Enough? Enough.

Over the weekend I read a piece in Tablet, by Marjorie Ingall, titled "Enough With the Holocaust Books for Children!" I generally like Tablet and like Marjorie's articles. This time, I experienced a serious disconnect.The article states:

As a non-Jewish librarian recently observed to me, if you dropped an alien into the children’s section of a library, it would think Jews disappeared after WWII. (The alien could tick off each book’s subject matter on its long green fingers: Holocaust, Holocaust, shtetl, Holocaust, Holocaust, Hanukkah, Holocaust.) As a people, we have a 6,000-year history to mine for stories. So, why are we so relentlessly focused on one event? We are more than just our suffering.

And:

But the amount of real estate, both physical and emotional, that these stories hold on our bookshelves is proportionally just too high.

The article makes two valid points. The first one is that bad books about the Holocaust are bad.Here's an idea: don't buy or read the bad Holocaust books. And if you're a librarian, take care to curate your collection.Of course, opinions vary about what's a "bad" book. I, for example, am not generally interested in fiction about the Holocaust, and generally find the bestseller, soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture novels particularly not compelling. That's just my thing, and I won't name titles, because they've all been suggested to me by well-meaning friends who think I'll like this or that novel because I wrote a book about my mother's own experience in Nazi Germany.I can certainly agree that books about the Holocaust that get the facts wrong are bad. The article states, "In my experience, a great many Holocaust books are factually flawed, trivializing of the horror, numbing, and/or unreadably didactic as all-get-out." I seem to have been lucky enough to have avoided those books. I don't think it's hard to find the gold and skip the dross.The second valid point in the Tablet article is that the Jewish experience is rich with topics other than the Holocaust for writers to mine. Absolutely.But to say, as the article does, that it's enough already with the Holocaust, that the Holocaust is too central in the consciousness of Jews, that children's books about the Holocaust instill a Jewish identity "based on defensiveness and fear"--no.First, the Holocaust happened, it was huge, it changed history. There can't be too many good books about something so significant. Here's a highly unscientific, inconclusive comparison: when I search for books on Amazon about "the Holocaust," I get 22,272 hits. When I search for books about "the U.S. civil war" I get 21,253; for "the civil war," it's 286,191. I would never say there are too many books about the Civil War.Oh, when I search for books about fantasy, I get 404,159 hits. How many is enough?Second, books about the Holocaust are not exclusively or primarily for Jewish readers. The world is still learning about the Holocaust, and by world I include communities and populations in these United States of America. For my own so-called Holocaust book, I have found non-Jewish communities--especially communities that are different from my own urban east coast community--acutely interested in this historical era about which neither adults nor their children have heard much at all. I will spare you the extremely basic questions my mother and I have heard and gladly answered when we presented to non-Jewish audiences. Plenty of people  have no idea. I am not talking about deniers here, but well-meaning people who simply don't know.Third, great books about the Holocaust era illuminate such diverse themes as survival, grit, shared humanity, heroism, and friendship. If you want to complain about books that paint Jews as victims and Jewish culture as based on defensiveness and fear, then I guess you could read all bad books and suggest that they stand for the whole. But what is the point of that?Every so often a Jewish culture critic feels compelled to float this idea that there are too many Holocaust books. When I present The Year of Goodbyes to students or educators, I always take this proposition on directly, usually quoting a similar article that came out in 2010, around the time my book was published, entitled, “There Are Too Many Damn Holocaust Movies.”  (That article starts with this cheeky sentence: "Remember when you were in like sixth grade and your teacher asked you to read Number the Stars and you quietly thought to yourself, 'jeez Louise, how many of these Holocaust books are there?' and then you felt terrible and never said anything to anyone?") One grows used to the phenomenon. I don't take it personally as a writer. I don't take the Tablet article personally; after all, The Year of Goodbyes was on the magazine's "best of" list when the book came out in 2010. But apparently--witness this long blog post--I do take this phenomenon personally as a human.Happily, I have found antidotes for the sad feeling I get from reading the Tablet article and others like it.The antidotes include the Alabama high school English teacher who recently received a fellowship to attend Columbia University this summer to study how to use literature to teach about the Holocaust. Sounds like she's already doing a great job of it--her students, Farrah Hayes told the AP in an article published today, "are amazed by the story of the Holocaust," which she presents through literature, rather than "just throwing facts at them."The antidotes also include reflections written by young adults, Jewish and non-Jewish, after visiting the sites of Nazi Germany persecution in Poland as part of the March of the Living program. Reflections like this:

"[C]ommon humanity is what should unite us when injustice is inflicted upon any one of us . . . on the basis of these differences. This is not to eradicate the differences . . .but to transcend them when there is a need to embrace a higher ideal."-- Ayesha Siddiqua Chaudhry – Canada"[O]ur differences must make us more knowledgeable, understanding and connected, because in the end we are inflicting suffering on our own family. We are all the same world, and the beauty of this world lies in its diversity."-- Mona Ayoub – Lebanon

You can read more such comments here. These reflections may be among the best answers there are to the Tablet piece. They show that when we teach about--and even immerse young people in--the Holocaust, we are not reinforcing a Jewish culture of victimization, defensiveness, and fear. If we’re doing it right, we’re reinforcing a culture of compassion, humanity, empathy, integrity, and peace. Not everyone can travel to the sites of concentration camps to absorb these principles. That is where the great books come in. Enough with the Holocaust books for children? Please. Enough of this.