Yael Darr, Divided Unity: Jewish Writing for Children in the United States and Palestine at the Onset of the Second World War In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197577301.003.0005 Divided Unity: Jewish Writing for Children in the United States and Palestine at the Onset of the Second World War Yael Darr (TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY) At the onset of the Second World War, two exceptionally morbid novels for young Jewish readers were published on opposite sides of the world. In blunt and graphic language, they presented the dire situation of the Jews in Germany and Austria and the urgency of saving them. The general storylines are similar: in both books, young readers follow the upheavals in the lives of two children who, brutally separated from their parents and forced to fee their secure and stable world, confront antisemitism and fascism, hunger and murderous violence. Nevertheless there was a discursive chasm separating the two works. Their target readerships, although similar in age (children between the ages of 10 and 12), were so remote from one another geographically, ideologically, and culturally that one could assume that neither had read the other. Yankev Glatshteyn’s Emil un Karl (Emil and Karl) was published in New York in 1940 and was written in Yiddish, which the Bund and Yiddishist movements viewed as the dominant Jewish language. The other, Levin Kipnis’ Bintiv hapele (The Miraculous Path), was published in Tel Aviv in 1939 and written in Modern Hebrew, the language of Zionism and of a people seeking to revive itself in Eretz Israel. 1 Emil un Karl promotes the values of socialist solidarity and universal humanism. The plot is set in Vienna in the period following the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany (March 1938), against the background of the mass arrests and deportations of Jews from Germany and Austria, the events of Kristallnacht, and the severe maltreatment of the city’s Jews. At its center are two nine-year-old boys caught in the grips of the Nazi regime—Karl, the son of non-Jewish socialist par- ents opposed to the regime, and Emil, the son of Jewish parents forced to cope with Austria’s rapid decline into catastrophic Nazism. Both boys, who are cruelly orphaned, expelled from school, and torn from their familiar surroundings, fnd themselves alone in a hostile and dangerous environment. They are sheltered by two