‘What Good are the Words?’: Child Memoirs and Holocaust Fiction

Abstract

Proposing that children’s literature possesses an overlooked ‘radical potential’ that will help transform society, Kimberley Reynolds celebrates that literature’s ability to ‘encourag[e] readers to approach ideas … from new perspectives’ (Reynolds, 2007: 1). Asserting that ‘new ways forward are central to the work of radical, transformative texts,’ Reynolds implies that Holocaust literature for children is like any other children’s literature in that it too has this potential (Reynolds, 2007: 87). Although Reynolds’s analysis does not focus upon Holocaust literature, her concern about nihilistic books that ‘risk encouraging conformity and disillusionment’ suggests that a ‘radical’ Holocaust literature for children would hold out the possibility that readers recognize themselves as political beings who possess the power to challenge the status quo and thereby ensure that the future will be better than the past (Reynolds, 2007: 81). But in a field long dominated by Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1997), this is far from innovative.