Choosing Jewish Joy: How Yiddish Young Adult Novels Fostered Resilience After the Holocaust

What did Yiddish-speaking teenagers in the Americas need to know about Jewish history during and immediately after the Holocaust? How ought the decimation of their cousins in Europe inflect their own Jewish lives? Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the highest priority of educators in the secular Yiddish schooling networks of the New World was to help their students metabolize the violence in Europe and relate it meaningfully to their own choices as emerging adults. Historical fiction, richly woven with strands of myth, helped young readers to reflect upon a long history of resilience in the face of persecution and to imagine what Jewish thriving might look like.