"Grasping the Unimaginable"

Although "Grasping the Unimaginable" focuses on teaching about the Holocaust with novels, Gilbert explores the role that storytelling and stories might have in "leading children toward an awareness of uncertainty and ambiguity" (355). Unlike the Jordan article discussed in my post about  Never Fall Down, Gilbert  sees the potential for stories as doing much more than implementing strategies for teaching information about global atrocities (beyond personalizing with first person or themes of hope) -- one that does not "overwhelm" children. Instead, Gilbert is suggesting that a novel can represent the ambiguity and uncertainty of such atrocities, which is a much more authentic, even phenomenological representation of the occurrence. I think this approach also respects the nature of adolescence, which is wrought with the discomfort of uncertainty.  If the novel can draw young readers into this phenomenological representation rather than being a conduit of information, the novel will actually be doing something quite remarkable: "capture the fractured nature" of global atrocities (355).

Gilbert examines the "role of silence" within the narratives of two novels about Holocaust written for young adults. Many Holocaust novels, she suggest, set out to explicitly inform young readers about the horrors of the Nazi genocide, but she challenges the "educative role" of such works citing how  "blunt didacticism"  can close down a "child reader's imaginative engagement with the ungraspable nature" of the genocide."  Instead, Gilbert suggests that novels that confront the reader with a "complex set of ideas about the relationship between narrative and subjectivity" have a more educative role.

A predominant theme in Holocaust studies, and I think in genocide studies (a new topic to education), is how to represent the unrepresentable. Of course, it is not possible, so to construct a narrative without complexity and uncertainty is problematic. Novels about atrocities and trauma should show this impossibility with "honest and insightful narrative" (356).

"Grasping the Unimaginable: Recent Holocaust Novels for Children by Morris Gleitzman and John Boyne," Ruth Gilbert