Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record.

Introduction : Wild Things and Chosen Children -- A Word about Language -- Remembering the Way into Membership -- Crossing and Dwelling : Afterlives of Moses and Miriam. The Unbearable Lightness of Exodus ; Dwelling in Chosen Nostalgia -- Binding and Unbinding : Hauntings of Isaac and Jephthah's Daughter. Bound to Violence : Lynching, the Holocaust, and the Limits of Representation ; Unbound in Fantasy : Reading Monstrosity and the Supernatural ; Conclusion : The Abrahamic Bargain -- Appendix : Children's Books.

This book illuminates the importance of fear and suffering in shaping African American and Jewish children's literature. Through close readings of selected titles published since 1945, the author analyzes what is at stake in portraying religious history for young people, particularly when the histories in question are traumatic ones. In the wake of the Holocaust and lynchings, of the Middle Passage and flight from Eastern Europe's pogroms, children's literature provides diverse and complicated responses to the challenge of representing difficult collective pasts. In reading the work of various prominent authors, including Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, the author changes our understanding of North American religions. If children are the idealized recipients of the past, what does it mean to tell tales of suffering to children? This book asks readers to alter their worldviews about children's literature as an "innocent" enterprise, revisiting the genre in a darker and more unsettled light.