Childhood can be rough. Even the most uneventful childhood is fraught with an assortment of worries and fears; some are benign and even seem silly – consider the child who pales at the sound of a noisy blender or is afraid to sleep without his blankie – while others are based on reality, such as dealing with the illness of a beloved relative. But a child that experiences a trauma or some other hardship will face a set of challenges that will transform him forever. Such a child will not remain a child for long.
A pair of books has recently been released that deals with just such transformative events: the first, Dollhouse (Feldheim 2010, 504 pp.) by Miri Sonnenfeld and translated from the Hebrew by Sheindel Weinbach, focuses on five-year-old Chanale and on her mother’s extraordinary attempts to shelter her from the reality of divorce; the second, The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow (St. Martin’s Press 2008, 272 pp.) by Krystyna Chiger, opens with five year-old Krysha and describes in painstaking detail her family’s attempts to survive the Holocaust under the most harrowing, primitive conditions. The two books, one a work of fiction, the other a memoir, couldn’t be more different.
Dollhouse presents a troubling treatment of the topic of divorce. It opens with a tense and wrenching scene: Ima is bustling about, rushing little Chanale to get ready quickly, as she prepares their departure from home; Abba is nowhere to be found, and Ima does not feel any need to share with her little daughter why they are leaving. They are picked up by a relative and taken to Chanale’s maternal Sabba and Savta in Haifa. They arrive midweek, and Chanale waits with eager anticipation for her Abba to join them on Shabbos. But her mother, engulfed as she is by her private sorrow, has no energy to disabuse little Chanale of this expectation.
In fact, it’s a long while before anyone in the family shares with Chanale even an inkling of the new reality in their family. When Sabba asks her if she had said Kri’as Shema before bed, Chanale tells him yes. And what about Hamalach? That she’ll only say with Abba. Sabba urges her to say it with him, and when she continues to refuse, he becomes annoyed, and leaves. She falls asleep murmuring, “I’m waiting for you, Abba. Please come! I’m waiting.”
Admittedly, children should not be privy to every decision the adults in their family make, but when these decisions impact on the child and are not properly explained to him or her, the consequences can be grievous. It isn’t until chapter 100 (of 132 total chapters!) that Abba attempts to clarify to Chanale the true nature of the divorce: “I don’t have a wife, and your mother doesn’t have a husband.” Sensing her confusion, he weakly adds, “I thought you understood that long ago, or I would have spoken to you about it then.” But rather than clearing things up, Abba’s belated explanation confuses her further – and Chanale suddenly becomes afraid that she, too, might become divorced from her parents – and so she runs away. When her worried mother finds her, instead of consoling her, she responds harshly. “You bad girl!” she scolds. “What happened to you?” Ima then takes her home yet still fails to sit her child down and explain the simple facts of what divorce really means.
Without the proper information, Chanale’s mind sets about creating pathetic scenarios. “What would happen to Chanale when her turn came to be divorced? Where would she go?” she wonders. “Where would she live?” The scene gets more preposterous and absurd. “Who would cook for her? Would she have to go hungry all day long?” Would a normal child think this way? “Who would make Kiddush for her on Shabbos? Or Havdalah? And who would light candles? Little girls are not allowed to touch matches, especially when they’re alone. And she would be alone. She and Shabbos and the darkness!”
She proceeds to plan her own divorce, thinking through what dolls she would take and how she would transport her packages: “She just hoped that when the time came for her to leave, to be divorced and be on her own, it wouldn’t be in the afternoon, when all the children were in the yard. They’d make fun and call her names.” Her turmoil continues the next day at school, and it isn’t until a family friend takes her aside and tells her what she should have been told from the very start that she is finally reassured. “He stated the facts with such certainty that Chanale suddenly felt that she could breathe freely once again.”
There is no question that Chanale suffers greatly because of the divorce, but it can be argued that much of her suffering could have been mitigated by some thoughtful intervention by her parents or even her teachers. In scene after scene, Chanale is left to interpret events on her own, and it is no surprise that she ends up getting more anxious and fearful. To its credit, the book does a fair job of describing the wear and tear on a child in moving from one parent’s home to the other, and on the mishaps that can happen when one parent fails to communicate properly the child’s needs to the other. But the shroud of secrecy that is wrapped around this little girl is heartbreaking to witness. And the excess of secrecy ends up straining, if not compromising, the credibility of the story.
While divorce, unfortunately, has become a not uncommon occurrence in our generation, in Ms. Sonnenfeld’s work it is regarded as a taboo subject. In a preamble to the book, the author reprints a letter from a reader which highlights her true purpose for producing this narrative. Apparently, the reader had a relative who was about to separate from her husband until she read this book. “I never realized how awful it could be.” Would that all readers have the same reaction to the story. Divorce is awful. But Ms. Sonnenfeld’s depiction of Chanale’s parents as obtuse, clueless individuals is unfortunate. Dollhouse is a missed opportunity to deliver a more honest and clear-eyed message about divorce: that it is a harsh decree, and that no member of the family emerges from it unscathed; nevertheless, sensible parents can find a way to ensure that their children feel secure and loved, and be reassured that they are in no way responsible for the dissolution of the marriage.
By the end of the story, Chanale seems so grown up. She is starting second grade. She pays a visit to her old kindergarten, where she resolves an argument between a group of girls who all want to play with the classroom dollhouse. She issues what sounds like a Solomonic solution: “You can have more than one house. Sometimes there really is more than one house, so you can be the Ima in the second house.” Thus five-year-old Chanale emerges from her ordeal with a philosophic view of life, intact, and seemingly happy.
* * *
Unlike Chanale, who had to contend with so much strife and chaos in her family, Krysha, the owner of the eponymous green sweater, knew only family harmony, even when food was scarce and their living conditions were abysmal. Green Sweater is a formidable work. Krysha’s story, set in Lvov, Poland, during a harrowing time in history, is a haunting and beautifully written account of a family that perseveres and survives in large part because of their fierce attachment to one another.
A pampered child who was born in 1938 into a well-to-do, educated family, Krysha describes a joyous childhood, which coincidentally included her “prized possession,” a spectacular dollhouse: “I would lose myself in my imagined world of that dollhouse, inventing fantastic little lives for the people who lived there.” On September 1, 1939, the Germans attack western Poland, and in short order, Krysha’s fantastic little world crumbles: First come the Russian occupiers, and with them Communist rule and the nationalization of all industry; next come the Germans, and the ghettoization of the city, the establishment of the Julag (Judenlager, or Jewish camp), random actions, and deportations.
As life in the ghetto becomes increasingly tenuous, some parents place their children with non-Jewish friends for safekeeping. When this option presents itself to Krysha’s parents, Krysha adamantly refuses. Her mother is conscripted to work 12-hour shifts at the Janowska labor camp, sewing uniforms for the German army, and her father works as a carpenter doing assigned tasks for the Obersturmfuhrer. Thus, Krysha is left alone all day to care for herself and her little brother Pawel. She writes, “Each day, when my parents went out, Pawel and I would sit quietly and wait for them to get back. For me and my brother, this was terrible – to be left alone, for so many hours, when all around us people were being pulled from their apartments and out onto the streets. Pawel may have been too young to dread those long hours the way I dreaded them, but I was anxious enough for both of us.”
A remarkable aspect of Krysha’s account is how, at such a young age, she is able to grasp the seriousness of her situation and respond appropriately. All around her, she witnesses Jews being shot and beaten, and she experiences her parents’ terror when the German officers come to prowl in their apartment and help themselves to their things. “Every day they were killing Jews, taking Jews, punishing Jews,” she notes matter-of-factly. “But when it was a big effort, they gave it a name. They called it an action. In the meantime, they did it anyway.” She realizes what it is to be in life-and-death circumstances and what would be expected of her in order to survive. She writes, “We were like animals, attuned to our environment.” This innate sensibility, hard-won at such a young age, serves her well as the war progresses.
Krysha’s father Ignacy, whom she clearly reveres, is one of the heroes of this story. As the risks of staying exposed in the apartment mount, he uses his ingenuity to safeguard his children in clever, albeit extremely uncomfortable, ways. One of these was constructing a hiding place beneath a window ledge with just enough space for the two children to sit; he placed a pair of potties inside, installed the children there before he left for work, and closed up the wall, camouflaging it with a big heavy table. “We sat close, face-to-face, as if we were still babies in my mother’s belly.” The children could not get out until their father returned to free them. And so they sat, quietly, in the dark enclosed space, for 12 to 14 hours at a time, waiting for release, never certain it would come. She confides, “For me, these long, endless days in our hiding places were the worst part of the war.. Always we were so scared! Our tears would run without noise, we were so afraid to make a sound.”
By the age of seven, Krysha experiences more hardship than most of us do in a lifetime. “I was like a parent and a sister to my baby brother, but this was too big a job for such a small girl. In this way, I had my childhood taken from me. The Germans did not take me, but they took a part of me. This part.” But her endurance was yet to be tested. On May 30, 1943, the Germans staged the final liquidation of the ghetto. “It was something no child should have to experience, this measure of alarm. it was as if it had come from nowhere. We were prepared and unprepared both, and while we were in its middle, there seemed no end to it.” But Ignacy had arranged for this eventuality, and with his family descends into the city’s rat-infested sewer to wait out the war. Fourteen incredible months later, on July 7, 1944, they emerge above-ground, half-blinded and weary, but wholly intact.
* * *
It would not be fair to compare Krysha’s experience with Chanale’s. While Chanale’s parents chose to shelter their only child from the truth, Krysha’s parents did not have that luxury. Krysha became a mini-adult almost overnight, caring for her little sibling alone, witnessing the birth and eventual death of a baby in the sewer, and experiencing the loss of many loved ones through tragic circumstances in the space of a few short months.
Yet the contrast in the family dynamic is telling. While silence and emotional distance reigned in Chanale’s life, warmth, optimism and humor sustained Krysha and her brother. Despite their harrowing living conditions during the war, the children learned to adapt, secure as they were in their parents’ love, and trusting in their ability to protect them. “Underground, at least, I was with my parents,” Krysha confides. “Underground, at least, we had one another. I did not care so much how we suffered as long as we were together.” Of her mother, Krysha writes with admiration, “[She] could see beyond the mud and the cobwebs and the rats. She had a great vision that came from only reasonable expectations.”
We can never predict what challenges our children will be expected to face. As we raise them, we attempt to equip them as best we can to meet those challenges head-on. Both Chanale and Krysha encounter difficulties in their young lives. Each of them suffers, but there is a difference. Chanale suffers deeply in spirit, even as all her material needs are accounted for. On the other hand, Krysha endures extreme physical deprivation, but her spirit is largely sound, as she takes comfort from being surrounded by her loving family. In contrasting ways, Dollhouse and Green Sweater underscore the value of strong family relationships.
May our children be spared from difficulties and hardships, and may we have much success in instilling in them the knowledge of how precious they are to us and how much they are loved.
