"A" is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the

"Children's Literature of Atrocity"

Kenneth B. Kidd

Children's Literature, Volume 33, 2005, pp. 120-149 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.2005.0014

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/183490

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“A” is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, TraumaKENNETH KIDD
120
Theory, and the “Children’s Literature of Atrocity”
Kenneth Kidd

Since the early 1990s, children’s books about trauma, especially the
trauma(s) of the Holocaust, have proliferated, as well as scholarly treat-
ments of those books. Despite the difficulties of representing the
Holocaust, or perhaps because of them, there seems to be consensus
now that children’s literature is the most rather than the least appro-
priate literary forum for trauma work. Subjects previously thought
too upsetting for children are now deemed appropriate and even
necessary. Thus, in “A New Algorithm of Evil: Children’s Literature in
a Post-Holocaust World,” Elizabeth R. Baer emphasizes the urgency
of “a children’s literature of atrocity,” recommending what she calls
“confrontational” texts, and proposing “a set of [four] criteria by which
to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of children’s texts in
confronting the Holocaust sufficiently” (384). 1 “A” is now for
Auschwitz, and “H” for Holocaust (if sometimes for Hiroshima). And
“B” is still for book, though no longer necessarily the Bible.2 Baer sees
as exemplary texts like Roberto Innocenti’s picture book Rose Blanche
(1985), Seymour Rossel’s nonfiction history The Holocaust (1981), and
Jane Yolen’s novel The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988). Such books empha-
size their protagonists’ direct experiences of the Holocaust, experi-
ences that extend to and presumably interpellate the child reader
outside the story.
How to explain this shift away from the idea that young readers
should be protected from evil and toward the conviction that they
should be exposed to it, perhaps even endangered by it? It’s almost as
if we now expect reading about trauma to be traumatic itself—as if we
think children can’t otherwise comprehend atrocity. Just how new is
this faith in exposure, experience, and confrontation, and how do we
assess its significance with respect to contemporary children’s litera-
ture and trauma studies?
Many people believe that the Holocaust fundamentally changed
the way we think about memory and narrative, as well as about human
nature. Presumably the exposure model became necessary because

Children’s Literature 33, Hollins University © 2005.

120
“A” is for Auschwitz 121

we no longer have the luxury of denying the existence of or postpon-

ing the child’s confrontation with evil. Certainly the Holocaust helped
make the often entangled projects of literature and psychoanalysis
especially ever more anxious and serious. Adorno’s infamous declara-
tion that “[to] write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” was received
more as a call to narrative arms than a moratorium; Holocaust schol-
ars have long insisted that Adorno was speaking poetically and not lit-
erally, saying we must write poetry after Auschwitz, just as we must put
psychoanalysis to good use.3 Even so, the Holocaust has only recently
become a coherent narrative project in literary, psychological, and
theoretical discourse. Lawrence L. Langer’s foundational study The
Holocaust and the Literary Imagination was published in 1975, and is
one of the earliest long critical treatments of the “literature of atroc-
ity.” If Western culture has only lately come to terms with the Holo-
caust, those terms are largely literary and psychological, beginning
with Holocaust memoirs and diaries, then historical analyses, and fi-
nally fictionalized treatments alongside academic trauma theory.
Only now can Baer insist that there’s such a thing as “sufficient”
confrontation with the Holocaust. Not everyone would agree; one of
the counter-tropes of Holocaust narrative is that confrontation is im-
possible or always insufficient, that such faith in literature is foolish,
even unethical. In any case, the Holocaust has arrived as a legitimate
subject, and has ushered in the wider sense that trauma writing can
be children’s literature. It’s not surprising that the Holocaust has func-
tioned as a sort of primal scene of children’s trauma literature, through
which a children’s literature of atrocity has been authorized within
the last decade, asserted around both the power and limitations of
narrative.
The psychoanalytic conceit is not accidental. The recent surge of
Holocaust and trauma writing has many causes and vectors, among
them the success of the progressive social movements of the 1960s
and 1970s, and the residual faith in literature as a form of identity,
empathy, and community in a pluralist society. Holocaust writing would
be unthinkable without the therapeutic ethos that at once nurtured
this progressive culture and formed its popular and institutional cor-
rective (in the form of Cold War psychology, for instance). As social
historians have shown, the helping professions have engendered a
belief in the complexity of psychic life and interpersonal relations, a
belief with both progressive and reactionary tendencies. Psychoanaly-
sis has long been wildly popular in the US, and now has a diffuse
122 KENNETH KIDD

cultural life. Thanks in part to the dissemination of psychoanalysis

and the professionalization of mental health work, trauma is a key
concept in our life and literature. Not surprisingly, recent academic
theory privileges literature and psychoanalysis as interrelated forms
of trauma “testimony.”
For better and for worse, the Holocaust has become nearly cote-
rminous with the idea of the unconscious. Like the unconscious as
theorized by Freud, the Holocaust is at once history and the never-
ending story, the primal scene forever relived and reconstructed. It is
something that must be spoken about but that remains inaccessible.
The Holocaust is simultaneously an event that we’ve moved beyond
and one that we cannot and must not forget: this is the necessary
paradox of Holocaust writing, akin to the idea of the unconscious,
the central and necessary conceit of psychoanalysis. Baer points to
the promotional buttons for the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, which read “REMEMBER” and “NEVER AGAIN”; the Mu-
seum is a walking and talking cure, one that asserts the preventative
as well as recuperative power of memory.4
This essay, however, does not argue for the supremacy of psycho-
analysis as a tool for representing and understanding trauma in and
around Holocaust literature. Instead I show how, for better and for
worse, psychoanalysis and children’s literature have been mutually
enabling, alongside and through academic trauma theory, which re-
writes the “crisis” of representation in signal ways. Children’s litera-
ture, of course, has been very usefully understood as therapeutic and
testimonial. Certain genres seem to function much like the dream-
work as Freud described it, at once acknowledging but distorting or
screening trauma. Drawing upon Freud, Bruno Bettelheim famously
suggested that fairy tales help children work through both painful
experiences and everyday psychic trouble. And fairy tale motifs sur-
face in other kinds of texts about war and especially the Holocaust.
Thus Donald Haase, among others, examines “the fairy tale’s poten-
tial as an emotional survival strategy” (361) in and around Holocaust
narrative.5
But because psychoanalysis and literature are so enmeshed, this
kind of treatment begs the analytical question in a sense, using one
discourse to discover in the other analogous procedures and truths.
In the case of the fairy tale, we might also examine how fairy tales
have helped articulate psychoanalytic discourse. And in the case of
trauma writing overall, we might ask—as have Holocaust scholars
“A” is for Auschwitz 123

Adrienne Kertzer and Hamida Bosmajian in recent studies—how our

understanding of trauma is discursive as well as lived, shaped by cul-
tural pressures alongside personal experiences. What if psychoanaly-
sis isn’t, in fact, the best treatment for trauma, but rather one of its
privileged modes of presentation? Do we usually now expect children’s
literature to testify to trauma in psychoanalytic fashion? Why not turn
instead to alternative discourses of trauma work, among them “narra-
tive medicine” and “narrative therapy”?6 Or why not abandon psycho-
logical approaches altogether, in favor of sociohistorical analysis? In
An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Ann
Cvetkovich advocates what she calls “critical American Studies,” which
would provide “a fuller examination of racialized histories of geno-
cide, colonization, slavery, and migration that are part of the violences
of modernity, and whose multigenerational legacies require new vo-
cabularies of trauma” (37).7 Is it time to leave psychoanalysis behind?
Cvetkovich’s work demonstrates the value of an integrative approach
to trauma, one in which psychoanalysis doesn’t dominate the inter-
pretive scene, being understood as one heuristic among many. As I’ve
argued elsewhere, psychoanalysis and children’s literature share many
of the same central themes, conceits, and institutional practices, which
means we can’t treat one discourse as method and the other as mate-
rial. Psychoanalysis is not just a method of interpretation, but a foun-
dational set of texts, ideas, rules, and habits; psychoanalysis is at once
subject, method, and field. We can’t either simply apply or renounce
it; it’s part of our heritage. We can, however, examine the interdepen-
dence of psychoanalysis and children’s forms. And we can question
their testimonial equivalence as asserted by contemporary trauma
theory, as trauma theory has its own investments, and adapts from
literature and psychoanalysis certain conventions and tropes.8
While it looks as if we’ve fashioned a more serious and sophisti-
cated children’s literature, what we’re seeing is not only a breakthrough
in the field but also a particular moment in the ongoing collaborative
project of psychoanalysis and literature—both of which take the Ho-
locaust as, in the words of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their
book Testimony (1992), “the watershed of our times . . . whose trau-
matic consequences are still actively evolving . . .” (xiv; italics in origi-
nal). That project is articulated as such in theoretical texts such as
Testimony, which, despite its sophistication, seems to celebrate testi-
mony as a kind of antidote to the otherwise troubling uncertainties of
memory, history, and representation, attributing to testimony the very
124 KENNETH KIDD

agency at issue in psychoanalysis and much trauma literature. Such

upbeat, personifying theory perhaps parallels the “Americanization”
of Holocaust narrative.
Although children’s books differ from psychoanalysis and trauma
theory, all three projects now make trauma more personal than politi-
cal. After examining at length trauma theory’s complicity with an
Americanized, fairy tale–inflected psychoanalysis, I consider first re-
cent young adult novels about genocidal trauma, then picture books
about 9/11. Whereas trauma theory is unconsciously sentimental, the
young adult novels and especially the 9/11 books are openly so, ap-
propriating the vulnerable/dead child as the representative Ameri-
can—as, in Lauren Berlant’s formulation, “the infantile citizen.” I
conclude the essay by turning to a trauma text that urges communal
rather than infantile citizenship, Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993). Lowry
affirms our faith in testimony but protests the privatization and
infantilization of the public sphere.

Trauma/Testimony/Theory

A key lesson of recent trauma theory is that psychoanalysis offers the

best clinical and theoretical treatment of trauma. In Testimony,
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub propose that psychoanalysis is a form
of testimony to the unspeakable, recognizing the unconscious witness-
ing of the subject. In their view, psychoanalysis acknowledged, “for
the first time in the history of culture, that one does not have to pos-
sess or own the truth, in order to effectively bear witness to it; that speech
as such is unwittingly testimonial; and that the speaking subject con-
stantly bears witness to a truth that nonetheless continues to escape
him, a truth that is, essentially, not available to its own speaker” (15).
Put another way, the speaker does not possess the truth; the truth
possesses the speaker. The traumatized speak in spite of themselves,
and psychoanalysis is there to witness. Traum is German for dream
(though the term “trauma” comes from the Greek for “wound”), and
dreams and nightmares help make possible psychoanalysis and much
trauma theory after it. Felman and Laub also describe literature as
testimony, remarking that “[p]sychoanalysis and literature have both
come to contaminate and to enrich each other”; both function “as a
mode of truth’s realization beyond what is available as statement, be-
yond what is available, that is, as a truth transparent to itself and en-
tirely known . . .” (15–16).
“A” is for Auschwitz 125

Felman and Laub are right to see psychoanalysis and literature as

entangled forms of trauma testimony. High tragedy and other literary
genres have long functioned as such, sometimes self-reflexively and
sometimes not, and that’s largely why Freud repeatedly drew from
folklore and literature to dramatize his theories. But Freud’s very in-
vocation of folklore as evidence points to the limits of a standard
psychoanalytic reading. Furthermore, even if psychoanalysis and lit-
erature testify to trauma, are we really reliable witnesses? And how
much can we ever know about ourselves or about others?
Consider, in contrast to Felman and Laub’s optimism, these char-
acteristically apt words of Janet Malcolm in Psychoanalysis: The Impos-
sible Profession. Her subject is transference, but her comment applies
to psychoanalysis more broadly:
The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can
be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea
that the most precious and inviolate of entities—personal rela-
tions—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an
uneasy truce between solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially)
romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a pro-
found impersonality. The concept of transference at once de-
stroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic:
we cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other
through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each
other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each
new attachment we form. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster proposed.
“Only we can’t,” the psychoanalyst knows. (6)
Malcolm takes her book title from Freud’s description of psychoanalysis
as one of three “impossible professions,” after education and govern-
ment (Freud 203). Drawing from Freud’s work and other materials,
she authenticates what many Americans would see as the pessimism
of classical psychoanalysis, pointing to the consistency of Freud’s sense
of the psychotherapeutic project as announced in the early work Studies
on Hysteria (1899), cowritten with Josef Breuer: “transforming your
hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (Breuer and Freud 305).
With the exception of Jacques Lacan and a few others, most post-Freud-
ian psychoanalytic thinkers have embraced a more hopeful psycho-
analysis. This is particularly true of Americans, who tend to confuse
psychoanalysis with self-help. Most historians of psychoanalysis under-
score the positive (perhaps wishful) thinking that marks American
126 KENNETH KIDD

variants. At the least, then, the tribute of Felman and Laub needs to
be tempered, as does much poststructuralist theory about trauma and
disaster, which seems strangely detached from the gravity of its sub-
ject.
A return to the pessimistic Freud is not, however, a solution to the
problem of voluntarist or utopian trauma theory. It might even be a
distraction, as critical theory more broadly, not just trauma theory, is
indebted to psychoanalytic and psychological narrative. Critical theory,
of course, is a rich amalgam of philosophical and disciplinary projects,
but chief among them is psychoanalysis, especially the work of Freud
and Lacan, whose writings on subjectivity, desire, and language have
been enormously generative. The influence of psychoanalysis on criti-
cal theory is both direct and indirect, acknowledged and unremarked.
For example, as Jane F. Thrailkill has very persuasively shown, a
particular psychoanalytic trope runs from Freud to Lacan to the work
of contemporary trauma theorists: the figure of the dead/wounded
child. Long a literary staple—think Stowe’s little Eva, for instance, or
any of Dickens’s angelic and all-too-mortal children—the trope of the
dead/wounded child entered the psychoanalytic domain in Freud’s
dream of the burning child in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). As
Freud reports, a sleeping father is mourning his dead child, whose
body lies in state in the next room. The father wakes up when he
dreams this anguished plea: “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?” But
he cannot save his son, who is already dead, or even his corpse, now
being accidentally burned by sacramental candles. “What is [the child]
burning with,” writes Lacan after Freud, “if not that which we see
emerging at other points designated by the Freudian topology, namely,
the weight of the sins of the father, borne by the ghost in the myth of
Hamlet, which Freud couples with the myth of Oedipus?” (Lacan 34).
For Lacan, the dream illustrates the ethical nature of the unconscious
and the existential state of humanity. In her influential study Unclaimed
Experience (1996) trauma theorist Cathy Caruth in turn interprets and
appropriates the dream: “If Freud asks, What does it mean to sleep? Lacan
discovers at the heart of this question another one, perhaps even more
urgent: What does it mean to awaken?” (99; italics in original).
They mean about the same thing for Caruth, who adopts the
wounded child as a metaphor for the impossibility of trauma’s con-
scious and localized apperception.9 Rather than coming to terms with
trauma, she says, we pass trauma along to the next person (here, the
next theorist), keeping trauma unconscious and always moving. Caruth
“A” is for Auschwitz 127

sees this transmission as an enabling sort of anxiety of influence (and

in fact she thanks Harold Bloom in her book’s acknowledgements).
Such transmission is not just productive; it’s also ethical, in her view.
“In thus relating trauma to the very identity of the self and to one’s
relation to another,” she writes, “Lacan’s reading shows us, I will sug-
gest, that the shock of traumatic sight reveals at the heart of human
subjectivity not so much an epistemological, but rather what can be
defined as an ethical relation to the real” (92; italics in original). For
Caruth, the impossibility of sufficient response to and representation
of trauma is itself traumatic, and inaugurates an ethics of collective
memory and cultural work. In her analysis of what we might call the
sentimental unconscious of trauma theory, Thrailkill shows how
Caruth’s reading privileges psychoanalysis:
Caruth suggests that contemporary theory-reading “trauma ex-
perts” have the following role: to take the traumatic death of the
child and see that it is “transformed into the imperative of a speak-
ing that awakens others” (108). This speaking is, as Caruth ex-
plains, “the passing on of psychoanalytic writing,” which is in-
triguingly cast as something more akin to inspiration than inter-
pretation . . . Theory in this account becomes a means of tran-
scendence, and would appear to fulfill a psychoanalytic critic’s
dream: direct correspondence with Freud . . . Writers of trauma
theory, and by extension, their audience of committed readers,
are clearly designated as the keepers of the flame, the
memorializers of not just this particular dead child, but of what
that figure embodies and indeed etches on the body of the re-
ceptive reader. . . . (Thrailkill 138–9)
Whereas for Malcolm, transference is the ultimate downer, for
Caruth it is what makes intellectual life worthwhile. We might add
that Lacan’s discussion of the ethical nature of the unconscious is
much more detached than Caruth implies; Lacan even suggests that
to understand that ethical dimension, we must break with the accepted
view of Freud as intrepid explorer. “[W]hen I say that Freud’s approach
here is ethical,” writes Lacan, “I am not thinking of the legendary
courage of the scientist who recoils before nothing” (34).
The sentimental invocation of the dead/wounded child is charac-
teristic not just of trauma theory, as Thrailkill shows, but of a certain
strain of poststructuralist critical theory. Consider, for instance,
Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (1980), a poststructuralist
128 KENNETH KIDD

theoretical meditation in the form of fragments. Blanchot’s mode of

critical theory likewise depends upon psychoanalysis, and particularly
upon the writing of Serge Leclaire and D. W. Winnicott. About mid-
way through his text, Blanchot takes up the subject of “[i]mpossible
necessary death,” an d turns to Serge Leclair for wisdom: “According
to him, one lives and speaks only by killing the infans in oneself (in
others also): but what is the infans? Obviously, that in us which has
not yet begun to speak and never will speak; but, more importantly,
the marvelous (terrifying) child which we have been in the dreams
and desires of those who were present at our birth (parents, society in
general)” (67). The child as theorized by Blanchot is linked with “pri-
mary narcissistic representation” but is neither a child nor a child-like
state: rather, a metaphor for “impossible necessary death,” one with
“the status of an ever-unconscious, and consequently, forever indel-
ible, representation” (67)— one presumably transmitted through
experimental forms of theory writing, despite Blanchot’s declared
resistance to “therapeutic” appropriation.10 Blanchot even furnishes
his own recollection of childhood, introduced parenthetically as “A
primal scene?” (72).
Lacan and Blanchot both feature in Christopher Fynsk’s Infant Fig-
ures (2000), a fascinating if also exasperating exploration of language
and its discontents. Pairing up Blanchot’s primal scene and the dream
of the wounded child as reclaimed by Lacan, Fynsk claims, “all hu-
man speech and psychic life are haunted by the death of a child, a
being whose passing is the condition of speech, and who is therefore,
of necessity, without speech: infans” (3; italics in original). Fynsk ex-
trapolates this idea from Lacan and Blanchot, as well as from liter-
ary and artistic treatments of dead children. He insists upon its uni-
versal truth against a more historicized analysis of the trope’s intellec-
tual and imaginative career. “A theoretical presentation that would
attempt to read Blanchot from Lacan or Lacan from Blanchot,” he
writes, “would lose precisely what is at stake, whatever it is that lies in
the resonance of those two phrases (‘a child is being killed,’ and “Fa-
ther, don’t you see I’m burning?’) as they are brought to sound in the
respective texts” (91). Fynsk holds that the death of the infans haunts
psychoanalysis precisely to the degree that psychoanalysis is concerned
with language as the marker of the human.
His formulations are quite engaging, perhaps when most diffuse
(“whatever it is”), but like Caruth before him, Fynsk appropriates the
trope of the wounded/dead child as a sentimental figure, as a pure or
“A” is for Auschwitz 129

transcendent site of narrative engagement. “No one can say fully, in-
telligibly, what the death of a child is, for all saying proceeds from
such a death. But all saying is haunted by it” (50). While he acknowl-
edges that Freud’s burning child might be voicing abandonment (“Fa-
ther, don’t you see I’m burning?”), Fynsk holds that there “is also a
kind of ‘pure desire’” for death voiced in the dream (118). What
Thrailkill says apropos of Caruth applies here: trauma promises a
“point of contact or ‘transmission’ between the dead and the living;
the theorist of trauma, then, might be said to act as Virgilian guide to
his realm” (134–5).11 Infant Figures, in fact, is dedicated to the memory
of Fynsk’s friend Jean-François Lyotard. “The words in this volume
that were written for him are now left like orphans,” writes Fynsk.
“But I take solace in the thought that some of those who knew him
(and perhaps even some who know only his writings) will recognize a
trace of his gift in the many pages he rendered possible here, and I
will listen for the sound of his humor in their reactions.”
The trope of the wounded/dead child is but one index of the mu-
tuality of psychoanalysis and critical theory. As Peter Ramandanovic
underscores in his introduction to a special issue of Postmodern Cul-
ture, the term “trauma” first became an important keyword of critical
theory with Shoshana Felman’s essay “Education and Crisis, or the
Vicissitudes of Teaching,” first published in 1991, just as the new
“children’s literature of atrocity” was appearing on the scene. Felman’s
essay, which presented psychoanalysis as a form of unconscious testi-
mony, was reprinted in Testimony, cowritten by Felman and clinician
Dori Laub. In the essay, Felman returns to Mallarmé’s lecture “La
Musique et les lettres” and a later text, both of which had already
loomed large in Paul de Man’s essay “The Crisis of Contemporary
Criticism” (1967). In his many writings, de Man insisted that the role
of theory and criticism is to “trouble and reinvent writing”
(Ramadanovic 2), and Felman, in turn, troubles and reinvents “cri-
sis,” turning it into trauma/theory. “If de Man establishes criticism as
the ‘rhetoric of crisis,’” writes Ramadanovic, “Felman proceeds to re-
late the crisis—that is, theory—to education, and, more importantly,
she takes the term crisis in a new direction as she focuses on the pres-
ence of history in writing” (3). Crisis thus yields to trauma. If we be-
lieve Felman, theory more broadly is trauma theory, at least to some
degree. Theory is also framed as traumatic: it ostensibly traumatizes
literature and those who love it (do we not all know academics who
lament the profession’s tragic fall into theory?)
130 KENNETH KIDD

Like de Man, notes Ramadanovic, Felman turns theory back upon

itself, raising necessary questions about the limits as well as the possi-
bilities of analysis.12 Ramadanovic seems optimistic about the pros-
pects of trauma theory that foregrounds its own “constitutive limita-
tions” (9). That optimism, and that formulation of theory’s “self-con-
sciousness,” ratify intellectual work as a form of academic testimony,
even for those outside the clinical fold. Critical theory demands trans-
ference, ensures its own transmission, especially when concerned with
trauma or psychoanalysis. It is simultaneously a form of cultural capi-
tal and a mode of transmission/acculturation.13 Trauma theory ap-
propriates the ethical discourse of testimony that is largely the legacy
of the Holocaust and an international commitment to human rights.
If “A” is for Auschwitz, “T” stands not only for trauma, testimony, and
theory, but also for transference and transmission.

The Uses (and Abuses) of Enchantment

The sentimentality of the wounded child trope; the ease with which
some theory sees the dead child as necessary to language; the rewrit-
ing of crisis as trauma; the incestuous kinship of psychoanalysis and
theory: all helped inspire as much as they explain the contemporary
“children’s literature of atrocity.” To give a proper account of that
literature’s emergence, of course, we’d also need a thorough psycho-
social history of childhood in the United States, dating at least from
the end of the nineteenth century. Thrailkill gestures toward such a
history, locating her critique of recent trauma theory in the larger
context of American literary sentimentalism, showing how the realist
tradition that Mark Twain introduced against the excesses of “femi-
nine” sentimentality has nonetheless made way for the reincarnation
of the wounded/dead child in that most unlikely of places, critical
theory. As Thrailkill has it, the suffering literary child made thinkable
the wounded child of social reform around the turn of the century,
and now survives as the traumatized child of theory. Writing about
the sudden popularity in the 1990s of adult trauma stories in which
childhood looms large, Patricia Pace similarly points to the historical
transformation of the American child from “economically useful” to
“emotionally priceless” (238), drawing from Viviana Zelizer’s work on
the subject. Clearly the emergence of a trauma literature for children
is part of this complex history of childhood’s revaluation, of its merger
with the idea of interiority. As Thrailkill, Pace, and other scholars
“A” is for Auschwitz 131

working in the 1990s point out from various angles, childhood is now
imagined as a psychic-developmental space at once sacrosanct and
violated.
If that larger sociohistorical picture is beyond the scope of this es-
say, I can at least outline some of the more recent factors in the rise of
a children’s literature of atrocity. As I’ve shown, trauma has been au-
thorized by psychoanalysis and/as critical theory, as well as by adult
literature. One year after Langer’s The Holocaust and the Literary Imagi-
nation was published, Bruno Bettelheim’s even more influential study
The Uses of Enchantment (1976) codified but also revised the trope of
wounded child. The Uses of Enchantment was published to wide acclaim,
and has had significant influence on how fairy tales signify. Even if
Bettelheim knew nothing about children’s literature—and in fact
posed fairy tales against it—The Uses of Enchantment attests to the grow-
ing force of that expectation in the 1970s and continues to shore it
up.
Not only did Bettelheim show us how to read fairy tales; the cul-
ture also showed Bettelheim. He had no interest in fairy tales origi-
nally, but had long been preoccupied with what I’ve elsewhere called
the feral tale. Bettelheim was fascinated by accounts of wolf-children,
and argued as early as 1959 that such accounts were really stories of
autistic children. He was also preoccupied with the experiences of
Holocaust survivors and the ways in which their behavior resembled
that of emotionally disturbed children. The feral tale provides a use-
ful bridge from his studies of particular experiences of trauma, espe-
cially in concentration camps, to his more professional focus on ev-
eryday trauma and how to manage it. A particular “wolf-girl” case,
about a girl who lived in a bunker in Poland during the war, allowed
Bettelheim to move from Holocaust trauma to autism to a more ge-
neric sense of trauma and dysfunction—at which point developed his
interest in the fairy tale. Put another way, the dead/wounded child of
Holocaust experience and of residential clinical work merges in The
Uses of Enchantment with the traumatized but resilient child of psycho-
analysis as theorized by Freud. Freud’s detractors have long argued
that, by emphasizing the power of oedipal fantasy, Freud denied or
downplayed child abuse. Rather than take up that issue, Bettelheim
blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality, abuse and everyday
angst, turning to the fairy tale.
The Uses of Enchantment thus evades as much as registers the
overdetermined, incestuous history of psychoanalysis and children’s
132 KENNETH KIDD

literature, and represents the kind of personalized theorizing that risks

trivializing individual as well as social history. The Uses of Enchantment
gave pop-intellectual affirmation to the now commonplace idea that
fairy tale reading amounts to self-help or bibliotherapy. Recent rev-
elations that Bettelheim plagiarized and was an often nasty character
have not tempered the public’s enthusiasm for the uses of enchant-
ment; rather, Bettelheim has become the Big Bad Wolf.
This contemporary tradition of child figuration, of course, differs
from the trope of the dead child that drives the poststructuralist theo-
retics of Blanchot and Fynsk. But just as the dead child trope enables
a theoretics of academic transmission and transference, so too does
the wounded-but-resilient (inner) child of pop-psychoanalysis enable
a poetics of popular transmission and transference, whose major genre
is the fairy tale. Through the fairy tale, people tell stories about chal-
lenge and survival, hardship and hope. By the 1990s, the fairy tale was
ever more entrenched in US pop-literary culture, in the form of nov-
elizations, films, “politically correct” satires, etc. Most of these new
fairy tale forms claim both psychological and historical relevance, and
vis-à-vis each other. Thus in her afterword to Briar Rose (first published
in 1992), Yolen can write, “This is a book of fiction. All the characters
are made up. Happy-ever-after is a fairy tale notion, not history. I know
of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive” (241). Yolen can re-
pudiate the happy-ever-after scenario precisely because we now ex-
pect fairy tales to be both not happy—i.e., therapeutic rather than con-
ventionally satisfying—and history. It’s as if Yolen is suggesting that
while this particular plot element isn’t accurate, the novel is still true
to history—that is, to deeper psychological truths.
In this novel, ostensibly a variant of “Sleeping Beauty,” a young
woman does escape from Chelmno alive—an unthinkable and per-
haps irresponsible plot, as Adrienne Kertzer argues in My Mother’s Voice:
Children, Literature, and the Holocaust. Kertzer chastises Yolen for pan-
dering to the naive American desire for a happy ending in Holocaust
narrative. And yet Yolen clearly sees her work as legitimately historical
as well as imaginative. So does her editor Terri Windling, in her intro-
duction to the 2002 edition of Briar Rose. “Way back in the 1980s,”
writes Windling, “I was a young book editor in New York City, and
Jane Yolen was one of my heroes. Not only was she, quite simply, one
of the finest writers I’d ever read, but her knowledge of the world’s
great wealth of fairy tales was second to none. Like Jane, I was crazy
about fairy tales, and so I had the notion of publishing a series of
“A” is for Auschwitz 133

novels based on these classic stories. Thus the Fairy Tale series was
born . . .” (xiii–xiv). Windling furnishes a nutshell history of the fairy
tale, pointing to its juvenilization by Disney and hinting that its legiti-
macy is now being restored through her series. She implies that Yolen’s
novel will return to the fairy tale its rightful European seriousness,
against Americanizations “stripped of moral ambiguities” and narra-
tive complexities” (xiii). There’s even an epigraph from Jack Zipes’s
Spells of Enchantment, which suggests how closely our faith in the socio-
logical and historical significance of the fairy tale is entangled with
our faith in its psychological import.14 Whereas Kertzer sees the novel
as a typically American exercise in imaginative denial, Yolen and
Windling position Briar Rose as a higher truth. Kertzer and Bosmajian
are right to point out that such texts are problematic, even if our
disappointments with as much as our praise of children’s literature
confirm our faith in its testimonial power.
Among the confrontational texts recommended by Baer are a group
of time travel and/or “trading places” novels that operate in a magi-
cal realist register and emphasize an experiential, healing relation to
Holocaust-related trauma. I don’t mean the Time Warp trio books of
John Sczieska, but rather Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988) and Han
Nolan’s If I Should Die Before I Wake (1994). These titles represent not a
simple banalization of the personal, as with the 9/11 titles I discuss
next, but rather the expectation that young readers must find history
personally traumatic in order to know it. It’s as if Santayana’s famous
remark has been amended to “Those who want to remember the past
are condemned to repeat it.”15
I should first note that, as Kate Capshaw Smith pointed out in re-
sponse to an earlier version of this essay, faith in the power of travel/
trading narratives stems in part from the success of similar texts about
African American historical trauma published decades ago, such as
Virginia Hamilton’s House of Dies Drear (1968) and especially Octavia
Butler’s Kindred (1979), arguably a text cross-written for (or at least
cross-read by) adolescents. In the latter, the protagonist Dana is trans-
ported to and from 1976 California to 1815 Maryland so that she—
and by extension, the reader—can experience firsthand the terrors
of slavery. Another example is Hamilton’s Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush
(1982), in which the female protagonist Teresa (Tree) learns through
a sort of psychological time travel of her family’s traumatic history of
porphyria as well as abuse. Even when time travel or place exchange
is not a central element, many if not most contemporary children’s
134 KENNETH KIDD

books about African American life are historical and often traumatic
in emphasis, so pervasive is the legacy of slavery, Reconstruction, and
the fight for civil rights. Tellingly, these books have yet to be reclaimed
by the emergent field of trauma studies, suggesting again the domi-
nance of Holocaust narrative. Though familiar with all three of these
novels, I too failed to see them as trauma texts.16
The more contemporary protagonists of Yolen and Nolan are sub-
jected through their Holocaust exposure to a splitting—even shatter-
ing—of their subjectivity, from which they must assemble a more adult
self. Here, as in the texts of Hamilton and Butler mentioned above,
the psychoanalytic-literary collaboration is productive and admirable.
In Yolen’s novel, a bored Jewish girl named Hannah opens the door
for Elijah during her family’s Passover seder and finds herself in Nazi-
occupied Poland in 1942. With other Polish villagers, Hannah—now
Chaya—is rounded up and taken to a concentration camp. Eventu-
ally, she sacrifices herself to save her friend Rivka. When she walks
into the door leading to the gas chambers, she suddenly returns to
her real life in the Bronx, with a new appreciation for history and
modern rituals. Nolan’s novel likewise whisks a contemporary teen
girl back to war-time Poland, but this time that girl, named Hilary,
belongs to a white supremacist group. She becomes Chana, a young
Jewish girl, and learns some valuable lessons about racism and genocide.
Unlike Hannah, Hilary trades ethnicity as well as place, in keeping
with other trading places texts. I found this aspect of the transforma-
tion unbelievable, and wonder if ethnicity should be so easily elastic.
These stories are effective precisely to the degree that they capital-
ize on our conviction that historical trauma should be personal, in
ways that are often surprising or unpredictable. Although I don’t know
enough about the genre, my sense is that historical fiction for chil-
dren has become more than ever a metadiscourse of personal suffer-
ing that in turn demands pain from readers as proof of their engage-
ment. Whether about the impact of slavery, the Holocaust, or other
horrific world events (as in the recent spate of Great Depression sto-
ries), the genre seems now to thematize the reader’s own exchange
with the child protagonist. And such personalization, which seems
consonant with post-1960s identity politics and the faith in empathy,
can sometimes lead to a denial of history’s complexities, which aren’t
always so easily plotted.
Much as I admire the work of Yolen and Nolan, I find the same
conceit of split subjectivity disturbing in another young adult text,
“A” is for Auschwitz 135

Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s The Hunger (1999), in which a fifteen-

year-old Canadian girl named Paula simultaneously becomes anorexic
and learns about the Turkish massacre of Armenians during the years
1915–1923. Half realistic, “problem teen” fiction and half historical
fiction, the novel opens as the standard story of a perfectionist girl
increasingly preoccupied with her body image but soon takes on an-
other dimension. As she gets sicker, Paula learns more about the mas-
sacres online. After a dangerous run, Paula has a heart attack, passes
out, and travels through a time tunnel. She finds herself face to face
with “a mirror image of herself” (98) named Marta. “Paula stepped
into the mirror image of herself and felt a loving warmth envelop
her,” writes Skrypuch. “‘Paula’ no longer existed. She had just stepped
inside of Marta” (99). Paula-Marta then wakes up in a Turkish orphan-
age in 1915, where her hellish history lesson begins. The brutalities
she experiences link her specifically to her grandmother Pauline, who
emigrated from Armenia in 1923 with her adoptive parents at the age
of seven (meaning that she was born in the same or subsequent year
in which the novel is set). Paula’s grandmother Pauline is the daugh-
ter of Mariam, Marta’s older biological sister, which makes her grand-
mother Paula’s niece in the temporal logic of the story. (To make
matters more complicated, Marta was not merely Pauline’s aunt but
also her adoptive mother.)
The Hunger is commendable for raising consciousness about the
massacres, which have long been a taboo subject, especially in Turkey.
Even so, I doubt that “real hunger” can or should serve as a wake-up
call for teen girls with eating disorders in contemporary North
America. When offered food, Marta seizes it eagerly, thinking, “The
Turks may wish us to die . . . but I’m not about to cooperate” (115).
Her brutal experiences with the Turks inspire a new will to live and
therefore to eat. She earns how to keep food down: “This is medicine,
medicine, medicine, she chanted” (160–1). Eventually she’s returned
to the present and to Paula, her struggle not over but her fatal aver-
sion to food overcome. The novel enacts a split subjectivity only to
portray eating as a matter of willpower and personal/familial experi-
ence of history. Clearly eating disorders are cultural, but the will to
live and the will to eat are not so transcendent of historical context.
Yet Amazon.com reviewers call the book a “skillful blend of the con-
temporary and the historical,” and “an especially suitable gift for a
young person struggling to overcome an eating disorder or to deal
with personal or family trauma.” Any personal or family trauma?
136 KENNETH KIDD

Skrypuch herself weighs in as a reviewer, describing her research and

naturalizing the link between Paula’s story and the historical trauma
that Paula (re)lives. Asserting that Hitler modeled the Holocaust on
the Armenian massacre, Skrypuch claims an even earlier primal scene
of genocide, then uses it to authorize an object lesson for contempo-
rary teens. The personal, it seems, is the historical, and both are billed
as traumatic.
Why are Yolen and Nolan successful where Skrypuch is less so?
Skrypuch isn’t as masterful a writer as Yolen, to begin with, and The
Hunger is her first novel. But it’s also possible that Skrypuch can take
greater license with her story because the Turkish massacre of the
Armenians is only now being acknowledged publicly. Even now, per-
spectives are sharply divided along nationalist and political lines.17
The Hunger at least attempts to grapple with the event and its conse-
quences; it is a consciousness-raising book and was surely published
to that end. Another somewhat contradictory explanation is that
whereas the Holocaust is entangled with our ideas about memory,
repression, and the intransigence of the unconscious, the Armenian
tragedy seems more urgent (as un- or undertold) and also more open
to invention, less haunted by mass trauma. I’m probably overlooking
other possibilities, but in any case, The Hunger’s ostensible “historic-
ity” feels almost painfully voluntarist and presentist.
The Hunger is but one example of the ease with which historical
trauma is used to authorize personal loss in contemporary young adult
literature. In Edward Bloor’s recent novel Crusader (1999), fifteen-
year-old Roberta Ritter reconstructs the horrific murder of her mother
through the supportive “screening” of Mrs. Weiss, the daughter of
Holocaust survivors. Mary Ann Ritter was murdered while working
one night in the family arcade, and the case has never been solved.
Seven years later, Roberta begins to figure it all out. Just after her first
viewing of an archival video of a news broadcast about her mother’s
murder, Roberta cries for the first time in those seven years, then
stumbles to the home of Mrs. Weiss, who serves as a surrogate mother.
Mrs. Weiss just happens to be watching Holocaust footage on televi-
sion, and a long conversation ensues about human evil and account-
ability. “‘I had come here to get away from a horrible video,’” thinks
Roberta, “‘and I had found another one’” (204). The link is awkward,
one of many problems with the book. To make matters worse, Uncle
Frank, one of two problematic father figures, hosts parties in the new
arcade that revolve around racist/genocidal virtual reality “experi-
“A” is for Auschwitz 137

ences,” including “White Riot,” “Lynch Mob,” and “Krystallnacht.”

Roberta prefers unmediated reality, whatever that might be. Crusader
is a novel of empowerment, and Roberta’s growth depends upon her
ambivalence about “enchantment” and her repudiation of her bio-
logical family, who are linked to history’s worst villains—even as Bloor
criticizes anti-Arab sentiment.

Picturing 9/11

Of all contemporary genres of children’s literature, the picture book

offers the most dramatic and/or ironic testimony to trauma, precisely
because the genre is usually presumed innocent. A picture book about
the Holocaust has greater power to shock and presumably to educate.
Innocenti’s Rose Blanche, for instance, tells the story of a young Ger-
man girl who secretly feeds concentration camp victims and is then
mistakenly shot by the Americans who liberate the prisoners. Her death
is abrupt and upsetting, and the book seems to affirm the idea that
children should be exposed to rather than protected from trauma.
Or consider Toshi Maruki’s Hiroshima No Pika (1980), a devastating
account of a seven-year-old Japanese girl’s experience of the Hiroshima
bombing. Young Mii “saw children with their clothes burned away,
lips and eyelids swollen . . . There were heaps of bodies everywhere”
(n.p.). Those heaps evoke the mass graves of the Holocaust, compli-
cating any “adult” argument about the necessity of such drastic retali-
ation against the Japanese. In more recent picture books about the
Holocaust, the photograph has become the preferred visual form, in
keeping with a faith in the realism of photography (a realism that
Kertzer and others usefully question).
If the Holocaust is now understood as the horrific event with which
we have slowly come to terms—as the structuring and residually un-
conscious trauma of the twentieth century—then the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001, in our very American society of the spectacle,
constitute the ultimate and easily knowable affront to self and nation.
Whereas the Holocaust slowly became an acceptable topic for
children’s literature, no such lag occurred between 9/11 and the pub-
lication of children’s and young adult books about that tragedy and
the so-called “war on terrorism.” More than twenty such books have
appeared so far—most of them published in 2002—mostly picture
books but also diary anthologies, graphic novels, and comic book is-
sues (single and serialized). These titles are largely disappointing as
138 KENNETH KIDD

art and as social commentary. Many claim 9/11 as both a simple story
and as personally traumatic, figuring the nation as a wounded inno-
cent and ignoring our complicity in the exploitation of the world’s
people and resources.
In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant ar-
gues that “infantile citizenship” has displaced any meaningful partici-
pation in American public life. With the rise of the Reaganite right,
she holds, “a nation made for adult citizens has been replaced by one
for fetuses and children . . . Portraits and stories of citizens-victims . .
. now permeate the political public sphere, putting on display a mass
experience of economic insecurity, racial discord, class conflict, and
sexual unease” (1). In other words, privileged citizens claim, in the
name of children born and unborn, to be traumatized—by progres-
sive social politics, for example, such as feminism and affirmative ac-
tion, and more recently by the events of 9/11. “Mass national pain
threatens to turn into banality,” writes Berlant, “a crumbling archive
of dead signs and tired plots” (2).18 Berlant even holds that the “ur-
infantile citizen narrative is actually the presidential autobiography”
(37), as if anticipating the election of President Bush.
The title of Rosina Schnurr’s contribution to the growing body of
9/11 children’s books nicely sums up the collective spirit: Terrorism:
The Only Way is through a Child’s Story. Another title, 911: The Book of
Help, is a collection of essays, poems, short fiction, and drawings cre-
ated by young adult writers in response to the attacks—sort of a Chicken
Soup for the Traumatized Teen Soul. Then there’s Latania Love Wright’s
A Day I’ll Never Forget: A Keepsake to Help Children Deal with the September
11, 2001 Attack on America. I couldn’t find the book in my library (or
bring myself to buy it), but according to the publisher’s description,
“[t]his is a book intended for every child between the ages of 4 to 10
years old who watched the worst attack on America . . . from their
television set. This book is a keepsake in which the child’s name, date
given, and who the book was given by can be recorded. The fact that
it is a coloring book involves the child in the reading and is a very
educational resource . . . It is a resource that allows children to ex-
press their own individual feelings about that horrible day. Children
of all races and ages are captivated by this book.” Not one of these
books seems to grapple with the political contexts of the attacks, and
certainly not with the United States’ own bullying practices or sup-
port for such. Instead, young readers are urged only to express their
feelings and to appropriate 9/11 as a personal trauma—no matter
“A” is for Auschwitz 139

what their own experiences have been. Choose (and color in) your
own 9/11 adventure.
One of the better 9/11 books is Goodman and Fahnestock’s The
Day Our World Changed (2002), an anthology of children’s art that con-
firms our faith not only in the picture book as testimony but in chil-
dren as reliable witnesses, if not expert interpreters. The book is a
joint project of the NYU Child Study Center and the Museum of the
City of New York, which suggests again how psyche and history con-
vene of late. The book features gorgeous artwork by children along-
side essays by therapists, journalists, teachers, politicians, and histori-
ans (including former Mayor Rudy Guliani, novelist Pete Hamill, and
Senator Charles Schumer). The book does represent varied perspec-
tives on the attacks and their import, but once again, there’s no atten-
tion to geopolitical context and its language is relentlessly pop-thera-
peutic. In his foreword, Harold S. Koplewicz, MD explains that “[I]n
a single day, the illusion of our nation’s invincibility was shattered for
them. How they handle this new sense of vulnerability and, more im-
portantly, how we as adults help them find their way, will have a
tremendous influence on our country’s future” (10).
There are a few signs of intelligent life in this anthology. In “Chil-
dren as Witnesses to History,” Sarah Henry traces the history of our
national interest in children’s voices; she even mentions the impor-
tance of St. Nicholas, as well as Freud, Dewey, progressive education,
and the infamous 1913 Armory Show. Debbie Almontaser’s “Growing
Up Arab-American” is a welcome contribution about anti-Arab and
anti-Muslim backlash after the attacks, even if Almontaser keeps her
piece focused on strategies for preventing such bigotry rather than
narrating actual incidents. For most of the adult contributors, how-
ever, the title of The Day Our World Changed is not ironic but a straight-
forward description of innocence lost that makes possible innocence
regained. Pete Hamill titles his piece “Horror through Innocent Eyes.”
Rhapsody displaces analysis throughout the book. “So much that in-
forms the great works of art of our time,” writes Arthur L. Carter in
his piece, “comes from the innocence, humor, primal joy, fear, and
innate sense of humanity that children typically have . . . Many adults
have tried to respond to the day, but few have done it as eloquently as
our children. What a lesson! Their instincts have an emotional inci-
siveness that few adults can match” (107).19
In his spirited interpretation of 9/11, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!,
Slavoj Žižek proposes that terror has lately been made into “the hid-
140 KENNETH KIDD

den universal equivalent of all social evils” (111), in keeping with what
he calls “the subjective economy of the realization of the Self’s inner
potentials” (77). For Žižek, Lacanian psychoanalysis is the cure for
traumatic political realities. He puts his faith in the Lacanian Real
against the “hegemonic liberal multiculturalist logic” (64) which, he
says, makes more feasible notions of Absolute Evil. Counterintuitively
he asks, “Is it not that today, in our resigned postideological era which
admits no positive Absolutes, the only legitimate candidate for the
Absolute are radically evil acts?” (137). He strenuously objects to the
elevation of 9/11 to that status, as well as to comparisons of 9/11 to
the Shoah. Though he admires some articulations of the Holocaust
as the great singularity, he stresses the need to keep historical per-
spective on the Holocaust, against the kind of personal relativizations
that make evil too easily Absolute, as in these children’s books.
We don’t have to share Žižek’s faith in the recuperative power of
psychoanalysis, but what better evidence of that “subjective economy”
than these 9/11 titles? If the only way to understand terrorism is
through a child’s story, then we need children’s books that actually
reckon with the horrific world violence to which our nation handily
contributes, and which challenge the masterplot of childhood inno-
cence that has transformed our very understanding of citizenship.
Instead we have books that promote infantile citizenship, that resort
to a thematic of absolute evil and absolute innocence. Among them
are books about the bravery of firemen and rescue dogs, alongside
Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey, the vacuous On That
Day by Andrea Patel, and the twelve-book War on Terrorism series
published by ABDO & Daughters. The titles in the latter series, per-
haps the most reactionary of all the 9/11 books so far, include Ground
Zero, Heroes of the Day, Operation Noble Eagle, United We Stand, and Weap-
ons of War (all published in 2002—a book per month for a full year).
This series is dumbly patriotic, with its stars-‘n-stripes covers and its
jingoistic support for America’s war machine. President Bush comes
off as a hero rather than a war zealot or just a politician. These books
have wide distribution, as ABDO is a privately held company that pub-
lishes children’s nonfiction for the school library market. As reported
on the ABDO website, the War on Terrorism series has garnered praise
from the American Library Association’s Booklist magazine.20
Instead of nuanced history, we get The Big Scary Picture Book of
Terrorism.21 The child inside and outside the text is at once the
wounded/dead child of trauma theory and the endangered child of
“A” is for Auschwitz 141

our reactionary national imagination. All this picture book talk of in-
jury and vulnerability is cause for alarm, especially because such talk
is supposed to be reassuring. Picture books about 9/11 insist upon a
traumatized reader, but they also redefine trauma as the stuff of pop-
psychology, emphasizing—and delimiting—choice, pleasure, and ac-
tion. We want books to give children hope, to nurture them and aid
their development. But a coloring book about 9/11? A personal “keep-
sake”? Complexity and collectivity are refused in the name of the in-
fantile citizen.

Trauma and Memory in The Giver

One of the best-known Holocaust titles for children, and so far the
only one to be honored with the prestigious Newbery Medal, is Lois
Lowry’s Number the Stars (1989). Set in 1943, Number the Stars tells the
story of a Danish family and their friends who help smuggle Jewish
neighbors out of Nazi-occupied Denmark and into Sweden. Ten-year-
old Annemarie Johansen becomes involved with the Resistance when
her family hides Annemarie’s best friend, Ellen Rosen, from the Na-
zis. As the novel unfolds, Annemarie comes to terms with the terrors
of their situation.
Lowry alternately safeguards her protagonist Annemarie and puts
her in harm’s way, through changes in place and an emphasis on the
defensive power of ignorance rather than innocence. Midway through
the book, Annemarie discovers that her Uncle Henrik has been lying
to her about their mysterious family business near the sea, and con-
fronts him. “‘How brave are you, little Annemarie?’” he asks, saying
that the larger truth of their situation is too much for anyone, much
less a child, to bear. Annemarie accepts this explanation, thinking
“they protect[ed] one another by not telling” (91)—by not knowing
or claiming too much individually, they avoid giving others away
through German torture. In the book’s climactic event, Annemarie is
instructed to take a basket of food to her uncle on a docked boat. She
knows her task is dangerous, but not why. Hidden in the basket is a
handkerchief soaked with a concoction designed to throw off the
German dogs brought aboard the boats to sniff out stowaways headed
across the sea to Sweden. On her way she encounters German sol-
diers, who confiscate the lunch but let her take the basket to her uncle.
The handkerchief arrives in the nick of time, and prevents the dogs
from sniffing out the Rosen family members hiding in a secret com-
142 KENNETH KIDD

partment. While on the path, Annemarie realizes that she must seem
as ignorant as possible. She thinks of herself as Little Red Riding Hood,
and even tells herself that story as she walks along. Remembering the
childishness of her younger sister, Annemarie feigns anger and con-
fusion when the soldiers confiscate the lunch: “‘Don’t!’ she said an-
grily. ‘That’s Uncle Henrik’s lunch!’” (114–15). Innocence, she knows,
is a defense. Some critics even hold that Number the Stars is not a story
of lost innocence at all, but a meditation on the uses and abuses of
innocence.
Unlike other Holocaust narratives for children, Number the Stars is
not set in Germany, does not address life in concentration camps. For
better or for worse, its indirection or remove helps explain its success.
Unlike Baer, who argues for direct confrontation with trauma, Lowry
hopes details will suggest the larger picture. In her Newbery accep-
tance speech for Number the Stars, Lowry remarks: “As a writer I find
that I can cover only the small and the ordinary—the mittens on a
shivering child—and hope that they evoke the larger events. The huge
and the terrible are beyond my powers” (416). Lowry poses the ques-
tion with which we’ve been concerned: How, when, and why to speak
the unspeakable, especially to and for and in the name of children?
In my view, Lowry does more than just “evoke the larger events,” and
her images of child innocence and vulnerability engender a strong
sense of community.
Number the Stars shows how the infantilizing loss of freedom goes
hand and hand with pain and hardship. So, too, does Lowry’s second
Newbery Medal–winning novel, The Giver, published four years later.
Whereas Number the Stars is historical fiction, The Giver is a dystopian
novel in the tradition of Brave New World (1932) and 1984 (1949).
Even so, the continuities of theme are strong. In The Giver, twelve-
year-old Jonas is selected to be the Receiver of Memory for his com-
munity, the bearer of his culture’s collective consciousness. His cul-
ture has gone to Sameness, refusing pain and poverty but also variety
and choice. He begins his training with the current Receiver, whom
he calls the Giver. Day by day, the Giver, weary from decades of pain
and isolation, transfers memories and impressions to Jonas, in a man-
ner reminiscent of the Vulcan mind-meld, Socratic pedagogy/ped-
erasty, and the evangelical laying-on of hands. Everyone else in the
community is shielded from pain and trauma, and soon Jonas finds
his new burden intolerable. “‘I think it would be easier if the memo-
ries were shared,’” he tells the Giver. “‘You and I wouldn’t have to
“A” is for Auschwitz 143

bear so much by ourselves, if everybody took a part’” (112). “‘The

worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness
of it. Memories need to be shared’” (153). The Giver agrees, and they
carry out a plan to restore memories to the community and force
people to make their own decisions. The conclusion is ambiguous,
suggesting at once the success and failure of their mission, the sur-
vival and the death of Jonas and of baby Gabriel.
Ideologically, The Giver is an ambivalent text. On the one hand, it
echoes the classic story of the chosen child, nearly always a boy, who
becomes a savior figure by sacrificing himself for the greater good.
The exceptionality of Jonas and the “newchild” he nurtures is very
seductive, so that it’s easy to miss the critique of heroic individualism
central to the book. That is, The Giver is at once the pleasurably famil-
iar story of the special/gifted boy, and a critique of that story.22
In the context of contemporary trauma literature, however, The
Giver looks more progressive than not. The sequence of Number the
Stars and The Giver points to their shared project of ratifying the po-
litical sphere against privatization and the banalization of trauma. In
The Giver, the specific lessons of history take backstage to a generic
respect for the importance of collective rather than individual memory.
The Giver gives memories to Jonas slowly, unwilling to burden the
boy with humanity’s painful and largely unspecified past. Even so, in
this book there are traces of war and even the Holocaust. The most
upsetting memory that Jonas receives is of a brutal battle scene evoca-
tive of the Civil War. And the devastating secret that Jonas learns in
his training is that people in his community are “released” or put to
death when they are too old, too immature, or just troublesome. In
horror he watches a videotape of his own father killing a baby by le-
thal injection, and it’s hard not to think here of Nazi eugenics and
medical experimentation. (This scene, incidentally, is often criticized
as too horrific.)
The Giver is a novel of the education of the senses. At first pain is
“beyond [Jonas’s] comprehension” (70), but through transmitted
memories of sunburns and broken arms, Jonas learns physical pain
first; in the novel, physical pain provides a baseline for pain more
generally. As he becomes more aware of human frailty and suffering,
he becomes more impatient with the empty rituals of family life that
merely gesture toward emotion. At one point, his little sister claims to
be “angry,” but Jonas realizes that she feels only irritation. He reacts
“with rage that welled up so passionately inside him that the thought
144 KENNETH KIDD

of discussing [his sister’s experience] calmly at the dinner table was

unthinkable” (132). As he shares physical and emotional pain with
the Giver, Jonas gains wisdom, specifically the wisdom that pain must
be shared if humans are to have authentic selves. The privatization of
pain/wisdom does not a legitimate culture make.
Thus Lowry dismantles the very pedagogical scene that is so seduc-
tive in the novel. (Even after finishing the book, my students often
tell me they’d like to be Givers.) Like so many heroes of fantasy and
utopian narrative, Jonas is the chosen one, destined to assume the
most urgent role in his community, to his own surprise and growing
dismay. With great power, after all, comes great responsibility: we know
the cliché. But while Lowry never dislodges Jonas as the redeemer
hero of her story, she does interrogate the classic male homosocial
fantasy of private instruction and social stratification that ensures a
dead public sphere. Against that classic fantasy she urges the redistri-
bution of knowledge and memory, the sharing of pain and/as wis-
dom, even if her vision for the redemption of culture still depends,
curiously, on both man-boy love and a highly sentimentalized portrait
of family life—namely, a Christmas story, a memory of family intimacy
and warmth that the Giver transmits to Jonas. Against its own custo-
dial investments, we might read The Giver as a cautionary tale about
contemporary US culture, and about the need for a thoughtful litera-
ture of atrocity. The Giver offers an allegorical, abstract solution to the
problem of narrating trauma and, by being less “historical” than other
trauma texts, is less easily made into a keepsake.
Lowry concludes her afterword to Number the Stars by quoting Kim
Malthe-Bruun, a young man killed for his participation in the Resis-
tance. “I want you all to remember,” he writes in a letter to his mother,
“that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war,
but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of
human decency . . .” (Lowry 137). Resistance to nostalgia and empha-
sis on human decency distinguishes Lowry’s ethic of transmission from
those marking trauma theory and the more banal, politically empty
rhetoric of sharing and caring typical of the 9/11 books. Lowry is not
the hero of my story, but her work offers an engaging model of
children’s literature as trauma testimony—one that is necessarily im-
perfect but that reckons with the difficulty of memory and narration—
against that “subjective economy of the realization of the Self’s inner
potentials” (Žižek 77).
“A” is for Auschwitz 145
Notes

My thanks to Katharine Capshaw Smith and Richard Flynn for their feedback and
support. I dedicate this essay to the memory of Patricia Pace and Mitzi Myers.
1
Baer adapts Lawrence Langer’s phrase “the literature of atrocity,” as formulated in
The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination.
2
In the New England Primer, “A” stands for Adam and original sin: “In Adam’s fall/We
sinned all.” Early children’s books on both sides of the Atlantic were largely exercises in
shame and abjection, written to subdue children and curb their sinful nature. In a sense,
children’s literature has always been both traumatized and traumatizing, at once an
affirmation of evil and its narrative antidote. As Baer likewise notes, contemporary young
adult fiction especially seems preoccupied with social ills, at once protecting and expos-
ing teen readers to pain, loss, and alienation. But if original sin still lurks in the collec-
tive unconscious of children’s literature and popular culture (think of all the “bad seed”
movies, from Rosemary’s Baby to The Good Son), the idea of human depravity was given
new and distinctive affirmation by Hitler’s genocidal program. Rather than argue for
the newness of evil or trauma, Baer introduces into her analysis a mathematical conceit;
what the twentieth century bears witness to during and after the Holocaust, she holds, is
a new “algorithm” of evil, a new configuration or formula.
3
Adorno later revised this formulation, remarking in Negative Dialectics that “it may
have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is
not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on
living . . .” (362–3).
4
The Holocaust is also represented as proof of man’s inherently sinful nature, in
keeping with a Calvinistic worldview residual in but not identical to psychoanalysis: here
the analogy between the Holocaust and psychoanalysis falters somewhat.
5
Haase looks at imaginative literature as well as autobiographies of war survivors;
among the texts he treats is the Sendak-illustrated edition of Dear Mili by the Brothers
Grimm.
6
Although inspired by many disciplines and practices, narrative medicine is largely
the brainchild of Dr. Rita Charon, whose Narrative Medicine program at Columbia
University emphasizes the importance of “narrative competence” for physicians-in-train-
ing. After practicing medicine as an internist for a number of years, Dr. Charon took a
doctoral degree in English and has since devoted herself to bringing the two disciplines
closer together. Students of narrative medicine take clinical cues from literature as well
as from their patients’ stories, learning how to interpret the languages of the body and
the mind. Narrative therapy, by contrast, is more closely affiliated with humanist psy-
chology and with poststructuralist theory; founding figures Michael White and David
Epston emphasize the “disciplinary” work of narrative even as they stress the freedom of
individuals to create their own meanings and tell multiple stories. Without further study,
it’s hard to say if either of these movements offers much by way of content or method;
most of the descriptions I found seem pretty generic.
7
Cvetkovich points out that most contemporary discussions of trauma in the acad-
emy are psychoanalytic rather than sociocultural or political in emphasis. Her own alle-
giances—feminism, critical race theory, Marxism, and queer theory—help position
trauma instead as “a social and cultural discourse that emerges in response to the de-
mands of grappling with the psychic consequences of historical events” (18). She names
as traumatic not only the usual historical suspects but also the everyday events of sexual,
racial, class-based, and homophobic violence. These events are often not perceived as
traumatic because they don’t always demand dead or even damaged bodies, and/or
because those bodies don’t add up to “mass” trauma.
8
In an essay on the “storying of war,” the late Mitzi Myers notes that war-themed
writing for the young “coincides with accelerating late-twentieth century violence and
146 KENNETH KIDD
reflects adult preoccupations with human evil: all forms of moral, psychological, and
material destruction; past and present genocides, from the Holocaust to more recent
‘ethnic cleansings’; the ever-present possibility of nuclear disaster” (328). “Adult social
history,” she continues, “cultural studies, and postmodern/postcolonial literary theory—
all much concerned with redefining what counts as ‘war’ and with exploring how con-
flicts escalate and how war is represented in history, memory, and words—filter into the
expanding and impressive volume of war stories for the young” (328). The storying of
war, she suggests, is entangled not just with social history and with literature but also
with theory.
9
Caruth’s scholarship “has circulated within a milieu that includes work by Geoffrey
Hartman, Dominick LaCapra, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Lawrence Langer, and
others that is centered on the Holocaust” (Cvetkovich 27). Among this group LaCapra
has been the most critical of the privileging of psychoanalytic method in Holocaust
criticism, and as Cvetkovich notes, has also tried to historicize the place of the Holo-
caust in trauma theory. Even so, LaCapra turns to a psychoanalytic conceit in his analy-
sis, remarking that the Holocaust “stands as the repressed event that guides
poststructuralist theory, particularly in its European contexts—a historical locatedness
that is especially likely to be lost in the translation to a U.S. context” (27). Cvetkovich
eschews the conceit of the return of the repressed, noting only that the Holocaust “of-
fers validation of theory’s applicability to concrete and pressing historical circumstances,
and it serves as a compelling example that unrepresentability and aporia can be integral
to lived experience rather than the deconstruction of experience” (27). She gives trauma
theory a hopeful countenance while stressing the importance of developing alternative
trauma projects such as her own work on trauma and lesbian public cultures.
10
Blanchot takes issue with Winnicott’s “impressive” but faulty formulation of child-
hood as an individual existential experience, calling it
a fictive application designed to individualize that which cannot be individual-
ized or to furnish a representation for the unrepresentable: to allow the belief
that one can, with the help of the transference, fix in the present of a memory
(that is, in a present experience) the passivity of the immemorial unknown. The
introduction of such a detour is perhaps therapeutically useful, to the extent
that, through a kind of platonism, it permits him who lives haunted by the immi-
nent collapse to say: this will not happen, it has already happened; I know, I
remember. It allows him to restore, in other words, a knowledge which is a rela-
tion to truth, and a common, linear temporality. (66)
11
Fynsk also justifies his project as the legacy of Hegel as well as that of Lacan: “if
there is anything legitimate in the link between death and language that Hegel estab-
lished for us, then I believe we have the grounds to pursue this problematic of the infans
through the vast literature devoted to the death of children, and that such a reading
would be ‘responsible’ in the deepest senses of the term” (88).
12
Felman’s most recent contribution to trauma theory is The Juridical Unconscious,
which examines how twentieth-century law and jurisprudence respond to as well as per-
petuate trauma in the public sphere.
13
In Cultural Capital, John Guillory argues that theory more broadly is a form of liter-
ary language, a kind of intellectual capital. He proposes, vis-à-vis de Man and Lacan, that
theory effects a sort of “transference of transference,” displacing the student’s love for
the teacher—the first transference necessary to successful pedagogy—onto the love of
the teacher’s discourse, thus dispensing with (denying) the problems of both transfer-
ence and countertransference. We don’t love the teacher or student; rather, we love
literature and/or theory. See especially 176–98.
14
The epigraph also suggests that Zipes has displaced Bettelheim as the fairy tale
critic of choice in this particular series.
“A” is for Auschwitz 147
15
Santayana’s actual line: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemend to
repeat it.”
16
“A trauma history of the United States,” writes Cvetkovich, “would address the
multigenerational legacies of the colonization and genocide of indigenous peoples as
well as of the African diaspora and slave trade—a project, it should be noted, that is
necessarily transnational in scope” (119).
17
Another recent and higher-profile return to this tragedy is the documentary film
Ararat (2002), directed by the Armenian Canadian director Atom Egoyan. In January
2004, Turkish Minister of Culture and Tourism Erkan Mumcu gave official and contro-
versial permission to Turks wanting to see the film, emphasizing that Turkey is now a
democracy. By and large, Turks and Armenians have told different stories about the
events beginning in 1915; Armenians avow that they were chased out of their ancestral
homeland and executed brutally, whereas the official Turkish line is that the Arme-
nians, encouraged by Russia, were rebelling against the Ottoman Empire and were thus
suppressed. Egoyan himself likened the film to Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s Holo-
caust film, adding more fuel to the political fire. Belonging to the more skeptical genre
of political documentary, the film raises consciousness not only about this traumatic
episode but also about the difficulties of coming to terms with history and/as trauma.
18
In her chapter “America, ‘Fat,’ the Fetus,” Berlant notes that “the pregnant woman
becomes the child to the fetus, becoming more minor and less politically represented
than the fetus, which is in turn made more national, more central to securing the privi-
leges of law, paternity, and other less institutional family strategies of contemporary
American culture” (85; italics in original).
19
Another such collection of children’s testimony is Messages to Ground Zero: Children
Respond to September 11, 2001 (2002), featuring writings by children collected by Shelley
Harwayne in cooperation with the New York City Board of Education.
20
Here’s the magazine’s review of Weapons of War, as cited on the ABDO website:
“Clear and well focused, this highly accessible text delivers the basic facts and the advan-
tages of various craft. Excellent color photos show a dozen different planes, as well as
five helicopters, and four support planes in flight, and the others [sic] major weapons in
use” (www.abdopub.com).
21
ABDO & Daughters is not the only children’s publisher to join the bandwagon;
there’s also Scholastic, often championed as socially progressive. In his very engaging
paper “Marketing 9/11: Children as Victims, Agents, and Consuming Subjects,” Rich-
ard Flynn turns his attention to “the good corporate citizen” Scholastic, which “mobi-
lizes” its resources on behalf of the wounded nation and the vulnerable child (2–3). As
Flynn points out, Scholastic.com constructs the child as not only vulnerable but already
traumatized, in need of expert help, shopping incentives, and patriotic pedagogy. Speak-
ing more broadly about corporate children’s culture, Flynn holds that such materials
“reinforce an image of children as infantile, vulnerable, voracious consumers” (10).
Flynn presented this paper at the Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference
in 2002.
22
In a recent Foucauldian reading of the novel, Don Latham argues that the novel
seems both a narrative exercise in discipline and punishment and a refusal of such, and
that it “both resists and fulfills the role of the typical adolescent novel . . . namely to
integrate adolescents into the power structure of society” (149).

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