How War, Language, and Nation-Building Shaped Hebrew Children's Literature

Prof. Yael דר of Tel Aviv University, a cultural historian who studies Jewish children’s culture in the first half of the 20th century, says children’s literature reflects both its own era and the future adults hoped to build through children. In her view, the early Hebrew canon emerged amid massive Jewish migration, modernization, secularization, and, in the case of Zionism, a shift in language and national ethos. She argues that writers for children were trying to create a native Hebrew culture and a new kind of child who would speak Hebrew naturally and inhabit the land with confidence.

Dr. דר said the formative years of Hebrew children’s literature were the 1920s and 1930s, with major writers and poets such as Haim Nahman Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky, and Leah Goldberg contributing heavily, mostly in children’s press. She noted that early stories gave little space to parents or home, because the expectation was that children would bring the new culture back into the household. Only in the 1950s and 1960s did family-centered children’s stories become common.

Contrary to the familiar claim that the Holocaust was barely discussed, she found that Hebrew children’s newspapers in Mandatory Palestine addressed the plight of European Jewry extensively during World War II. In the early 1940s, and even during the war itself, papers such as "Davar LiYladim" published editorials, stories, and poems about the catastrophe and about adults’ fear and helplessness. Levin Kipnis’s 1940 book "B’Netiv HaPele" was an early example, and she said there was a strong urge to share the crisis with children and create a sense of shared fate.

After the war, as the narrative of "from Holocaust to rebirth" took hold, heroic children’s books appeared, including Yimima Tchernovitz’s "Shmonah Achar Mei-ehad" and Yigal Mossinzon’s "Hasamba" series. After the Yom Kippur War, a countercurrent of anti-war children’s books began, including Tirza Atar’s "Milchamah Zeh Davar Bo’eh" and Uri Orlev’s "Hayelet HaChoshekh". She said militancy remained embedded in Israeli culture, but today’s children’s books are also marked by globalization and a tendency to avoid local dilemmas. She added that she is curious how war, social division, and uncertainty will be reflected in future children’s literature.