Violence and resistance in Jewish children's and young adult literature about the Shoah

Abstract

This article focuses on representations of violence in Jewish children's and young adult literature about National Socialism, representando Jewish resistance through violence. This is an aspect that has received little attention to date, and is also comparatively underrepresented in children's literature. Jewish resistance employing violence is subject to a strong taboo, which is particularly evident in German-language children's and young adult literature. The representation and function of violence are examined using three texts by Juri Suhl (Of Life and Death, Auf Leben und Tod), Uri Orlev (The Man from the Other Side, Der Mann von der anderen Seite) and David Safier (28 Long Days). The texts were written at different times and published in different languages, but all are devoted to violent resistance against National Socialism by the Jewish partisan movement and the Warsaw ghetto uprising, respectively. The analysis examines narrative strategies to mitigate the impact of violence, such as embedding it in the genre conventions of adventure literature or its deliberate use as a means of building suspense, as well as the revenge motif and genre-specific motivational patterns and the depiction of sexual violence in Safier's novel. Connected to this representation is the interpretation of the historical events narrated and thus the positioning within a narrative of Jewish history and (self-)representation in children's and young adult literature.