Art of Jewish Children, the - 1936-1941

This book, which accompanies an inspiring, poignant traveling exhibition from Dusseldorf, reprints several works by professional artists who were persecuted, along with a number of brightly colored drawings by German-Jewish schoolchildren collected by the artist and teacher Julo Levin, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. The works from the segregated Jewish schools of Dusseldorf and Berlin call to mind the more familiar children's art from the Terezin concentration camp. They faced radically different working conditions--the former group lived at home in deceptively normal circumstances and had ready access to art supplies--but, writes Milton, research curator of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for all of these children, art was a form of therapy, the medium for the transmission of a cultural and religious heritage and a means of spiritual resistance and thereby survival. The students--whose often-gruesome fates are enumerated here--of the beloved Levin paint the ancient Jewish triumphs over Pharaoh in Egypt and Haman in Persia; conjure China and Africa; depict the mythological Prometheus and a contemporary house flying a flag with a swastika. (Sept.)