Greenhorn. By Anna Olswanger.
Illustrations by Miriam Nerlove. Junebug Books. $17.95.
A lovely, sensitive little
story – not a novel or novella, but a novelette, and barely that – with
wide-ranging themes but so narrow a focus that it will have only limited
appeal, Greenhorn is the latest of
many, many books seeking to capture the Jewish experience of the Holocaust
before the very last people who remember it firsthand are gone forever. A
lightly fictionalized account of the childhood of real-world people – again,
like many similar books – Greenhorn
is tender and thoughtful, encapsulating in its microcosmic scope the
macrocosmic experiences of an entire people who had been singled out in
horrific ways because of their beliefs.
For Jews, particularly Jews
in New York who will understand the many local references (“Daniel snored like
the BMT train”), Greenhorn will be a
bittersweet journey to a time nearly 70 years ago, when the wounds of the
Holocaust – unhealed even today for many – were fresh. It is the simple tale of
a boy named Daniel who comes to a yeshiva
in New York City in 1946, carrying a small box that he will not stop holding,
and of another boy, a stutterer named Aaron, who narrates the book – and who befriends
Daniel and tries to protect him from the taunts and bullying of some of the
crasser students.
The mystery of the box’s
contents is the only real tension in a book that is essentially an exploration
of the varied reactions of young European Jewish boys just after World War II
to schooling and life in the New World. Too brief to delve into the experience
in detail, Greenhorn relies on small,
nicely formed scenes to reveal character: boys offering to play Chinese
checkers with Daniel or let him read a Captain Marvel joke book; the school
bully repeatedly calling Aaron Gravel Mouth; Daniel, who rarely speaks, being
thought rather simple-minded until he reads a passage in Aramaic, Yiddish and
Hebrew; and the line, “Friends don’t keep secrets from each other,” which
inevitably becomes the book’s climactic saying.
It is all terribly earnest,
terribly well-meaning and terribly meaningful to the cloistered community at
which it is aimed. Greenhorn is an
inward-focused book for Jews who just cannot get enough of Holocaust and
post-Holocaust stories, for New York Jews still feeling close ties to their
city’s post-World War II history, for now-elderly Jews wanting a chapbook to
help communicate the feelings and events of a still-overwhelming time to
today’s children – who are far more likely, outside the Orthodox communities,
to be focused on electronics and reality shows than on kids’ behavior in the
mid-1940s. Anna Olswanger succeeds, in fewer than three dozen pages, in
bringing a small slice of a now-long-ago time to life, and Miriam Nerlove’s
illustrations complement the text very well indeed. The book reaches out solely
to a small, insular community, but within that community will surely be found
to be heartfelt, attentive and warm.
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