Anorexia 126, 130, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 142, 143, 147, 210n2 and Canadian literature 145, 148 and the Canadian civil body 148, 149, 150 and diaspora 136 See also eating disorders Antin, Mary 216n22 Anti-semitism 16, 25, 95, 191n19, 193n24 Apartheid 8, 190n14 Apocalyptic narratives 189n11 Appelfeld, Aharon 11 “Arbeit Macht Frei” 191n17 The Arcades Project 176 Architecture 49 “Area Studies and Multicultural Imperialism: The Project of Decolonizing Knowledge” 220n32 Arets, Maik 193n27 Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret 61, 211n7 Argentina, Dirty War 190n14 Armenia 125, 137, 148, 213n14 Armenian diaspora 136, 138–139, 148

233

234 • Index Armenian genocide 213n10, 15, 26, 31, 125, 129, 130, 131, 133, 136–137, 138–139, 148, 186, 190n14 Armenia: A Historical Atlas 213n14 Armeniandiaspora.com 138–139 As I Lay Dying 193n29 Aspects of the Novel 204n12 Assimilation 131, 136, 150–151, 192n22 in reading 115, 203n8 Assmann, Aleida 197n15 Assmann, Jan 197n15 Associated Press 191n16 Atwood, Margaret 27, 33–34, 144–145, 195n6 Auschwitz 2, 36, 84, 194n31, 198n2, 201n10, 216–217n1 Autobiographical self 41 Avery, Gillian 207n21 The Backwoods of Canada 147 Baer, Elizabeth R. 62 Bagdasarian, Adam 31 Bannerji, Himani 151–152, 153 Barrie, J.M. 188n7, 206n18 Barthes, Roland Camera Lucida 69, 71, 110–111 “The Death of the Author” 97, 204n11 Mythologies 138, 213n15 “Bashert” 10, 56–57, 198n22 Baudelaire, Charles 143 Baum, L. Frank 2 “Behold Now Behemoth” 192n23 Belatedness 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 103, 156, 189 Belated witness 6 Bellamy, Edward 195n5 Benjamin, Walter 17, 32, 49, 51, 143, 165, 176, 192n21, 194n4, 201n12, 211n4 Arcades Project 176 “The Cultural History of Toys” 211n4 “Old Forgotten Children’s Books” 85, 193n28, 201n11 “One-Way Street” 81–82, 201n11 “On the Mimetic Faculty” 17, 84–85 on performance 84 “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre” 84, 86, 165, 218n9 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 28, 31, 59–60, 183–184, 194n4, 198–199n4 “Toys and Play” 211n4 “What Is Epic Theatre?” 201n13 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 49–50, 64 Bennett, Cherie 203n8

Bergen-Belsen 100, 105, 113, 207n20 Berger, Alan 6, 10, 16, 17, 55–56, 191–192n20 Bergson, Henri 188n6 Bernard-Donals, Michael 156 Bernstein, Susan David 203–204n8, 208n25 Bettelheim, Bruno 188n4, 199n6, 208n25 Bible 1, 54, 198n20 Bibliotherapy 3, 161–162, 188n4 Bildungsroman 145 Binaries 17, 18, 83, 151, 162, 180 Blodgett, E.D. 146, 215n19 Blume, Judy, xi, 13, 24, 25, 60, 90, 124, 158, 160, 164–165, 178, 184, 199n6, 200n7, 200n9 author of Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? 61, 211n7 author of Forever 61 author of Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself–see also Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself website of 201n16 Body 14, 18, 19, 26, 42–43, 50, 68, 69, 74, 76, 85, 112, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137 196n10, 219n20 body-image 129, 133 collective body 137 of the individual 26, 135, 136, 137, 141–142, 143 diasporic 136, 137 national 26, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150 and photography 69, 110 of texts 107, 115, 127 vulnerability of 159, 174, 175, 177–178, 179 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting 194n3, 196n11, 198n17 The Book Thief 3 Bordo, Susan 134, 214n17 Bordwell, David 73 Bosmajian, Hamida 3, 7, 23, 163–164, 187n3, 188–189n9, 194n30 Bosnia 35 Boym, Svetlana 126, 140–141, 142–143, 214n16 Brecht, Berthold 201n13 Brechtian epic theatre 85, 201n13 Briar Rose 194n30, 199n6 The Brothers Karamazov 53, 198n19 Brown, R. 217n3 Brundibar 191n17, 199n6 Buck-Morss, Susan 201n12 The Buffalo News 194n2

Index • 235 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 168, 209n27 Burundi 36 Bush, George W. 162, 177, 217n7, 219n22, 220n26 administration 171, 173, 177, 196n10, 217n2, 219n23 Bushman, John H. 29 Butler, Andrew 165 Butler, Judith, 16, 45–46, 47, 177–178, 180, 201n15, 220n29, 221n35 Call It Sleep 216n22 Cambodian genocide 30, 36, 55, 190n14, 206n16 Cambridge History of American Literature 215n20 Camera Lucida 69, 110–111 Canada 27, 136, 137, 148 Canadian cinema 146,147 Canadian literature 144–147, 215n19 Canadian multiculturalism 126, 150–152, 215n21, 216n24 Canadian national identity 143–144, 147, 148, 149–151, 215n21 Canadian Multiculturalism Act 151 The Canadian Postmodern 146 “Can American Studies Develop a Method?” 219n17 Capital 107 Capitalism 210n3 “Caravans” 16 Carlson, Nancy 162 Carrie 128, 212n8 Carroll, Lewis 2 Cartesian notions of the self 14, 18, 45 Caruth, Cathy 103–104 “Century of the child” 168, 218n16 Chicago School of Economics 182, 220–221n33 Child 1–2, 6, 10, 40, 66, 67, 76, 81, 93, 95, 108, 113, 118, 119, 131, 133, 137, 141, 159, 162, 165, 185 acrobat 170–171, 174, 219n20 actor 85, 86, 87, 174, 191n17 actual 87 after 9/11 156–157, 161 American 168–169, 173 “century of the child” 168, 218n16 characters 4, 15, 18, 34, 51, 87, 90, 157, 159, 160, 162, 167, 170, 171, 173, 191n17, 192n21, 206n18, 209n27 children of the Holocaust 197n13 death of 110, 111–112, 200n9, 207n21, 207–208n22

eternal 115, 119 exceptional 38 as figure 115, 160, 167, 168, 170, 174, 213n13, 220n27 gesture of 85–86, 201n13 iconic 119 ideal 113, 115 as image of the future 85–86 imagined 170 and interiority 115, 170 martyr 117 middle-class 120 and perception 64, 81–82, 84–85, 158, 192 in photographs 112–113, 200n9, 208n23, 208n24 at play 17, 60, 63, 82, 84–85, 87, 211n4 reader 3, 6, 7, 13, 19–21, 22, 161–162, 163–165, 173, 183, 184, 187n1, 188n7, 188n8, 193n25, 193n28, 195n9 and reason 1, 18 Romantic 24, 26, 91, 96, 108, 114–115, 117, 167, 169, 172, 108 sacrificial 53, 198n19 schoolchild 185 subjectivity of 119, 156, 199n5 and second-generation memory 17–18, 25, 32, 81 survivors 10–11, 56, 137, 190n15 of survivors 15, 17, 32, 46, 55–56 vulnerability of 174, 200n9 wartime 90, 91, 107–108, 108–109, 121–122 as writer 25, 87, 107–108, 206n17 Children of the Holocaust: Conversations With Sons and Daughters of Survivors 39–41, 197n13, 197n14 Children’s literature 1–4, 6–7, 11, 16, 21–23, 24, 118, 168, 176, 187n1, 187n2, 187–188n3, 193n29, 216n24, 218n10 “9/11 canon” of 161, 164 and the production of second-generation memory 21–22 and the (re)productive imagination 23, 25 about the Holocaust 3, 13, 15, 22, 23, 30, 62–63, 132, 133, 163–164, 187–188n3, 188–189n3, 191n17, 194n30 about September 11, 157–158, 159, 160–163, 173 Children’s Literature 2, 187n2 “children’s literature of atrocity” 2, 4

236 • Index Childhood American ideals of 168–169, and death 110, 111–112, 200n9, 207n21, 207–208n22, 200n9, 207n21 eternal 110, 112, 115, 119 fantasies 73–74, 74–77 games 64, 65, 66, 69–70, 71, 77, 78, 81, 86, 108 ideal 109, 113, 114 innocence 81, 200n9, 201n12 knowledge 76 lost 114, 115, 203n7 middle-class notions of 115, 120–121 “natural” 203n7 perception 7, 17–18, 64, 73, 81–87, 91, 158, 160, 176, 183, 184 performance 87 play 87 preoccupation with death 67–68, 77, 78, 79 preoccupation with sex 66–67, 69, 77 Romantic notions of 81, 96, 108, 109, 111–112, 117, 167, 168, 201n12 sexuality 118, 119, 199n5, 209–210n30 Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust 16, 191n20 Chilean coup of 1974, 181–182, 221n33 Christian Science Monitor 191n16 Chronicle 99–100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106–108 Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II 212n11 CIA 182 Cinema: see film Citizenship 151, 153, 162 CNN 217n4 Coerr, Eleanor 31 Cognition 217n3 Collective action 23, 80, 125–126, 211n3 Collective memory 4, 13, 14, 30, 33, 34, 48, 54, 173, 184, 186, 188n6, 189n10, 217n3 Collective mourning 78–80 The Collective Memory Reader 188n6 Colman, Benjamin 207n21 Coming-of-age narrative 61 Concentration camps 2, 15, 47, 56, 62, 63, 68, 84, 105, 110, 210n2 Auschwitz 2, 36, 84, 132, 194n31, 198n2, 201n10, 216–217n1 Bergen-Belsen, 100, 105, 207n20 Dachau 13, 25, 63, 66, 75, 78, 86, 164

game of ,in Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself 65–66, 69–71, 77, 78, 79–80, 83, 86 Terezin 191n17 Confession 211n5 Connerton, Paul 14, 188n6 Connolly, Paula 161, 169, 173, 219n18 Conquest, Robert 212n10 Conservative politics 22, 23, 26, 27 Corse, Sarah M. 146–147, 150, 215n19 Coup 179, 186 Counter-hegemonic criticism 160, 217n5 Creating the National Mosaic: Multiculturalism in Canadian Children’s Literature 216n24 Croatia 92 Cromwell, John 200n8 Cronenberg, David 146 Crosby, Bing 70 Crosses 135 Cut 135 Cutting 135 “The Cultural History of Toys” 211n4 Cultural mosaic 15; see also Canada and Canadian multiculturalism Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity 188n6 Dachau 13, 25, 63, 66, 75, 78, 86, 164 Dahl, Roald 2 “The Darker Side of Prosthetics: A Less Optimistic Reading of Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory” 193n27 Dash, Julie 192n21 DePalma, Brian 128 Dancing on Tisha B’av 191n19 Daughters of the Dust 192n21 DaVinci, Leonardo 66 A Day I’ll Never Forget: A Keepsake to Help Children Deal with September 11, 2001: Attack on America 161 Death 52, 57, 59, 71, 75, 130, 133, 137, 142, 144, 149, 159, 160, 163, 175, 176, 205–206n14 of Anne Frank 100, 110, 112, 113, 117, 207n20, 208–209n26 of the author 97, 103, 204n11 of the child 11–112, 200n9, 207–208n22 of genocide victims 13, 15, 62, 212n10, 212n11 of irony 165 child’s preoccupation with 66, 67–68, 71, 73, 74, 77, 78–79, 80, 84, 200n9

Index • 237 and photography 110–111, 112 and sex 68, 73, 74, 77 and trauma 218n8 death-camps 210n2 death-march 205–206n14 near-death 138–139, 140, 142, 213n15 “The Death of the Author” 97, 103, 204n11 “the death of irony” 165 Dear Mili 191n17 DeCerteau, Michel 196n10 Deconstruction 145, 214–215n18 DeLillo, Don 160, 164 DePalma, Brian 212n8 Derrida, Jacques 214n18 “The Dessert” 114 Detritus 82, 83 The Devil in Vienna 3, 31, 62 The Devil’s Arithmetic 31, 62, 63, 132, 133, 203n8 Devout Contemplation on the Meaning of Divine Providence, in the Early Death of Pious and Lovely Children 207n21 Dialectical image 176, 184 Diary of Anne Frank, see Diary of a Young Girl in Harry Potter 89–90, 98, 115–116 of soldiers 104, 205–206n14 of Zlata Filipovic, see Zlata’s Diary The Diary of Anne Frank (film) 113–114, 208n25, 208n26 The Diary of a Young Girl 20, 25–26 and photograph of Anne Frank 109–113 as proper history 100, 103 as source of cultural memory 202n4 context of production 104–105, 202–203n6, 206–207n19 definitive edition of 112–113, 207n20, 208n24, 209n28 editing of 117–118 film adaptation of 113–114, 208n25, 208n26 influence on Zlata’s Diary 93–96, 99, 106–108, 114, 116–117 literary aspects of 99–101, 103, 104, 108, 204n10, 205n13 name of 93 references to sexuality in 117–118 stage adaptation of 113, 208n25 versions of 117, 209n28 see also Frank, Anne Diaspora African 139

and myth 126, 137–142, 213n15 Armenian diaspora: see Armenia diasporic communities 4, 24, 41, 126, 131, 136–142, 142–143, 149, 150 diasporic memory 24, 91, 126, 143 Jewish 139, 140–141 Dickens, Charles 127, 207n21 DiGiovanni, Janine 119–120 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 53, 198n19 Doyle, Robert P. 193n26 Drew, Richard 175, 176 Duhamel, Georges 49 Dubrovnik 92 Eating disorders 26, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136, 137, 144, 147, 149, 154, 214n17. See also anorexia Eden 109, 140, 168 Edgeworth, Maria 1, 187n1 Eliot, T.S. 215n20 The Endless Steppe 31 “end of history” 189n11 The English Journal 194 Enlightenment 1, 14, 17, 18, 45, 46, 189n11 Entwicklungsroman 127 Epic theatre: see Brechtian epic theatre Epstein, Helen 39, 42, 44, 47, 48, 52, 197n13, 197n14 Esquire 175 Ethics 16, 17, 22, 33, 55, 124 Ethnic cleansing 13, 35, 132, 206n16 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close 160, 163 Fairy tales 165–166, 194n30, 199n6, 218n13 Falling Man 163, 175, 176, 177, 178, 184 Falling Man (novel) 160 Faludi, Susan 175, 220n26 Fascism 62 Family Frames 7, 8, 190n13 Family memory 4, 18, 24, 40–41 Famine 34, 132, 133, 148, 212n10, 212n11 Faulkner, William, xi, 183, 193n29, 221n37 Fawkes, Guy 185, 186 Feed 34, 135, 196n10 Felman, Shoshana 43, 197n16 Fetish 68–69, 173 Fetterley, Judith 218n15 Fielding, Sarah, 1 Fiedler, Leslie 219n17 Figure 135, 213n13, 219n20

238 • Index of the child 170, 220n27 Filipović, Zlata 10, 13, 18, 20, 24, 25, 60, 87, 90, 124, 193n25, 202n2 ABC News Person of the Week 121 background of 202n5 description of by Janine DiGiovanni 119–121 editor of Stolen Voices 206n17 escape from Sarajevo 202n1 see also Zlata’s Diary Film 19, 48, 49, 50, 51–52, 63, 67, 70–71, 72–75, 76, 80, 98, 99, 105–106, 147, 156, 163, 165, 174, 176, 179, 192n21, 199–200n7, 203n8, 206n15 documentary 70–71 espionage/spy 72 Hollywood 13, 25, 63, 70, 71–73, 74, 77, 80, 83, 113 and September 11 156, 163, 217–218n8 Fireboat 163 First Aid for Healing 161 Five Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada 215n19 Flashbulb memory 157, 217n3 Flat character 204n12 Flynn, Richard 161–162 Foer, Jonathan Safran 160, 163, 164 Fogel, Stanley 27, 145–146, 147, 214– 215n18 Food 104, 114–115, 129, 130–131, 132, 137, 147, 148, 149, 153. See also famine Forbes, Esther 168 Forever 61 Forgetting 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 48, 99 Forster, E.M. 129, 204n12 Fothergill, Robert 147 Foucault, Michel 107, 196n10, 204n11, 211n5 Frank, Anne 13, 19, 20, 25–26, 124, 191n17, 193n25, 193n26, 202n2, 202n4, 206n17 “Americanization” of 208n25 as depicted in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer 208–209n26 as “patron” 107–108 death of 99, 105, 110–112, 113, 207n20 eternal childhood of 110, 112–115 film depiction of 113–114 imprisonment of in Bergen-Belsen 105, 207n20 in cultural memory 110, 112–115, 117– 119, 202n4, 203–204n8, 209n27 Miep Gies’s memory of 206–207n19

photograph of 109–113, 118, 208n24 reader identification with 203n8 see also The Diary of a Young Girl Frank, Otto 117, 207n20 Fraser, Antonia 186, 221n38 “freedom fries: 180, 220n28 Friedman, Milton 221n33 Freud, Sigmund 66, 67, 68, 78, 107, 118, 176, 209–210n30, 219n19, 220n27 Frey, Charles 128 Fukuyama, Francis 189n11 Future 12, 31, 35, 54–55, 56, 59,67, 69, 76, 78, 80, 85–86, 87, 131, 133, 142, 157, 178, 181, 184, 186, 216n22 Garner, Alan 188n8 Gaskell, Susan 127 Gaze 74 Geertz, Clifford 204n10 Geha, Joseph 162 Genealogy 107 “The Generation of Postmemory” 8, 52, 190n11, 190n14, 197n13, 202n4 Generations 9, 10–11, 190–191n15 1.3 generation 190n15 1.5 generation 10, 56, 190n15 1.7 generation 190n15 fourth-generation relationships 131 post-9/11 generation 157 second-generation relationships 131 third-generation relationships 131, 212n9 See also second-generation memory Genocide 3, 34, 56, 188n5, 190n14, 206n16 Armenian 10, 15, 26, 31, 125, 129, 130, 131, 133, 136, 138–139, 148, 186, 190n14, 213n14 Bosnian 99 Cambodian 30 famine-genocides in India and Ukraine 132–133, 212n10–11 Holocaust: see Holocaust Genocide denial 20, 139 Gerstein, Mordecai 22, 23, 24, 27–28, 218n12, 218n13. See also The Man Who Walked Between the Towers Ghost image 5, 6–7, 13, 40, 57, 60, 98, 124, 141, 159, 160, 183, 192n21 Gesture 85, 201n13 Ghost image 1, 5, 6, 7, 13, 40, 57, 98, 124, 141, 159, 183, 192n21 The Ghost Writer 208–209n26 Gies, Miep 109, 206n19 Gibson, Lydia 218n10

Index • 239 The Giver 15, 16, 24–25, 61, 63, 80–81, 87, 90, 124, 125, 131, 133, 142, 154, 158, 194n1, 194n2, 195n9, 196n10, 197n12, 198n18 and collective action 53–54 and ethics 45, 55–56 and film 48–53 and forgetting 31–32, 34–37, 58–59 and individualism 38, 53 and lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) 36–37 and perception 39, 41, 49–50 and prophecy 54–55 and prosthetic memory 50–52, 53 and the relational self 45–47 and relationships between witnesses and interlocutors 43–45, 46 and the (re)productive imagination 57–58 as ambiguous utopia 33–34 conclusion of 59–60 depiction of physical reception of memory in 42 historical context of publication of 30–31 reception of 29–30 Giving an Account of Oneself 16, 45–46 Global War on Terror 171 Go Ask Alice 128, 211n6 The Go-Between 123–124 Goethe, Wilhelm 170, 171, 220n24 Golden Age of children’s literature 7, 188n7 The Golems of Gotham 210n2 “the good-bad boy” 167, 209n27 Goodenough, Elizabeth 187n2 Goodrich, Frances 113 The Goosebumps series 2 Gothic fiction 2, 187n1 Gottesfeld, Jeff 203n8 Gourevitch, Philip 192n23 Gramsci, Antonio 217n5 Grand, Sarah 214n15 Ground Zero 171 Guantanamo Bay 86, 182, 201n15 Gubar, Marah 6, 7, 156 Gubar, Susan 32, 48, 57, 58 Gulag 2 Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America 221n36 Gunpowder Plot 185, 186, 221n38 Guy, Josephine 127, 210–211n3 Haas, Diane 61 Hackett, Albert 113

Halbwachs, Maurice 4, 7, 8, 14, 18, 189n10 Haley, Alex 30 Handler-Spitz, Ellen 41 The Handmaid’s Tale 34, 195n6 “The Hansel and Gretel Syndrome: Survivorship Fantasies and Parental Desertion” 199n6 Hansen, Marcus Lee 212n9 Hansen, Miriam 48 Hanson, Carter F. 195n5, 198n18 Hard Times 127 Harpers 192n23 Harry Potter 2 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 89–90, 91, 98, 115–116 Hartley, L.P., 123–124, 125, 184, 210n1 The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine 212n10 “The Haunted Nursery: 1764–1830” 187n1 Hautzig, Esther 31 Haviland, Virginia 62 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 97, 215n20 The Heavenly Twins 214n15 Hegemony 217n5 Heimat 171 The Here and Now Reproducible Book for the Day That Was Different 161 Herzegovnia 92 Hewson, Robert 213n14 Hintz, Carrie 29 Hipple, Ted 29 Hiroshima 2, 31 Hirsch 6, 7–10, 12, 52, 157, 189n9, 189– 190n11, 190n13, 190n14, 197n13, 197n15, 200n9, 202n4 The Historical Novel 198n3, 214n16 “The Historical Problem of Generations” 9 Historical realism 63, 198n3 History 8, 16, 27, 31, 34, 35, 41, 49, 59–60, 113, 116, 125, 137, 138, 143, 146, 149, 150, 159, 164, 166, 170, 173, 176, 183–184, 194n31, 196n10 acceleration of 31, 34, 59, 196n10 as constellation 183–184 end of 189n11 as linear 18, 183–184 proper history 99–100, 105, 107, 108 and photography 111 History and Memory After Auschwitz 194n31, 198n2, 201n10 History of Little Goody Two-Shoes 1

240 • Index The History of Sexuality 211n5 Hitler, Adolf 65, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 83, 191n17 Hobsbawn, Eric 140 Hodgson-Burnett, Frances 168, 209n27 Hoffman, A. Robin 208n23 Holocaust 3, 10, 13, 15, 16, 22, 30, 57, 58, 163–164, 186, 187–188n3, 188–189n9, 190n14, 190–191n15, 191n17, 191–192n20, 192n23, 197n13, 197n14, 206n16, 209n26 children’s books about 3, 13, 15, 22, 23, 30, 62–63, 132, 133, 187–188n3, 188–189n3, 191n17, 194n30 family memory of 39–41, 42, 49 and film 30, 32,40, 58, 70, 99, 106, 114 museums 139; see also U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum poetry about 32, 56–58 references to in Zlata’s Diary 98–99, 106, 124 representation in Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself 61, 62–63, 64,69–70, 71, 74, 75, 77–78, 79–80, 83, 84, 86 second-generation witness to 55–56 sacralization of 80, 201n10 survivors 32, 43, 44, 77 Hollywood: see film Homeland 50, 158, 170, 171–172, 174, 219n23 Homophobia 16, 191n19 Hope’s War 212n10 Houston, Whitney 86 How Societies Remember 188n6 The Hunger 10, 15, 16, 23, 24, 26–27, 60, 155, 159, 171, 212n8, 212n10, 212–213n12, 214n15 and Canadian multiculturalism 23, 126, 150–154 and Canadian national identity 142, 143–152 and characterization 129–130, 135–136 and diasporic immigrant communities 126, 134–142 and eating disorders 26–27, 125, 126, 128–130, 134, 136–137, 141–142, 143–150, 152–154 and individualism 125–126, 127, 133–136 and intergenerational relationships 131–132 and myths of near-death 139–142, 214n15 and nostalgia 126, 139–142, 142–143

as a problem novel 125–126, 126–130, 134–136 as a time travel novel 126, 130–133 historical moment of publication of 212–213n12 historicity of 125 representation of the Armenian genocide in 125, 130–131, 132–133 Hurst, Fannie 206n15 Hutcheon, Linda 146 Hysteria 134 I Am Rosemarie 62 Ideological State Apparatus 152, 153, 154 If I Should Die Before I Wake 132, 133 Image 102–103 Image-Music-Text 97, 204n11 Imagination 8, 81 Imagined Communities 150, 216n23 “imitation of life” 106, 206n15 Imitation of Life (1934 film adaptation) 206n15 Imitation of Life (1959 film adaptation) 206n15 Imitation of Life (novel) 206n15 Immel, Andrea 187n2 Immigration 50, 86, 216n22 Individualism 18, 24, 38, 125–126, 132–134 Innocence American myths of 27, 159, 160, 168–169, 171, 174, 181, 182 of childhood 26, 76, 81–86, 114, 117, 120, 121, 160, 167–169, 181, 200n9, 201n12 Indian famine 133, 212n11 Interiority 170 Internet 5, 35, 138, 155, 156, 175, 185, 196n10 The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays 204n10 Interpretation of Dreams 107 In the Night Kitchen 191n17 In the Shadow of No Towers 160, 216–217n1 “invisible hand” 210n3 Iraq War (U.S.) 182, 217n, 220n28, 221n34, 221n35 Jewish universalism 191n19 Joffe, Roland 30 Johnny Tremain 168 Johnson, Lyndon B. 221n36 Jonah (Biblical Prophet) 54–55, 198n20

Index • 241 Jones, Walter 220n28 Junod, Tom 175 Kaddish 79 Kalman, Maira 163 Kansas City Star 194n2 Kant, Immanuel 57, 201n10 Kertész, Imre 11 Kertzer, Adrienne 3, 7, 23, 91, 97–98, 187– 188n3, 189n9, 193n25, 194n30, 199n6 Kertzer, Jonathan 146, 147, 215n19 Key, Ellen 218n16 Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox 112, 207– 208n22 Kidd, Kenneth, 2, 3, 38, 45, 53, 124, 161, 188n4 The Killing Fields 30 Kimmel, Eric 62 King, Stephen 212n8 Klee, Paul 31 Klein, Naomi 220–221n33, 221n34, 221n35 Klepfisz, Irena 10, 56, 58, 60 Knoepflmacher, U.C. 199n6 Kokkola, Lydia 3, 187n3 Kracauer, Sigfried 48 Krips, Valerie 188n8 Kulik, J. 217n3 Kundera, Milan 31, 196n11, 198n17 Kushner, Tony 191n17 Lacan, Jacques 76 LaCapra, Dominick 78, 80, 194n31, 198n2, 201n10 Lamb, Charles 114–115 Lampert, Jo 161, 162, 168, 172, 173, 179, 218n13 Landsberg, Alison 6, 19–20, 50–52, 192n21, 192n22, 192n23, 193n27, 216n22 Language 11, 41, 42, 45–46, 76, 104, 115, 117, 151, 196n10, 199n5, 204n11 spoken languages 136, 149, 151 Latham, Don 196n10 Laub, Dori 43, 44, 45, 46, 197n16 Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States 165 LeGuin, Ursula 53, 198n19 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 85–86 Let the Great World Spin 220n31 Levine, Michael G. 6 Levy, Michael, 33 Lewis, R.W.B. 168 Lidice 36

Lieu(x) de mémoire: see “site of memory” Life Between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties 217–218n8 The Lion and the Unicorn 2, 187n2 Little Lord Fauntleroy, 114, 168, 209n27 Little Women 112, 168, 207–208n22, 209n27 Locke, John 1, 2, 6 London, Jack 97 London Labour and the London Poor 120 Los Angeles Times 192n24 Lovell, Richard 187n1 Lowenstein, Adam 146, 176, 184 Lowry, Lois 15, 24–25, 61, 80, 90, 124, 158, 194n1, 194n2, 195n7, 195n9, 196n10, 197n12, 198n18 See also The Giver See also Number the Stars Luce, Henry 218n16 Lukásc, Gyorgy [Georg] 198n3, 214n16 Mahar, Donna 194n1 Malthusianism 210n3 Man on Wire 179, 217n4, 220n31 The Man Who Walked Between the Towers 22, 23, 24, 27, 60, 218n12 allegorical moments in 183–184, 176–178 allusions to 9/11 in 158–159, 175–178, 178–180 and the dialectical image 183–184, 176–178 and fairy tales 165–166, 218n13 and the “Falling Man” photograph 159, 175–178 and historical trauma 159, 181–183 and myths of innocence 159, 171, 174 and nostalgia 170–174, 181 and the production of second-generation memory 159–160 and vulnerability 174–178 critique of American myths in 179–183 fetishization of the Towers in 159, 166, 172–173 reaffirmation of American national myths in 167–174 representation of the child in 167–169, 170–173, 174 representation of Philippe Petit’s walk in 166–167, 172, 179–180 Marsh, Carole 161 Marsh, James 179, 217n4, 220n31 Marx, Karl 107 Marx, Leo 219n17

242 • Index Marxist theory 127, 211n3 Massé, Michelle A. 208n22 Matter and Memory 188n6 Maupin, Amy 29 Maus 216–217n1 Mayhew, Henry 120, 121 McCann, Colum 220n31 McClintock, Anne 8, 189n11 McCormick, Patricia 135 McEwan, Ian 160 McGee, Chris 135, 211n5 Meet the Prophets: A Beginner’s Guide to the Books of the Biblical Prophets 198n21 Melancholia 54, 77, 78 Melting pot 150, 151, 192n22, 216n22 Memory family memory 158 class memory 14, 15 cultural memory 3, 41, 90, 109, 114, 117, 119, 197n15, 202n4; see also collective memory flashbulb memory 157, 217n3 habit memory 91 oral 91 and photography 110 screen memory 170 textual 91 see also collective memory and secondgeneration memory Memory studies 24, 194n31 Merchant of Venice 97 Metafiction 145, 215n18 Metaphor 198n23 Mickenberg, Julia 165, 218n10 Middle Passage 139 Mignon 170, 174 Millenial anxiety 189n11 Miller, John W. 198n21 Miller, Kristine 164, 165 Milne, A.A. 188n7 Milton, Edith 62 The mimetic faculty 17–18, 81, 84–85, 106 Mirror stage 76 Miscek, Jennifer 135 Modernity 214n16 Mona Lisa 66 More, Thomas 195n5 Moskin, Marietta 62 Mourning 77, 78–79, 80, 160, 221n35 Mukerjee, Madhusree 212n11 Mulroney, Brian 151 Multiculturalism (Canadian) 23, 126, 150–152, 216n24 Multicultural studies 181, 220n32

Mulvey, Laura 74, 76, 199–200n7 Murphy, Louise 199n6 My Lai 36 My Mother’s Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust 187–188n3 Mythology 126 myth 137–138, 219n17 “myth and symbol school,”; see American studies myth of the Canadian cultural mosaic 150 myth of near-death 137, 138, 142, 213n15 U.S. myth of the melting pot 150, 151, 192n22 myth of innoculation 213–214n15 American myths 145, 168–169 mythological past 141, 188n8 Nabokov, Vladimir 143 Nagasaki 31 Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Canada and the United States 215n19 Nationhood/nationalism 15, 23, 24, 26–27, 143, 148, 150, 162–178 American national identity 158, 159, 164, 165, 168–169, 170–174, 175, 180, 181, 184 Canadian national identity; see “Canada” “neo-colonial” 12 “Never Again” 30, 57 Neverland 109, 206n18 The New American Exceptionalism 219n17 Newbery Award 29, 62, 63 Newbery, John 1 The New England Primer 207n21 Newspapers 204n9 Newsreels 70–71, 80 The New Republic 171 Newsweek 119 New York City 156, 159, 161, 166, 173 The New York Times 36, 175, 206n16 New York Times Book Review 62 Ney, Bob 220n28 Nixon, Richard M. 181 Nolan, Han 132, 133 Nora, Pierre 31, 32, 33, 34–35, 37, 38, 194n4, 220n25 North and South 127 Nostalgia 115, 123–124, 139–140, 141, 142–143, 170–172, 174, 181, 214n16, 220n27 reflective nostalgia 143

Index • 243 restorative nostalgia 126, 140–141, 143 “Notes on the Postcolonial” 8 Number the Stars 3, 22, 31, 62, 63, 194n1 Oedipal drama 119 “Old Forgotten Children’s Books” 85, 193n, 201n11 “old wives tales,” 1, 187n1 Olick, Jeffrey K. 188n6 On Collective Memory 4, 8 On That Day 163 “On the Mimetic Faculty” 17, 84–85 “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” 53, 198n19 Optical unconscious 51, 192n21 Oracle 54 Orientalism 210n1 Origins 67 Orgel, Doris 3, 31, 62, 63 Orwell, George 196n10 Ozick, Cynthia 208n25 Palimpsest 4, 5, 124 Paris 168, 202n1 Passover 197n14 Patel, Andrea 163, 165 Patron 106–107 Pearl Harbor 157 Pease, Donald E. 171–172, 219n17 Pentagon, see Washington, DC Perkins, Millie 114 Perception and film 49–52, 73 and second-generation memory 7, 27–28, 39–40, 47, 57–59, 179, 183–184, 191n20 of the child 17–18, 64, 81–87, 158, 160, 176, 184 Performance 25, 60, 65–66, 77, 79–80, 84–87, 106, 201n13, 216n22; see also Petit, Philippe Peter Pan 6, 188n, 206n18 Petit, Philippe author of To Reach the Clouds 218n14 character in Let the Great World Spin 220n31 character in The Man Who Walked Between the Towers 158, 159, 166–169, 172, 173, 174–178, 179–181, 181–182, 183, 184 in Man on Wire 179, 217n4, 230n31 Photographs 64–69, 77, 184 and death 110–111 of children 112–113, 200n9, 208n23, 208n24

of Anne Frank 109–110, 112–113, 114, 118, 206n19, 208n24 of the Falling Man 175–176, 177–178, 181, 184 of the Holocaust 52, 70, 139–140, 189n9, 190n13, 200n9 Pinochet, Augusto 182 Plato 33, 194n5 Pleasantville 34, 195n8 Plotz, Judith 114–115 Poe, Edgar Allen 215n20 Pol Pot 36 Post-colonial theory 8–9, 123–124, 189n11, 190n12, 210n1 Postman, Neil 35 Postmemory 6, 7–10, 12, 188–189n9, 189–190n11, 190n13, 190n14, 197n13, 202n4 Post-structuralism 214–215n18 “Post-” 8–8, 189–190n11 Power, Samantha 3, 188n5 Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence 201n15, 221n35 Print capitalism 216n23 A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide 188n5 Problem novel 26, 125, 126–128, 129,130, 133, 134, 148, 213–214n15 Victorian 127, 135, 211n4, 213– 214n15 YA 126, 127–128, 134–135, 143, 211n6, 211n7 “The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant” 212n9 Process 5 Production 82 Productive imagination 23, 57–58 “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre” 84, 85, 218n9 “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy” 200n9 The Promised Land 216n22 “Promiscuous Reading: The Problem of Identification and Anne Frank’s Diary” 203n8 Prison Notebooks 217n5 Prophecy 54–55, 56 Prose, Francine 207n19, 209n28, 209n29 Prosthetic memory 6, 19, 50–52, 192n22, 193n27, 216n22 Radical politics 22, 23, 27 Radio 109 Ragged Dick 168

244 • Index Ranke, Leopold von 199n4 Raphael, Lev 16, 191n19 “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through (Further Recommendations on the Work of Psychoanalysis II)” 78 Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma 198n2 Representing the Holocaust in Children’s Literature 187n3 Repressive state apparatuses 152 Reproductive imagination 23, 57–58 Requiem for a Nun xi, 221n37 Richter, Miriam Verena 216n24 Ricoeur, Paul 23, 57, 196n10, 198n23 Rollin, Lucy 128 Romantic child 24, 26, 91, 96, 108, 114–115, 117, 167, 169, 172 Romantic notions of childhood; see childhood Roots 30 Rose, Jacqueline 67, 118, 119, 188n8, 199n5, 210n30 Rosenblatt, Roger 165, 180, 218n11 Rosenbaum, Thane 210n2 Rosewood 19, 51–52 Ross, Gary 34, 195n8 Roth, Henry 216n22 Roth, Philip 208–209n26 Round character 104, 129, 204n12 Rowling, J.K. 89, 91 Rushdie, Salman 160 Russell, David 128 Rwanda 36 Sadoko and the Thousand Paper Cranes 31 Said, Edward 210n1 “The Sanctioned Rebel” 218n15 Sarajevo 90, 93, 96, 108, 124, 202n1 Saturday 160 The Scarlet Letter, 97 Schatz, Thomas 72, 200n8 Schindler’s List 30 Scholastic Inc. 162 Schueller, Malini Johar 220n32 Scopophilia 66 Screen memory 170, 219n19 Second-generation memory and belatedness 6 and Cartesian notions of the self 18, 45–47 and childhood perception 17, 26–26, 27–28, 38–41, 80–87, 158 and collective action 24–25, 26, 33, 53–54

and collective memory 4, 14–16, 18, 126, 132–134 and diaspora 4, 26, 126, 142 and ethics 15–17, 33, 45–47, 53–59, 124–125, 133, 157, 186 and forgetting 33, 58–59 and individual orientation to the past 126, 132–134, 142, 154 and interpretation 4, 13–14, 132 and intertextuality 96–98 and kinship relations 4, 13, 24, 25–26, 33, 42–45, 46–47, 90–91, 107–108, 115–116, 124, 131–132 and the mimetic faculty 17–18, 81, 84–85, 106 and mourning 77–80 and nostalgia 115, 126, 141, 142–143 and poetry 56–59 and the problem of generations 9–11, 56, 131 and the productive imagination 23, 57–59 and prophecy 54–55 and prosthetic memory 6, 19–20, 50–52 and self-awareness 4, 14–16, 39–41, 42, 45–47, 124 and the visual media 24, 25, 48–52, 53, 66, 68–69, 69–77, 185–186 as ghost image 5, 7, 13, 57, 124, 141, 159 as palimpsest 4–5, 124 development of 11–12, 27, 32–33, 38–41, 155 narrative aspect of 4, 8, 12–13, 18, 19, 21, 40–41, 45–47, 56, 58 ,60, 65–66, 69–71, 71–77, 80–87, 92–98, 98–99, 99–108, 115, 116–117, 124 production of by children’s books 22–23, 156–158, 159, 183–186 relation to children’s literature 6–7 relation to postmemory 6, 7–13, 197n13 relation to potential 27–28, 59–60, 158, 159–160, 183–186 relation to second-generation witness 6, 191–192n20 Second-generation witness 6, 16, 17, 191–192n20 Second World War 72, 91, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 190n14, 205n14 Secret signal 80, 85, 178 Section Twenty-Seven of Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms 151 Segregation 83–84

Index • 245 Self-help 161–162; see also bibliotherapy Sendak, Maurice 15, 16, 133, 191n16, 191n17, 199n6 September 11, 2001 events of 2, 10, 27, 86, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 177, 178, 180, 186, 201n14, 216–217n1, 217n3, 218n11, 217–218n8, 219n18, 220n26 September Roses 163 “shadow of no towers” 156, 160 Shakespeare, William 97 Shalimar the Clown 160 Shanksville, Pennsylvania 161, 163 Shivah 68, 78–79, 79–80, 81 Shock 52, 57, 58, 62, 102, 121, 159, 164–165, 169, 175, 176–177, 184, 198n23 aftershocks 47, 156 shock value 64 “shock and awe” 221n34 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism 220–221n33, 221n34, 221n35 Shohat, Ella 8, 9, 12, 19–20, 190n12 Silvey, Anita 30 Since You Went Away 200n8 Singleton, John, 19, 51–52, 55, 57 Sirk, Douglas 206n15 Site of memory (lieu[x] de mémoire) 37, 41, 173, 220n25 Skrypuch, Marsha Forchuk 10, 15, 23, 24, 26–27, 60, 155, 159, 171, 212n10, 214n15 author of Hope’s War 212n10 see also The Hunger Slotkin, Richard 221n36 Smith, Henry Nash 168, 171, 219n17 Smith, Kate Capshaw, 187n2 Some Thoughts Concerning Education 1 Sommers, Joseph Michael 128, 211n7 Sororal Dialogism 211n7 South Tower: see World Trade Center Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and the Holocaust 187n3 Sparks, Beatrice 128, 211n6 Speak 128, 211n5 “Special registration” 86, 201n14 Sphinxian riddle 66 Spielberg, Steven 30 Spiegelman, Art 156, 216–217n1 Spitzer, Alan B. 9 Slavery, in U.S. 190

“Socialization and Saying ‚Cheese!: School Picture Day in Children’s Books” 208n23 Stahl, John M., 206n15 Stalin, Josef dekulakization 31, Stalinistera Soviet Union 31 Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself xi, 12–13, 24, 25, 60, 125, 131, 160, 164–165, 178, 184, 198n1, 201n16 and childhood perception 83–87 and Hollywood film 63, 70, 71–77, 80, 83 and performance 79, 85, 86–87 and photographs 64–69 acting out and working through 78–80 critical reception of 61–62, 63 fantasy sequences in 61–65, 69–70, 74–76, 77–78, 82 mourning and melancholia 77, 78–79 representation of Holocaust 61, 62–63, 64, 69–70, 71, 74, 75, 77–78, 79–80, 83, 84, 86 representation of sex and death 66–69 Steedman, Carolyn 170, 174, 213n13, 219n20, 220n24, 220n27 Staiger, Janet 73 Stein, Ruth M. 61 Stevens, George 113, 208n25, 208n26 Stewart, Susan Louise 29, 195n9, 196n10, 197n12 Stine, R.L. 2 Stoehr, Shelly 135 Stolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries from World War I to Iraq 206n17 “structures of feeling” 172, 220n24 Studies in the Novel 218n15 Sublime 201n10 Subversion 180 Sulieman, Susan Rubin 10–11, 56–57, 190–191n15 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature 144 Swiss Family Robinson 114, 208–209n26 tabula rasa, 1 Tanner, Tony 215n20 Television 2, 5, 19, 24, 30, 35, 92, 93,105, 106, 155–156, 220n26 Terrorism 160, 171, 180, 181, 219n22 terrorist attacks of 11 September 2, 27, 155, 156, 159, 160, 163, 164, 169, 175, 180, 182, 201n14, 216n1, 217n2, 217n3, 217n4, 217n7, 217–218n8, 219n21 terrorists 162, 169, 179–180, 181, 219n22, 221n38

246 • Index The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America 220n26 Terrorist 160 Testimony 43, 44, 46 Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History 197n16 The Theory of the Novel 214n16 There’s A Big, Beautiful World Out There! 162, 173 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 28, 31, 59–60, 183–184, 194n4, 198–199n4 Thick description 103, 204n10 The Thieving Hand 193n27 Thompson, Kristin 73 Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex 66, 68, 209–210n30 Tikkun olam 16, 191n18, 191n19 Time 165, 218n11 Time-travel novel 126, 130, 133 “tissue of quotations” 97, 204n11 Tom Sawyer [The Adventures of] 114, 209n27, 218n15 To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers 218n14 Torture 221n35 Townshend, Dale 1, 187n1 Townsend, John Rowe 207n21 “Toys and Play” 211n4 Toys “R” Us 161, 162 Traill, Catharine Parr 147 “transcendental homelessness” 214n16 Trauma 4, 12, 15, 16, 17, 32, 43, 51, 53, 77–80, 103–104, 105, 106, 107, 190n15, 219n19 and childhood 108–109, 161–162, 200n9, 203n7 historical 10, 11, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 30, 31, 32, 40, 52, 124, 126, 131, 134, 139–140, 154, 157, 178, 185–186, 213n15 national 158, 159, 165, 180, 181–183, 218n8 representation in children’s literature 2–4, 77–80, 128, 161–162, 163–165, 187n2 traumatic past: see historical trauma, above. Trauma studies 24, 194n31 Tribunella, Eric 3 Trimmer, Sarah 187n1 Trites, Roberta Seelinger 127 Trudeau, Pierre Eliot 151 The True Story of Hansel and Gretel : A Novel of War and Survival 199n6

Twain, Mark 29, 167, 209n27 Twin Towers, see World Trade Center Tyrone, Stephen 193n24 Uglies 135 Ulanowicz, Anastasia 198n1 Ulanowicz, Emil 205–206n14 Ukrainian famine 132–133, 139, 212n10 “The Uncanny” 176, 220n27 Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War 187n2 “Under Fire” conference at Princeton University 187n2 Unheimlich 220n27 UNICEF 121, 202n1 United 175 155 Updike, John 160 USA PATRIOT Act 171, 182, 219n22 The Uses of Enchantment 188n4 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 20, 30, 62, 139–140, 192n23, 192–193n24 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 201n14 Utilitarianism 210n3 Utopia 63, 195n5, 196n10, 198n18 Utopia 195n5 Vietnam War (U.S.) 181, 190n14, 220n31, 221n36 Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth 168, 171, 219n17, 219n21 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” 74, 199–200n7 Von Brunn, James W. 192–193n24 Vulnerability 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 212n8, 213n15, 220n30 “War on Poverty” 221n36 “War on Terror” 27 “Wartime child” 90 Washington, DC 161, 163 Washington Post 194n2 Watergate 181, 182, 220n31 Wayne, John 175 We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy 191n17 Weeks, Brigitte 61 Wegner, Philip 217–218n8 Westerfield, Scott 135 Western (film genre) 175 “What Is an Author?” 107, 204n11 “What is Epic Theatre?” 201n13 White, Hayden 99–100, 106–107 Whitman, Walt 215n20

Index • 247 “Why Won’t Melinda Just Talk About What Happened?: Speak and the Confessional Voice” 211n5 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 170, 171, 174, 220n24 Williams, Esther 70 Williams, Raymond 172, 220n24 The Wind’s Twelve Quarters 198n19 Winnie the Pooh 6, 188n7 Winters, Jeanette 163 The Witches 2 Witness 43, 44, 46, 155, 157 second-hand witness 155 Wolfe, Alan 171 Wordsworth, William 112, 167 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 49–50 “Working-through” 77, 78, 79–80 World Trade Center 155–156, 158, 159, 160, 163, 165–166, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181, 217n4, 217–218n8 World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999 212–213n12 Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada 215n19 Wright, Latania Love 161 www.judyblume.com 201n16 www.whitehouse.gov 217n6, 217n7 Wyss, Johann 208n26 Yale Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies 44

Yellow stars 98 Yolen, Jane 31, 62, 63, 132, 133, 194n30, 199n6, 203n8 Zelizer, Barbie 35–36, 48, 70, 206n16 Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo 10, 13, 18, 19, 24, 25–26, 60, 158, 206n17, 208n24 and The Diary of a Young Girl 93–96, 98, 99–101, 103, 104–105, 106–108, 114–117, 122 and Harry Potter 90, 98, 115–116 and (inter)textuality 91, 96–98, 105– 106, 107–108, 204n9, 206n15, 206n17 and trauma 103–105, 108 as a chronicle 99–104, 106–108 documentation of war in 92–93, 94–95, 101–103, 104–105, 202n3 foreword by Janine DiGiovanni 119–121 naming of diary 93 publication of 121, 202n1 quotidian details in 91–92 references to Holocaust in 98–99, 105–106, 109 representation of childhood in 108–109, 111, 114–117, 119–122, 203n7 representation of ethnic identity in 94–97, 202n5 representation of kinship 90–91, 107–108 See also Zlata Filipović Zuzak, Markus 3