Good-bye Marianne. (Recensions).

Kertzer, Adrienne

Good-bye Marianne. Irene N. Watts. McClelland and Stewart Young Readers. Toronto: Tundra Books, 1998.112 pp. $8.99 pb. The Children of China: An Artist's Journey. Song Nan Zhang. McClelland and Stewart Young Readers. Toronto: Tundra Books, 1998.32 pp. $9.99 pb.

The question of how to present history to children is foremost in two recent and very different publications from Tundra. Irene N. Watts's Good-bye Marianne uses fiction to present what the cover informs us is "A Story of Growing up in Nazi Germany." In truth, the temporal focus is narrower as Watts narrates how her eleven year old protagonist, Marianne Kohn, moves in a two week period from being a child whose greatest worry is a math test to a child travelling alone on a train to England. For Marianne never takes the math test scheduled for November 15, 1938; that very day, Jewish children are barred from attending German schools. Only Marianne's good luck (and the bad luck of someone else) ensures her place on the first of the Kindertransportes that ultimately rescued 10,000 children from Nazi Germany. This numerical information is included as the penultimate sentence in the brief Afterword. The succeeding sentence states the other numbing numerical fact that children's writers on the Holocaust always repea t as though repetition could make sense of the number: "The Nazis murdered one and one-half million children under the age of fifteen." How do we tell children (Tundra suggests the book is appropriate for ages 9-12) stories about such facts?

The extent to which Watts bases the novel on her own experience is unclear. We are told that she too lived at Richard Wagnerstrasse 3, the same address she gives to Marianne, and that she too was sent to England on another Kindertransport. But Watts (Irene Kirstein) was then only seven and one-half. A protagonist of that age, we assume, would not be able to ask the kind of questions and teach the kind of lessons we hope that older children will learn from historical fiction, and so Watts must make her heroine four years older. Yet it is significant that Marianne is asked on the train to take care of a vulnerable seven year old girl holding a doll. Immediately after the unnamed mother leaves the younger child with Marianne and "move[s] away without looking back," Marianne promises herself to never talk about this unbelievable day and occupies herself by taking care of the child. By distancing her story from that of her seven year old self, by talking about someone older, someone with some control (Marianne eve n manages to trick the Gestapo at one point, and evinces an eleven year old flair for mocking Hitler) Watts obviously achieves the control she needs to write about this still traumatic event. Is Marianne the older child she wishes she had been, a fictional tribute to a real child who did take care of her, or an imaginary portrait of the child she wishes had taken care of her? Such questions are not trivial, but speak to the way Holocaust memories recast as children's fiction negotiate the tensions between telling children historical truth and making that truth bearable.

Children's fiction on the Holocaust also recognizes that there are limits to what an eleven year old can understand, limits that Good-bye Marianne does not cross. As Watts provides the historical facts that record the events leading to Marianne's departure from Berlin, she reinforces those limits by having the mother repeatedly plead with her daughter to accept what seems beyond understanding: a father in hiding since his release from a concentration camp; a mother willing to send her daughter away. And Marianne faces other facts she cannot comprehend: a friend who longs to join the Hitler Youth; a nation that refuses to regard her as she regards herself, as more authentically German than the Austrian Hitler. With a "list of forbidden activities ... piling up like the compost heap," Marianne experiences the multiple and increasing signs of discrimination and humiliation, and for the reader's benefit, recalls still others. But Marianne reaches a point where she can no longer interpret events for her reader; th is limit is reached when she and her mother arrive at the Berlin railway station: "Immediately they were assaulted by sights and sounds of such confusion, noise, and terror that Marianne's questions were left unspoken."

A child reader truly ignorant of Nazi Germany might be puzzled by the paragraph that follows. Surely it is the historical knowledge of what comes later, the subject that Watts does not write about, that informs the terror of Marianne's unspoken questions as she sees "seemingly endless railway tracks, which Marianne knew sent trains all over Europe" and the presence of SS guards with "powerfully muscled watchdogs." What the reader is given is a fairly safe escape story in which the Holocaust is not yet known, Marianne's impassioned speech about Nazi persecution does make a difference upon her Hitler Youth-loving friend, and Marianne is herself never abused by the Gestapo. Thus the book can end with ambiguous hope: "The ship sailed on, into the darkness, into safety, into the future," the fate of Marianne's parents unknown (although the letter the mother hides contains sufficient hints that the mother knows she will likely never see her daughter again). Twice in the letter the mother expresses the hope that one day her daughter will understand why a mother would willingly send her own daughter away. By writing Good-bye Marianne, Watts implies that this difficult maternal decision is one that she has come to understand.

A different and far less challenging understanding of mothers, children, and the telling of history is provided by Song Nan Zhang's The Children of China: An Artist's Journey. The author of A Little Tiger in the Chinese Night, an eloquent depiction of Zhang's political response to the massacre in Tienanmen Square, now continues his autobiography in art by telling children about the people he paints, people he could only travel to see after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Zhang explains that the nomadic people of China appear so ''colorful,'' ''romantic,'' and ''happy'' in these paintings because after the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, this is exactly how he saw them: "To me, they represented freedom in a country without freedom, the right to live one's own way, to dress, work, worship and bring up children according to ancient customs." The paintings, based on sketches, photos, and memories accumulated during his travels between 1976 and 1989, present a depoliticized world of beautiful, happy chil dren protected by parents; the painting that serves also as the cover illustration is a good example. In this painting, a Tibetan mother, arms around one child with another snuggled on her back, faces the viewer. The children do not look at the viewer, for such looking might interfere with their representation as infants inhabiting a world of complete maternal power and protection. The image is a striking contrast to both the motherless image of Marianne on the cover of Good-bye Marianne and the restricted power of historically situated mothers that Watts narrates. In The Children of China, the children smile; the world is beautiful. Only the introductory and concluding remarks give the historical context for these utopian paintings. Only in those remarks and two paintings of his own son, does the historical reality of the world Zhang's own son faced come into focus.

In his conclusion, Zhang quotes his own father, "All children are born good." He goes on to draw a parallel between artists and children: both innocent, both aiming to understand and convey the magic of the world; and concludes that the ancient art of China demonstrates how art survives long after the empires established by powerful tyrants. The need to say and believe this, to position himself against a political use of art is understandable, but is nevertheless itself a political conclusion. Not only for ignoring that all art, including the art done in caves of Dunhuang, is always art done in a political, historical and economic context. And the very marketing of the book by Tundra for "ages 12 and up," is both revealing and problematic. Presumably Tundra markets the book for this age group because of the quality of the paintings, the implication being that younger children will not appreciate such paintings, for surely the content of Zhang's text would not pose problems for younger children. Yet why not ma rket the book for adults? That the paintings were originally bought by adults is acknowledged by the text where a note thanks various individuals "for graciously lending their paintings for the production of this book." Does the marketing decision simply recognize that Western readers persist in thinking that books with pictures are never intended for grown-ups, or does it acknowledge that such readers might be perplexed by the book's joyful ahistoricism? What exactly do we teach young adults about the limits of history when we give them this admittedly beautiful book?

For such young adult readers are older than those to whom Tundra believes we can present historical fiction such as Good-bye Marianne. They are readers who are not so much innocent as simply ignorant of Chinese history. Seeing with such ignorant Western eyes, what will they see in Zhang's paintings of children outside Beijing? Despite the cultural history depicted in the paintings, I suspect that such viewers will take the world Zhang paints at face value. They will not see what Zhang acknowledges, that utopia is always a place one longs for, not a place that exists: I had mixed feelings as I painted this picture for I have my own memories of working in the autumn woods. During the Cultural Revolution, when I was sent to the countryside to be 'reeducated,' we collected leaves to use as food.

Instead they will see a world of happy people, painted in such a way that history is presented as safely in the past, something that happened long ago. Only the end notes about the Silk Road tell another story, the very name reminding us that there is no place outside history, however beautiful the pictures may be, and that children of whatever age, however innocent, are always already historical subjects.