The Portrayal of Jewish Children

Even within the Weimar Judaic burnish, where social discrimination was al styluss more than than or slight a feature of life, a specifically minority point education was not considered especially significant; far more important were more generalized (i.e., mainstreamculture) economic and social considerations (Levine end-to-end; Schwartz and Isser 18790). Curiously, the inculcation of a specifically Judaic individualism to begin with the war appears to have been made more available to Judaic orphans educated in institutional settings than to Jewish children attending customary schools (Bernard passim).

To a degree, in the postwar literary treatments of Jewish children, the Jewish per countersignal identity operator matters more than any other factor of the children's lives because that identity was nearly destroyed by the Holocaust. To be sure, the external culture also made such identity decisive, irrespective of whether a child was predisposed to religious observance or way of life. Thus the hear of the Holocaust revived the American Jewish assimilated culture's interest in making a specifically Jewish identity concrete. In the literature that has emerged since World War II, the Jewish children portrayed appear highly conscious of their Jewish identity on one hand, and of the special character that such identity assumes relative to the larger culture. Gross argues that one theme of Philip Roth's bye-bye Columbus and Por

A child's experience of Jewishness as but one aspect of experience in the larger culture may be seen in the work on of Woody Allen. In The Floating Light Bulb The family is unimpeachably Jewish in culture, perception, behavior, inasmuch as the characters' diction and allusions are to elements of Jewish culture, such as to working in Yiddish or to a small woman's "schnozzle bob" (Allen 61). But Woody Allen is more interested in the secular than in the religious Jewish culture. there is little suggestion of religious observance as the central fact of existence. It is a view, often satiric and just as often pleasantly sentimental, from the inside, of lowermiddleclass Jewish American life.

The idiosyncrasies and wellmeant mental cruelties of Enid toward her stuttering older son Paul, an elegant artist inside but a pent-up nincompoop outside, and her wisecracking younger son Steve, therefore have as much to do with the frustrations of being socioeconomically trapped as with religiosity. A similar American acculturation that is, however, accented by Jewish culture is taken up in Allen's motion pictures, and the satirical attitude expressed in the childhood memoir film Radio Days toward the frenetic relationship between parents and children is typical. When the young son of the family is scolded for stealing money from a drive to progress to a state in paradise, the boy is portrayed as a rascal who doesn't care much about Palestine because "it's all the way over there in Egypt." The fact that the scolding takes place in a Jewish surround (Hebrew school), with parents, rabbi, and child is incidental inasmuch as the same kind of convulsion might take place among Methodists. Yet it has an edge to it inasmuch as the boy's growing pains are connected with how he leave alone form his attitudes toward the integrity of the Jewish culture and the idea of a Jewish homeland. The moral climate of Judaism is therefore never wanting(p) from the portrayal.

Katriel, Tamar, and Nesher, Pearla. "Childhood as
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