by Jaime Herndon Oct 27, 2021 I can remember the first time I really felt “seen” in a book. It was Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret . Margaret’s parents had an interfaith marriage, like my parents. I’d never seen that before in a book, and it felt special to me. I don’t remember reading many of the Holocaust books people say they read as kids (Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars comes to mind, which is actually about a non-Jewish girl), although we did read The Diary of Anne Frank in school. To put it bluntly, we didn’t need to read many of those books at my Jewish day school. The history was in many of our families, with grandparents having numbers on their arms or stories of escape. It was in some of our teachers whose histories we whispered. We studied the Holocaust intensely our 8th grade year. I don’t think it was until after I graduated and went to a public high school that I realized Holocaust kid lit and YA lit was A Thing. Sometimes I cringe when looking at
Comments
Post a Comment