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- Title
Child Rearing in Jewish Families in Interwar Poland: An Attempt at a Historical-Anthropological Analysis.
- Authors
Bassok, Ido
- Abstract
The source material for this article is suppied by 150 (out of a total of over 300) autobiographies written by Jewish youths in the 1930s for three successive writing competitions operated by YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Institute) in Wilno. The article juxtaposes the lights and shadows, as it were, that writers of those autobiographies identified with regard to the ways in which children were brought up in religiously orthodox Jewish families. The article finds that, according to respondents, orthodox Jewish families were guided by the notion that a child is just one of many "threads in an infinite, divine, tapestry." That tapestry set a predestined course for children. Hence almost any means was regarded as legitimate in directing a child back onto its course if it strayed from it. Additionally, a child was not perceived as a unique individual with a specific personality that had to be safeguarded and protected in order to allow its sound development but as material to be molded according to a preset pattern. Such ideas enabled or even encouraged emotional estrangement, physical and emotional neglect, suppression of impulsive behavior among children, or even violent retribution for minor offences. At times violent parental behavior bordered on normative. On the other hand, the autobiographies reveal a lighter side in parent-child relations in which children were encouraged to excel in their studies and their parents took pride in their academic achievements. Some parents related to their children's birth as a unique occurrence, documented their children's early childhood in journals or in pictures and were even willing at times to give in to childish whims if they were connected to educational or spiritually-oriented activities.
- Subjects
CHILD rearing; PARENT-child relationships; CHILD psychology; CHILD development; INTERWAR Period (1918-1939)
- Publication
Gal-Ed: On the History & Culture of Polish Jewry, 2015, Vol 24, p75
- ISSN
0334-4258
- Publication type
Article