Frozen in Sorrow

S tudying Holocaust fiction for young readers means touching upon the core characteristics of children's literature.Various critics have identified in children's literature about the Holocaust a crucial dilemma:1 on the one hand, authors and educators cherish the desire to inform readers in a way that does justice to the atrocities of the persecution and genocide of Jewish people and that raises awareness in the young that history must not be repeated.On the other hand, children's literature has a tradition of providing mostly optimistic, or at least hopeful, narratives that often put young people's agency and growth central.These two perspectives cause friction in Holocaust literature for children.What Geoffrey Hartman calls "the limits of representation" may weigh in on children's books even 1 See, for example, Adrienne Kertzer, My Mother's Voice

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