Jane Yolen, The Devil's Arithmetic and Sister Emily's Lightship

[oyceter]

The Devil's Arithmetic: The YA counterpart to Briar Rose. Or rather, given the publication dates, Briar Rose is a more adult look at the Holocaust. Hannah, a girl who is sick and tired of hearing her relatives' stories about the Holocaust, ends up opening a door on Passover that leads to the life of Chaya, a Jewish girl in 1942. I was calmly reading most of the story, despite the horrors of Hannah-as-Chaya finding herself and her entire community sent away to a concentration camp.

I don't know if the -- I don't want to say "prevalence" -- maybe the cultural permeation of the Holocaust and of Holocaust narratives have somehow dulled the impact of yet another Holocaust narrative. I mean, there are works like Maus and Schindler's List, and there's also Life is Beautiful and Jakob the Liar. Not that I've seen Jakob the Liar. But sometimes it's as though the Holocaust has been distilled so anyone can use it if they want to make a tearjerker, and that seems wrong on very many levels.

I've only read the first book of Maus right now, but it reminds me a little of most of The Devil's Arithmetic. The horror is there, but it's off in the distance, buried under the daily hardships and worrying about food and learning how to survive. The blood inherent in the concentration camps has been momentarily hidden. It breaks out in the very last chapters of The Devil's Arithmetic, and suddenly, a book I thought I was emotionally all right about made me cry in bed. Part of it is because it's so sudden -- we know what goes on in the concentration camps, but it doesn't directly affect Hannah. And then, suddenly, it does, and three little girls go to the gas chambers.

Sister Emily's Lightship: Short stories! Jane Yolen does a lot of fairy tale/mythological/etc. rewrites, and for some of them, the endings can seem a little too "shocking" -- you can see Yolen trying hard to turn the formula over. While I liked her rewrite of Rumplestiltskin ("Granny Rumple") as a tale of bigotry and anti-Semitism and her rewrite of Snow White ("Snow in Summer") with a much less stupid Snow White, the revisions felt a little too PC or something. I don't know. It's that feeling of righting a fairy tale gone wrong, of fixing it so that it fits in with our modern morals. "Lost Girls," her redo of Peter Pan, felt like that as well (although I liked the disturbing picture of all the Wendys).

Ones that I did like were Allerleiraugh, a very disturbing rewrite of an already disturbing fairy tale (Donkeyskin/Coat of Many Colors/Tattercoats) and the satiric take on Beauty and the Beast and "The Gift of the Magi" in one ("The Gift of the Magicians, with Apologies to You Know Who"). I also liked the world of "The Thirteenth Fey" and the other two stories in that world -- reminded me a great deal of the Enchanted Forest of Patricia C. Wrede in terms of sensibility toward fairy tales. I also liked "Become a Warrior," a new fairy tale in the shape of the older ones; that is to say, bloody and rather merciless. And "A Ghost of an Affair," which is my idea of a good love story. I think I would have enjoyed the title story more if I knew more about Emily Dickinson. The only resonance it really had for me was one line in which she talks about her dog stopping for death, with the lines "Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me" ringing through my head. I suspect there are more snippets of her poems throughout the story, except I am not knowledgeable enough to pick up on them.

Comments

[buffyannotater.livejournal.com]

I'm finding this conversation very interesting, because I am Jewish and cannot read Holocaust novels, with the exception of Maus, which affected me profoundly and which I can never read again, and The Diary of Anne Frank, which I know technically isn't a novel. I have never seen Schindler's List, and I have no intention of ever seeing Schindler's List, or Life is Beautiful, or Jakob the Liar. Because I know myself, and I know that I cannot handle being so immersed in the Holocaust. As a child, going to a Hebrew day school, we were taught so much about the Holocaust, and went to the museum in DC on a class trip, I would have nightmares about it. I am torn about the proper thing for the school to have done though: on the one hand, it's obviously a major part of the Jewish heritage, is a relatively recent occurrence, and Jewish children must learn about it, and on the other hand, I almost think at times what they taught us was too much for young people to handle. Some people have told me that it is wrong for me to not read books or watch movies on the Holocaust, but I am not disrespecting it by doing so. I have the utmost respect for my relatives who died horrible deaths in the forties. Over 3/4ths of my family were wiped out by the Nazis, and later, the Polish. It is a fact that not everyone knows that thousands of Jews were killed after the Holocaust was officially over, because the Poles had taken over their homes and properties and killed them when they tried to reclaim their property. The fact is, though, I just cannot deal with the emotional weight of the situation. I was horrified by the Holocaust Museum. After I saw an actual boxcar, and how extremely small it was, and realized how many people were put in there for days, with no room to move, I averted my eyes for the rest of the day there, closing them when I could, very hard to do when you're in a room surrounded by things you don't want to see. I was 13 years old and completely traumatized. I believe that is important to know what happened, and yes, to feel what happened. But after having allowed myself to feel what happened, I know I can't do it again. In fact, the only films with Holocaust content I can watch are Cabaret, because it is only indirectly dealt with, and X-Men, the prologue scene of which I thought was done beautifully. That, though, is in a small dose and followed up by almost 2 hours that don't deal with it, again. But sitting through a full movie on the subject or even worse reading a book on it, which takes up days of your life...my stomach is literally going into knots right now, thinking about it. In particular, I find the concept of The Devil's Arithmetic, of a modern girl opening a door and finding herself in the time period of the Holocaust, possibly the scariest idea I have ever heard. It was always on the recommendation lists when I was in middle school, but I never bought it. Although I don't have nightmares about it anymore, the fact that just the description of the plot of that story continues to scare me says a great deal.

[oyceter]

*hugs* I don't think it's any sort of disrespect to find that you almost physically can't watch or read things that deal with the Holocaust in such length.

I suppose going into too much detail is better than ignoring the subject all together, much like the official Japanese textbooks refuse to publish anything on the comfort women or things like the Rape of Nanking. But I can't imagine learning about it in such detail so young -- I think my first exposure to it was probably Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, then Number the Stars.

Thanks for posting. I've been turning this over in my head all day.