This paper examines two fictional narratives for children by Jane Yolen, both of which deal with the Holocaust—Briar Rose and The Devil's Arithmetic. The need to remember the Holocaust and the effort it cost those who survived are the central motifs of these two novels. To put the horrors of the Holocaust behind one and create a life in America is what many Holocaust survivors did. Each of the novels deals with one such family and the ways in which the Holocaust and its memories had shaped the lives of the survivors and their families. The paper works with the notion that remembering and forgetting, especially in conjunction with an event of the scale of the Holocaust, is rarely a simple matter. Moreover, the ways in which one remembers such an event shape the consequent identity adopted by the individual. The paper examines the role of memory in the reshaping of identity: as Jews, as survivors, as heroes, as victims, and finally, as Jewish Americans.

In both Briar Rose (1992) and The Devil's Arithmetic (1988), Jane Yolen tells the stories of the Holocaust, even as the stories raise questions regarding the nature of heroism and what it means to be a victim. Most children's literature dealing with the Holocaust is predicated on the identity of the victim as Jew (see Johanna Reiss's The Upstairs Room, 1972; Doris Orgel's The Devil in Vienna, 1988; and Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, 1989, among others), the consequent atrocity—which is usually not dwelt upon in graphic detail—its associated trauma, the struggle for survival, and the necessity to remember. Yolen uses similar storytelling techniques but moves it one step forward. Her victims are not always Jews (thus there is the gay victim of Nazi persecution in Briar Rose), and the primary focus is not necessarily on the struggle for survival in Nazi-controlled territory (though both tales have Nazi camps at the center); rather at the core are other related issues: how identities—both individual and familial—may be shaped, reshaped and reinvented as a consequence of having survived concentration camps, and how remembering and forgetting are not imperatives but choices each individual comes to via circuitous and tortuous routes. The survivors' act of remembering the Nazi camps shapes and is shaped by the ways in which they live now and how they perceive their former life in the camp.

The modes of remembering by survivors of the Nazi camps are crucial in identity formation. This is so because these acts of retrieving memory are necessitated, rejected, and shaped by what their present is—as Jewish Americans; and the identity of individuals and families are shaped by how they relate to their survivor parents and grandparents when such memories are revived. How do these members reconfigure their families? How do Jewish Americans respond to their Jewish `core' when they are told of the camps?

In other words, this paper suggests that the very question of `Jewish American' identity for individuals and families becomes contingent upon how memories of the Holocaust are retrieved through storytelling. The Holocaust in memory and stories is a component of their psychological and social identity. Jane Yolen's work, in particular, situates acts of memory retrieval via stories within such contexts of Jewish American children growing up.

Jane Yolen's Holocaust Fiction, Devil's Arithmetic, Literary Inspiration, Holocaust Literature, Literary Imagination, Gemma memory, Josef Potocki, Vicissitudes, Jewish Americans, Literary Imagination.