To Read Only Children's Books

To read only children's books

To cherish only children's thoughts.

All grownup things to disperse far away

And to rise from a deep sorrow.

Osip Mandelstam 

trans. Dmitri Smirnov

This past week I began re-reading the Odyssey, in Robert Fagles magnificent translation.  As I've been reading, I've been reminded that my initial introduction to Homer was not so much textual as visual.  

As a child I was fortunate indeed to have come across the Golden Book Illiad and the Odyssey that immediately captured my imagination.  Even as a child, (or perhaps, particularly as a child) I must admit, many children's books seemed to me to be, well, childish.  Either clumsily drawn and painted, cloyingly sentimental or both.  More what the illustrator thought a child should want to look at rather at than what a child would actually want to see. 

But this book was different.  

Superbly illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen (not that at the time I paid any attention to who the artists were),  I was immediately drawn-in. I was enthralled by the wonderfully vibrant and dynamic line work and bold, expressive painting. 

By the flawless page composition . 
 

The large folio format of the book. 

And as a nine-year old, I loved the charioteers and heavily armored warriors with swords and spears fighting each other.

   

Inevitably, I suppose, beginning with the death of my sister, I learned more about deep sorrow than I'd ever thought possible.  I had to quickly put away children's thoughts.   

But that child's book which I was reminded of again this week, I continue to cherish.  

Steadfast Love

Our celebration of the memorial of St. Damian de Veuster (Damian the Leper) on May 10th is a reminder of what steadfast love looks like.  Fr. Damian, a Belgian priest, dedicated his life to those suffering from leprosy who were confined to the leprosarium on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.  He gave himself completely to the lepers, and after contracting leprosy (Hansen's disease), died among them and was buried with them.

I was reminded of the steadfast love of another generous and compassionate man, Dr. Janusz Korczak (Dr. Henryk Goldszmit), a Polish Jewish pediatrician, children's author and humanitarian.  He was a man of many gifts and talents.  A skilled and compassionate pediatrician,  he established just before the outbreak of World War I a Jewish children's orphanage, Dom Sierot in Warsaw.  As the director he implemented the principles of what was then called the New Education movement, which proposed a holistic pedagogy that took into account the moral, spiritual, physical and intellectual development of the child.

He wrote: "...children should be fully understood... must be respected and loved, treated as partners and friends... [and that] one ought to behave towards [each child as] a respected, thinking and feeling human being." Under the pen name Janusz Korczak, he wrote children's books that illustrated the challenges faced by the impoverished children who were in his care.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Dr. Korczak accompanied the children and staff of his orphanage into the Warsaw ghetto, rejecting generous offers by rescuers to bring him to safety.  He refused to be separated from the children of the orphanage and walked with them to the terrifying Umschlagplatz, where the Jews of Warsaw were assembled for deportation.  On August 7th, 1942, Dr. Korczak, with 190 orphan children in his care were killed at the Treblinka death camp.

A teacher who studied under his direction wrote:
"Everyone makes so much of Korczak's last decision to go with the children to the train.  But his whole life was made up of moral decisions.  The decision to become a children's doctor.  The decision to give up a full-time medical practice and writing career to take care of poor orphans, The decision to go with the Jewish orphans to the ghetto.  As for that last decision to go with the children to Treblinka, it was part of his nature.  It was who he was.  He wouldn't understand why we are making so much of it today."