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Jewish writers/editors/book people (pun not intended), can we talk about how it's becoming more and more of a stretch in the credibility department to write contemporary fiction about younger children whose grandparents (instead of great) are Holocaust survivors?
Unless we are talking about survivors who were *so* very young they barely remember it, AND we are talking about the parents of these fictional children having become parents later in life, it's not going to work for much longer.
Shoah (and other genocide) documentation and oral histories are super important, which is why so many museums and projects record them as we are left with an ever decreasing population of survivors.
But we have to start contending with the idea that real and fictional young people who are NOT going to meet these people firsthand and instead are only going to know them from those histories--or
by hearing the stories from those survivors' children and grandchildren, not direct from the survivors themselves. My Jewish grandparents (not survivors; they were first-gen Americans) were born in 1918/1919. I am, at 32, the youngest (by a lot) of their grandchildren.
The oldest of their GREAT grandchildren met them enough to remember them, and *they* are the ages that match contemporary YA and middle grade characters. Not their grandchildren. And that's only because they lived until almost-99 and almost-100 years old.
If I may, let's say that 1940 is the last birth year you can use and reasonably expect someone to have strong memories of the events of the Holocaust. That's 81 years old.
Like I said, I am very lucky in grandparents (on my dad's side too), so I have unreasonably high expectations for lifespan and don't actually know what a typical one is. (And my grandparents were very active and healthy. I know how lucky I am.) But I suspect it's not 100 years.
So for simplicity's sake, let's say a 1940 baby had a kid in 1965, who had a kid in 1990. That kid has aged out of contemporary middle grade and YA (as a character, I mean. Not a reader). THAT kid has a 5-year-old.
Museum curators, historians, amateur genealogists, and teachers have been contending with this dwindling pool of amazing people for years--preparing for the inevitable future by doing the important, time-sensitive work of interviews, recordings, lineage tracing, etc.
Fiction writers need to start thinking about how they're going to deal with that as well. For the sake of verisimilitude and credibility, and also for the sake of their readers, who won't *have* grandparents with that experience and thus cannot identify with characters who do!
Because it's implausible! And nearly impossible! Just like we now have schoolchildren and readers who have never lived in a pre-9/11 world and don't have memories of that day and its aftermath and we have to write accordingly, we need
to start thinking about kids who live in a world where their connection to the Shoah is one degree removed, not direct. Because it's coming--sooner than we'd like.
And don't forget--
Remember that we suffered
HEY!
Remember that we sufferedHEY!
