Street Urchins Research Articles

The Two Sides of Besprizornost’: Representations of Child Homelessness in Respublika SHKID and Pedagogicheskaia Poema

This article examines how the discourse about the re-education of besprizorniki , street urchins, became closely interconnected with the debate around the concept of the New Soviet Man in the 1920s and 1930s. This made child homelessness the ideal field in which to test different pedagogical approaches and the power of either the individual or the collective in the process of reforging human souls. By comparing two prototypical novels on besprizornost’ , Respublika SHKID ( The Republic of SHKID , 1926) and Pedagogicheskaia poema ( Pedagogical Poem , 1933–35), this article analyzes how the discourse on children’s re-education and conversion was portrayed differently in literature, reflecting the changes in Soviet society under Stalin and in the approach to street urchins and children in this period.

Urchin at War: The Tale of a Leipzig Rascal and his Lutheran Granny under Bombs in Nazi Germany by Uwe Siemon-Netto

Reviewed by: Urchin at War: The Tale of a Leipzig Rascal and his Lutheran Granny under Bombs in Nazi Germany by Uwe Siemon-Netto Robert Benne Urchin at War: The Tale of a Leipzig Rascal and his Lutheran Granny under Bombs in Nazi Germany. By Uwe Siemon-Netto. Irvine, California: 1517 Publishing, 2021. 286 pp. This remarkable memoir covers only the first eleven years of Uwe Siemon-Netto's life. Many Lutherans are aware of Siemon-Netto's work, The Fabricated Luther (1995), where he dispels the claims that Luther was to blame for the rise of Nazism. In that book he gave a few vignettes of his life as a child growing up in the war years. Happily, this engaging book, one of three planned, covers in colorful detail his early years in war-torn Leipzig. Given the daily bombing, it is a wonder that he lived to tell his story. The main story involves a rather distinguished anti-Nazi Lutheran family's struggle to survive the World War II years in Leipzig in the midst of daily bombings by the Allies, on the one hand, and intense Nazi pressures to conform, on the other. One word in the title—urchin—does indicate one truth illustrated richly: Uwe was a member of a kids' gang that did lots of rascally things, such as derailing trolleys. But there is quite another set of ingredients in his growing up. His father was a highly educated lawyer who was blinded in WWI. His mother was a budding concert singer. His grandmother, the central character in the book (besides the author), was a strong, well-educated, devout Lutheran, whose steady strength carried the whole family though those harrowing days. She was a real Mensch who calmly taught Luther's Catechism to Uwe as they took cover in the bomb shelters during the daily bombings. Uwe was brought up to appreciate Bach's music and Lutheran theology. Fine literature and art were part of the family's heritage. Uwe was hardly an ignorant street urchin, though he did have enough freedom to act like a naughty little boy. In their desire to protect Uwe from the bombs, his parents sent him to a country town to live with a Lutheran pastor and his family. What seemed like a good prospect turned out to be a nightmare of abuse and heresy. The pastor was an ardent Nazi who preached Nazi propaganda from the pulpit. He and his family ostracized and humiliated Uwe because he used French words and spoke high German. The memoir does depict vicious Nazis who affected their [End Page 243] lives, but spends more time on the many Germans—ordinary and extraordinary—who despised and resisted the Nazis in their own quiet yet dangerous ways. His experience of the war years is narrated by Siemon-Netto as he returns to visit and walk around his beloved Leipzig, now rebuilt and thriving. What is striking is his amazing recall of so many details of his early life. Certainly the dramatic—and frightening—experiences he had account for some of that recall. It is more likely, however, that he already possessed some of the gifts he needed to become the accomplished journalist that he became later in life. The book is a handsome and substantial one, replete with many pictures from that time. I found the book both edifying and entertaining. I eagerly await the sequels to his remarkable story. I recommend the book to all readers, but especially to Lutherans. Robert Benne Institute of Lutheran Theology Brookings, South Dakota Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

The Connection between Language and Identity: the Yoruba-Arabic Literates and The Street Urchins of Ibadan

The current paper is dedicated to investigate the connection between language and identity, with a special reference to two ambivalent social groups in Ibadan, i.e., the Yoruba-Arab literates and the street urchins. The research shall be carried out with samples of online videos as well as other online resources. One major phenomenon that connects people with varying degrees of social status, religious, ages etc. is the language they speak. In every society, language plays a herculean task in reflecting the identity of the people, and in most times, its usage shows the social class of the speaker. It is incontrovertible that, language and identity go together. We identify people and affiliate them with certain tribe, race or ethnic as the result of language they speak. In other words, we may say, there is no identity without language, this is because the language we speak gives people the opportunity to link us with certain community.

Makarenko's and Țurcanu's Re-Education Projects: Debunking a Myth in Romanian Historiography

Makarenko's and Țurcanu's Re-Education Projects:Debunking a Myth in Romanian Historiography Arleen Ionescu This article discusses two "re-education" campaigns that have often been colocated by Romanian historiography: Anton Semyonovich Makarenko's re-education of delinquents in the Soviet Union (1917–1936), and Eugen Ţurcanu's re-education of prisoners in Romania (1949–1952). My aim is to demonstrate that although Makarenko's and Ţurcanu's projects of engineering a New Man show structural analogies, the texture of the experience was very different. I therefore propose an original Nietzschean reading of both projects, not from a historical perspective but rather as a history of ideas, where "'[a]ction at a distance' seems to be admissible in the field of intellectual influences" (Wiener 537). Without arguing that Makarenko and Ţurcanu were directly drawing on Nietzsche, my exploration of how their contemporaries distorted and adjusted Nietzsche's dream of the Übermensch, as well as his ideas of the "will to power" and asceticism, can shed new light on the differences between the two projects. Makarenko was in charge of manufacturing the New Man in two self-supporting orphanages for besprizorniki (street urchins), the Gorky Colony (1917–1928) and the Dzerzhinsky labor commune (1928–1936). His reflections on the former appeared in Pedagogicheskaia poema (The Pedagogical Poem, translated as The Road to Life: An Epic of Education), and those on the latter in Flagi na bashnyakh (Flags on the Battlements, translated as Learning to Live). Ţurcanu's program took place in the gruesome period of Stalinization when re-education was sought to turn political prisoners into New Men. By 1952, when news about Piteşti Prison spread in the West, the regime needed to prove itself innocent and therefore charged Țurcanu and his assistants with conspiracy. Alexandru [End Page 1] Dumitrescu, the prison's director, Tudor Sepeanu, former director of the Bucharest Securitate (Romanian Secret Service), and the military doctor Viorel Bărbosu were charged with negligence and executed (1954–1957). The Pitești enterprise was described as "a criminal activity of a gang of legionaries, conducted in prison because of the lack of vigilance and the criminal negligence of some leaders of the respective prisons" (ASRI 229). For 36 years (1981–2017), Țurcanu's experiment was regarded by historians as originating from Makarenko's pedagogy, in particular his book The Road to Life. Reading the Pitești historiography, however, we can see that only one source was repeatedly used: Virgil Ierunca's 1981 Pitești, based on information that the Romanian historian gathered from interviews with witnesses who managed to flee Romania. Although two books written by an indirect witness, former convict of Aiud Prison Dumitru Bacu (1963) and Pitești inmate Grigore Dumitrescu (1978) preceded Ierunca's account, his book became so prominent that it was re-printed repeatedly by Humanitas (1990, 1991, 2007, 2008, 2011, and 2013) under the new title Fenomenul Pitești (The Pitești Phenomenon) that was meant to suggest the event's exceptionality. Aware of the regime's manipulations, Ierunca trusted only memoir sources, a perfectly ethical position at that time, since he "witnessed witnessing" to unprecedented torture (see Trezise). Ierunca's conclusions were that "The Securitate perfected a plan to liquidate the moral resistance of the young political detainees, using a group of inmates led by Eugen Ţurcanu, that was going to put in practice, as ordinary law, Makarenko's well-known theories" (18–19).1 An essential book that quotes Ierunca yet, unlike other studies, does not link the two experiments is Courtois et al., Le livre noir du communisme (The Black Book of Communism), which mentions only that "[t]he objective was the re-education of political prisoners, combining the texts of communist doctrine with physical and moral torture" (457), without clarifying which texts were at stake. Studies that draw a connection between Ţurcanu and Makarenko include The Presidential Commission's Final Report for the Analysis of Communist Dictatorship (Tismăneanu et al. 2007: 614n229), which nevertheless asserts that subsequent investigations could confirm or refute this view (614); Bottoni (2010), which asserts that Makarenko's theories "were applied to reeducate young 'fascists'" (61); and [End Page 2] Tismaneanu's 2012...

Disclosing Deceitful Behavior in Aladdin (2019): The Characters’ Violation of Grice’s Maxims

In spite of the fact that Grice’s maxims direct the dyad talk exchange to glide gently, some people disobey for certain rational grounds or motives: one of them is hiding a lie. Aladdin (2019) was the remake of the 1992 American musical fantasy film which described a kind-hearted street urchin (Aladdin) and a power-hungry grand vizier ( Jafar) who were vying for a magic lamp that had the power to make their deepest wishes come true. Princess Jasmine’s introduction enlivened the story because her beauty was so tempting that Aladdin, whose social stratification was different, fell passionately in love with her. Jafar’s ambitious appetency to take over the kingdom fired the conflicts among the characters. All enthusiasms drove these fictitious characters to do anything, including entailing lies. Unriddling the violation of Grice’s (1975) maxims and detailing Ekman’s (1992) Detecting Deceit theory, comprising word, voice and body, this investigation was designed qualitatively to disclose the characters’ deceitful behavior and find out the reasons behind it. Some of the reasons for telling a lie, according to Turner, Edgley and Olmstead (1975) are covering to save face, to maintain/terminate a relationship, to avoid tension/conflict, and to control the situation; these were operated in the study. It was found that there were groups who 1) violated the maxims of quantity, quality and manner; 2) violated the maxims of quantity, quality and relevant; and 3) violated the maxims of quality, manner and relevant. The most frequently found reasons for why they violated the maxims were to save face, to exploit others and to terminate the interaction. The results show that people tend to deceive others in order to save face in social situations and to gain power over others by violating multiple maxims.
 Keywords: deceitful behavior, reasons of deception, violated maxims

The shaping of a molecular linguist: How a career studying DNA energetics revealed the language of molecular communication

My personal and professional journeys have been far from predictable based on my early childhood. Owing to a range of serendipitous influences, I miraculously transitioned from a rebellious, apathetic teenage street urchin who did poorly in school to a highly motivated, disciplined, and ambitious academic honors student. I was the proverbial “late bloomer.” Ultimately, I earned my PhD in biophysical chemistry at Yale, followed by a postdoc fellowship at Berkeley. These two meccas of thermodynamics, coupled with my deep fascination with biology, instilled in me a passion to pursue an academic career focused on mapping the energy landscapes of biological systems. I viewed differential energetics as the language of molecular communication that would dictate and control biological structures, as well as modulate the modes of action associated with biological functions. I wanted to be a “molecular linguist.” For the next 50 years, my group and I used a combination of spectroscopic and calorimetric techniques to characterize the energy profiles of the polymorphic conformational space of DNA molecules, their differential ligand-binding properties, and the energy landscapes associated with mutagenic DNA damage recognition, repair, and replication. As elaborated below, the resultant energy databases have enabled the development of quantitative molecular biology through the rational design of primers, probes, and arrays for diagnostic, therapeutic, and molecular-profiling protocols, which collectively have contributed to a myriad of biomedical assays. Such profiling is further justified by yielding unique energy-based insights that complement and expand elegant, structure-based understandings of biological processes.

The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street by Lauren Oliver

Reviewed by: The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street by Lauren Oliver Fiona Hartley-Kroeger Oliver, Lauren The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street; illus. by Ethan M. Aldridge. Harper, 2020 [384p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-234507-3 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-234509-7 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-7 When Cordelia's veterinarian father disappears, she enlists the help of Gregory, a friendly street urchin, and his zuppy (zombie puppy) Cabal to track down those responsible. Accompanied also by a baby dragon, an irascible farting filch (chimp-like creature) aptly named Icky, and an old friend-turned-enemy-turnedfriend-again, Cordelia embarks on a search that becomes a series of chase scenes, narrow escapes, and acts of derring-do, from the streets of Boston to New York City to Nova Scotia and back again. Cordelia's idyllic early life, endearingly filled with personable monsters and covert monster-finding excursions with her father, has a tragic underside: her academic mother died while on a quest to prove that monsters are legitimate creatures of nature, not (as some believe) unnatural freaks of evolution. The evolutionary biology doesn't really hold water, but it's still an intriguing approach to the manual-of-magical-creatures genre, and Oliver retains a keen sense for the emotional dynamics of pre-adolescent girl friendships. The recurring meditations on the true nature of monstrosity and the unjust devaluing of lives may offer routes into timely conversations about the lives our own time devalues. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Road to Llorona Park by Christopher Carmona

Reviewed by: The Road to Llorona Park by Christopher Carmona David Langston (bio) The Road to Llorona Park By Christopher Carmona Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2016. 148 pp. ISBN: 978-1-62288-117-8 With the thoughtful short-story collection, The Road to Llorona Park, Christopher Carmona has contributed his own chapter to the traditional "defenses of literature," which justifies fiction for presenting models of principled (or unprincipled) conduct that offer ethical guidance: as Kenneth Burke puts it, literature proffers equipment for living. In a set of vivid episodes and character studies, Carmona makes a notable addendum to this tradition. For him stories are independent forces famished for lodgment in the mind and in the physical action of a vigilant, careful, and caring intelligence. This central theme structures the opening tale, "What the Story Eats," in which three street children, brothers Ramses and Moises, and a girl, Tzipora, meet La Anciana, who—in classic fairy-tale mode—dwells by a river beneath a bridge and hungers for "living stories" that will sustain her. Carmona associates this aged crone with the fairy-tale figure "La Llorona," the weeping woman of Mexican folklore who drowns children, except Carmona adds a crucial humanizing caveat: La Anciana is "more Indian" (11). The children's names suggest we have entered the zone of fable as they echo Cecil B. DeMille's fanciful telling of the Moses story in his 1956 film, The Ten Commandments, in which Moses, married to Zipporah, resists the tyranny of his brother, the Pharoah Ramses. Carmona's ironic film analogy brings symbolic density to the brothers' early-pubescent rivalry over Tzipora, but also suggests a more serious theme: the life-giving stories sought by La Anciana have a larger mythopoeic potential to shape entire cultures. This is suggested in the way she communicates with Moises and Tziporah in a language that remains incomprehensible to Ramses and an outside observer, a news reporter. The journalist has been dispatched to write a human interest story that he sneeringly regards as ephemeral rubbish about street urchins surviving by selling chewing gum (eating without nutrition). The children and the old woman know better, however; their world demands fresh stories that will rejuvenate its inhabitants. In Carmona's cardinal metaphor, even the stories by an obtuse journalist may devour readers in a moment of shared consumption to assuage their common hunger. Throughout the book, Carmona associates female figures with the stories. Like the old woman under the bridge, these women hover at boundaries that give them an ambiguous existence. They readily cross and re-cross boundaries of life and death, of male and female gender, of national location, and of language. Every boundary crossing provokes a need for appropriate linguistic performance (a story, a poem, a legal brief, a comforting conversation) that will breathe fresh life into the reality of their perpetual exile. When forging those connections succeeds, the resulting mutual understanding and communication allays the disquiet of estrangement and loss. Carmona extends his association of La Llorona beyond La Anciana to all of these shape-shifting female figures. But Carmona's own narratives aim to reshape the tragic implications of the Llorona myth by developing some striking and very smart variations of the archetype. Parallel to Chicanx feminists who have transvalued the negative traditional images of women to ascribe virtue and strength to figures formerly ridiculed or denigrated, Carmona aims for understanding that the triumph, irony, endurance, and erotic passion of his characters are key elements in their continual metamorphosis and reinvention. Carmona's incarnations of Llorona annul her reputation as the feared "stealer of children" and mutate into various guises that promise to transcend the tragic dead end of the original folktale. For example, in one of the more arresting tales, "The Sublime Dress," a beautiful female outcast composes a story about a red dress hanging on her lover's wall, a story that transfigures the clothing (another costume, a form waiting to give shape and grace to a body) into a vibrant representation of the two lovers' yearnings and dreams. In the eponymous story at the book's center, Carmona further elaborates the Llorona...

Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Communication to the UN Human Rights Committee Concerning the Philippiness Violation of the Human Rights of Children Prisoners under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)

The Philippine state has been violating the non-derogable right to equality and non-discrimination of child prisoners, a peremptory principle of international law, on the ground of “sex… social origin, property, birth, or other status” as laid down under Article 2, Article 24, and Article 26 of the Covenant. Virtually all child prisoners come from the poorest of the poor as well. Child prisoners detained by police officers in the company of adult crime suspects include prostituted girls, children hooked on substance abuse, street urchins, child scavengers, and children with mental disabilities.With the conspiratorial acquiescence, tacit consent, and implicit authority of the President and her top officials, and in violation of the principle of equality under Paragraphs 7, 10, and 12 of Committee General Comment 18, police officers commit the crime of jailing the children of the poorest of the poor on account of their being poor, sex (with respect to girls), poor social origins, and lack of property. The President down to the police officers know that these prisoners come from the economically marginalized and politically powerless sectors of society and therefore could not stand up to defend their human rights in the face of such onslaughts from the state. This reveals the discriminatory nature of the crime of jailing children with adult crime suspects, which the President and top officials refuse to officially acknowledge and stop until now, in violation of Articles 2(1), 24, and 26.The Philippine state has been committing a form of unlawful discrimination based on the status of the child prisoners as children of the poorest of the poor, on account of their being poor, their sex (as far as girl prisoners are concerned), and of their tender age which render them defenseless and powerless to rise up in defense of their dignity and human rights in the face of the systematic, organized, and widespread onslaught by law enforcers acting under color of official authority and title from the President who is their commander-in-chief. This violates Article 26 as elucidated in Committee General Comment 28 (Paragraphs 3, 4, and 15).These state functionaries know and/or are in a position to know that these child prisoners are mostly unlettered, economically marginalized, and politically powerless; thus, enabling them to commit this institutionalized discrimination against child prisoners with impunity. The President, et. al., know and/or are in a position to know that these children are incapable of defending and protecting their rights amid the onslaughts from the law enforcers who tacitly and indirectly receive their orders from the Philippine President, who is their Commander-in-Chief.

Teaching English-Yoruba Prosodies in Context: Connectivity in Disparity

The paper discusses a core feature that differentiates Nigerian English from other native Standard English varieties, namely the English prosodies of Stress-Rhythm-Intonation, in the light of the dominant L2 transfer feature of Nigerian spoken English’s Yoruba ‘tone-prominence’. Particular attention is given to Pitch which translates phonetically into Yoruba ‘Tones’. It discusses how the language use of popular street urchins in Lagos, Nigeria (popularly called ‘Area boys’) has been successfully used (among other registers) to teach the English prosodies of stress (embedding ‘pitch’), Rhythm and Intonation (also embedding ‘pitch’) in a multilingual but largely Yoruba L2 ‘tone-prominence’ speech community. A prosodic theoretical framework is adopted in the discussions and analysisof data, hitherto used in teaching a graduating class of B.A. English students who had been taught courses in English phonology throughout their four year course. It is argued that despite the disparity between the two language systems of Yoruba and English at the prosodic level, the language of ‘Lagos Area Boys’ creates some connectivity which the typical undergraduate student of English can identify with and which is used to successfully teach Pitch in particular, even though that language register is largely ‘tone-prominence’ based. Moving from the known to the unknown is always a useful teaching methodology and this approach has been employed here. Thus, an established connectivity in disparity can and indeed has, been used successfully within the Yoruba-English L2 language contact situation.

The Past Prepares the Future: A Conversation with Burundian Novelist Roland Rugero

12 worldliteraturetoday.org WLT interview A Conversation with Burundian Novelist Roland Rugero Emily Hunt & David Shook R oland Rugero (b. 1986) grew up in exile from his native Burundi but returned as soon as he could to pursue his education and eventually work as a professional journalist and writer. His second novel, Baho!, was published in France in 2012 and is forthcoming in English in 2015 (Phoneme Media), in a translation from the French by Christopher Schaefer. An active booster of Burundian literature, Rugero cofounded the Samandari literary workshop, which meets weekly in Bujumbura, and launched both the Frenchlanguage short-story Prix Michel Kayoya, now in its fourth year, and the English-language Andika Prize, now in its first. Rugero recently spent ten weeks at Iowa ’s International Writing Program. Shortly thereafter we corresponded about his upbringing as a refugee, the sociopolitical dimensions of his writing and being a writer, and the use of Kirundi in his writing. photo : creg bal The Past Prepares the Future September–October 2014 • 13 Emily Hunt & David Shook: How did your childhood as a refugee shape you as a writer? What about as a reader? How did you learn to read—and what—growing up between places, across borders? Roland Rugero: I left Burundi for the first time and became a refugee when I was seven. I left for Rwanda in September 1993, around the same time as the assassination of President Ndadaye. Three months later, I returned to Burundi before leaving again to Tanzania, around the time of President Ntaryamira’s death. I stayed there for four years. Even as a child, the exile was a very painful experience: Burundi was the home to which I truly wanted to return. I spent a lot of time staring at Lake Tanganyika. I really felt like a refugee, mkimbizi in Swahili (literally, “he who runs”). I wanted to run backward, like I did when I was returning home from Kinindo’s elementary school. Exile gave me time for my first silences, far from the silly games of my schoolmates at the Centre Scolaire Congolais, in Kigoma. The time for my first readings, for wanting to understand, through the rare newspapers that I would find from Burundi, what was happening, and why, and to what end. Otherwise, I technically learned to read as a little street urchin, at the Stella Matutina primary school. My father always wanted us to attend public school. Also, I had the fortune, as I understood it much later, to grow up without television in my family home: my time there was reserved for reading . I read children and young-adult books (OuiOui , Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, Jules Verne), some comic books, scientific journals, and soon after, crime novels, Hugo, a little philosophy . . . EH & DS: You also work as a journalist. How does that work interact with your work as a novelist ? What is the state of Burundian journalism today? RR: The journalist, like the author, is a griot of time. The difference between them? The former is more used to urgency, to time passing faster and faster. The rapid time of the journalist thus creates the literary account that I develop with the nonchalance of an author. In my opinion, Burundian journalism today suffers doubly: first, as journalism does throughout the world (albeit to different degrees), from predatory powers, and second, for not properly demonstrating and giving full justice to the formidable space of expression taking place in Burundi. EH & DS: When and why did you decide to become a novelist? Is writing fiction political? RR: Fiction that recounts the human, in all its forms, is always political. In my view, mankind is never alone in a novel, whatever he may be. He is at least two, with the author of the story. With this, a city of interactions thus forms, a polis springs up. But I never really decided to be a novelist. I just realized that I could write stories. EH & DS: If the action of eating is linked to the present, what does the feeling of hunger imply, and how does that motivate your novella’s characters? RR: Since eating is linked to the present, hunger becomes a motor that pushes the characters...

Writing a Life into History, Writing Black Mamba Boy: Nadifa Mohamed in Conversation

Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel, Black Mamba Boy (2010), traces the incredible—and incredibly precarious—journey of Jama, a young, orphaned Somali boy, from childhood to adulthood, from his experience as a street urchin in Aden to those of an askari, sailor, and entrepreneur. Following the death of his mother, Jama proves himself a born survivor as he treks across the Horn of Africa in search of his father, Guure. When Guure is fatally injured in a car crash just before the much anticipated reunion, Jama continues his journey across and beyond the continent to make a life for himself. The novel thus takes us from Yemen in the 1930s across the breadth of Northeast Africa and parts of the Middle East—Hargeisa, then British Somaliland, Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, and Palestine—to a depressed late-1940s Wales, before the protagonist’s return to his wife and son in southwestern Eritrea, near Sudan. Drawing on the life experience of Nadifa Mohamed’s father, the narrative (in the British edition) is recounted by the implied author, Jama’s adult child, though not necessarily the infant he returns to at the end of the novel.1 The book grew out of an oral history project and was initially conceived as her father’s biography, yet Nadifa Mohamed found herself gradually

Without a Family: Public Order, Social Welfare and Street Children in the Wartime Soviet Union

Homeless and delinquent children presented a serious problem for public order in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Even though on paper the government was committed to re‐socialisation of street children, in practice it was a low priority for the state, busy fighting a war. The state's interventionist policies were more about exercising control over the population than protecting the children from the hardships of war. Inattentive to the consequences of its actions, the system not only undermined its own child welfare programme by producing additional orphans and displaced children, but also continued to spawn street urchins and delinquents through poor administration of criminal justice, the criminalisation of labour violations and the ineffective management of local resources. As a result, not only did the Stalinist state fail to live up to the image of an “extended family”, it had taken upon itself, but it also enacted some of the most abusive policies in the history of Soviet child welfare, sending out public volunteers to clean up the mess afterwards.

The ‘Piccaninny’: racialized childhood, disinheritance, acquisition and child beauty

The dissemination of the Piccaninny type critically depended on the print media whose development coincided with, and underpinned, colonial modernity. Racialized child types such as the Piccaninny were put to work in the colonial imagination to set down very distinct claims to land ownership, inheritance, dispossession and eradication. While a number of such child types reflect ideas of inheritance in colonial discourse, such as the Bush Baby, Wild Child, Street Urchin, Drover's Boy, Half-caste and Lost Child, this paper concentrates on the Piccaninny type, tracing its recurrence and meanings in Australian cultural forms. It accounts for the recurrence of this figure of childhood as a racialized type, and examines the ways Australia put images of Indigenous children to work in producing a mythology of national identity and tenure. The Piccaninny type encapsulated an acquisitive impulse over colonized children that brought about their disinheritance—either through their removal from their families or through the dispossession of their homelands. Within this setting black child beauty as a commodity form for white consumption, in imagery, ceramics, fabrics and popular ephemera, acted as a fetish which disavowed the injury of these children's disinheritance and delimited their cultural presence to cute domestic and tourist bric-a-brac. The Piccaninny denoted racialized children and, this paper argues, was deployed in colonial discourse to outline the lineage of inheritance, particularly in land tenure.

Jesus’ affection towards children and Matthew’s tale of two kings

On account of multiple and independent attestations in early Christian literature Jesus’ affection towards children can be taken as historical authentic. From a perspective of the social stratification of first-century Herodian Palestine, this article argues that it is possible to consider these children as part of the expendable class. Neither Mark nor its parallel texts in the other Gospels refer to parents bringing these children to Jesus. They seem to be “street urchins”. In this article the episode where Jesus defends the cause of fatherless children in the Synoptic Gospels is interpreted from the perspective of Matthew’s version of Jesus’ affection towards children. The aim is to demonstrate that Matthew situates the beginning and end of Jesus’ public ministry within the context of Jesus’ relationship to children. Jesus’ baptism by John (Mt 3:15) and Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem (Mt 21:1-17) form the two poles of his ministry in Matthew. Both episodes are described as a kind of “cleansing of the temple”. Both incidents were (in a midrash fashion) understood by Matthew as fulfilment of Scripture. The baptism scene is a Matthean allusion to Isaiah 1:13-17 and the record of the entry into Jerusalem is an explicit interpretation of Jeremiah 7:1-8.

DVD Chronicle: Our Man in Havana , and: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , and: Young and Innocent , and: La Ronde , and: Le Plaisir, and: The Earrings of Madame de, and: City Girl (review)

Reviewed by: DVD Chronicle: Our Man in Havana, and: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and: Young and Innocent, and: La Ronde, and: Le Plaisir, and: The Earrings of Madame de, and: City Girl Jefferson Hunter (bio) DVD Chronicle: Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, director, 1959), Sony PicturesThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Martin Ritt, director, 1965), Criterion CollectionYoung and Innocent (Alfred Hitchcock, director, 1937), MGMLa Ronde (Max Ophüls, director, 1950), Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, director, 1952), and The Earrings of Madame de... (Max Ophüls, director, 1953), all from Criterion CollectionCity Girl (F. W. Murnau, director, 1930), from the Murnau, Borzage and Fox boxed set, Twentieth Century Fox Burl Ives, Noël Coward, Maureen O’Hara, Ralph Richardson, Ernie Kovacs, and Alec Guinness, not to mention Rachel Roberts in a tiny uncredited part: an improbable cast list for a film, one would say, a fantasy or a joke, and yet it is quite real, the roster of American and English players assembled in 1959 for Our Man in Havana, scripted by Graham Greene after his own novel, and produced and directed by Carol Reed. This is a film which has long been unavailable, making its recent appearance on DVD, and the manifold pleasures it offers, all the more welcome. The cast works well together. Guinness takes the lead as Jim Wormold, a middle-aged salesman of vacuum cleaners in Batista’s Havana, who in order to spoil his teenage daughter (convent-raised, but longing for a horse) allows himself to be recruited as a British spy. The recruiter is played by Coward; the recruiter’s boss in London by Richardson; Wormold’s dipsomaniac German friend Hasselbacher by Ives, for once not required to bring his guitar and folk-song act to the set; the threatening Cuban policeman Captain Segura by Kovacs, who keeps his comic flamboyance well down but does get to smoke cigars; and Wormold’s secretary Beatrice by O’Hara. Beatrice falls gradually and quite believably in love with Wormold, but not with the “intelligence” he cables in cipher back to London, since that is entirely fictitious, as fictitious as the list of Cuban subagents who supply it. That ominous new military installation out in the mountains, which so excites the boffins in Whitehall and earns a generous bonus for our man in Havana? It is nothing but Wormold’s sketch of one of his Hoovers. Clearly, with Our Man in Havana, we are situated in the moral terrain Greene made familiar in book after book. It is a place where secret services, whether “theirs” or “ours” it makes no matter, are equally inhuman and ridiculous, and where the loyalty that matters is not to countries but to other people (“to love,” Beatrice says, adding that she doesn’t think any [End Page 446] one country “means all that much”). Hard-nosed political reality in the twentieth century is “not something to be faced,” Hasselbacher observes sadly, standing at the bar and facing not much more than the glass in his hand and his own great paunch. The mise-en-scène of the film is recognizably Greeneland too, though in its louche rather than seedy aspect: a Havana full of lottery-ticket sellers, whores, pimps, and street urchins through which Guinness as Wormold passes in crumpled white tropical suitings with a preoccupied frown or a Holy Fool’s smile on his face, while the Cuban police patrol in their big-finned American sedans. Our Man in Havana, a few cuts aside, is very faithful to its source novel; Greene was accustomed to working hand in hand with Carol Reed, who of course had directed the two brilliant Greene adaptations of the late 1940s, The Fallen Idol and TheThird Man. The novelist and the director planned Our Man in Havana together in Brighton, and Greene was present for location shooting in Cuba in March, 1959, a process complicated by the recent victory of the Fidelistas, who in their puritanical way insisted on toning down some of the story’s loucheness and covering up some of the nightclub dancers’ nudity. According to Greene’s biographer Norman Sherry...

Out of an Old Toy Chest

Out of an Old Toy Chest Marina Warner (bio) The Soul of the Toy In Baudelaire’s essay “La Morale du joujou,” written in l853, he remembers how the toyshop owner Madame Pancoucke, all wrapped in velvet and furs, beckoned the young Charles to choose something from her “treasure store for children.” Looking back down the years, the poet still sees in his mind’s eye the magic room overflowing with toys from floor to ceiling that this “Fée du joujou” (Toy Fairy) opened to him. Without a second thought, he picked out “the most beautiful, the most expensive, the most garish, the freshest and the most bizarre of the playthings.” But his horrified mother insisted he choose another, less extravagant present, and the little Baudelaire had to resign himself and relinquish his toy. The word joujou (not jouet, the usual word for toy) is almost a pet name with a nursery ring like a “teddy” or a “dolly”; its repetition hints at baby talk and hence at playing, as when a child exchanges endearments and questions with a toy in imaginary conversations and elaborate scenarios. The toy in so many children’s games becomes part of an ongoing story and in this way initiates the first invented narratives in the child’s life. That scene of seduction, pleasure, and frustration with Mme. Pancoucke and his own mother catches Baudelaire’s lasting affection and reasoned admiration for toys. He called them “cette statuaire singulière” (this singular statuary); he was first a poet and then an art critic rather than a novelist, and as a flâneur of the boulevards and the galleries, he adopted a language of aesthetics, treating toys as an unusual form of sculpture. He recalls in pleasurable detail the miniature worlds conjured by Victorian nursery games and child’s play—from tiny “diligences” or mail coaches to detailed model furniture. But above all he muses in wonder at children’s ability to play without props or models, creating narratives, dialogue, and dramas [End Page 3] through fantasy alone: “All children talk to their toys; toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced by the camera obscura of their small brains. Children bear witness through their games to their great faculty of abstraction and their high imaginative power. They play without playthings.”1 Significantly, Baudelaire goes on to make the connection to creativity in general: “[The child’s] facility to satisfy the imagination shows the spirituality of childhood in its artistic conceptions. The plaything is the first initiation of a child to art.” Nothing will ever attain again, he says, the same degree of liveliness, or, crucially, the same intensity of presence or belief. For Baudelaire, the realization of childish make-believe cannot be regained: “Isn’t all of life found there in miniature, and much more vivid in colour, cleaner and shinier than real life?”2 Yet Baudelaire’s essay lingers on the frustration that dims these vivid, shiny colors, for children, he says, also want to see the soul of a toy. He describes how they will turn about their playthings and shake them, hurl them to the ground, and often break them in their bafflement and even rage at their stubborn refusal to awaken into life. His meditation hints that at the point when make-believe fails, the vitality of toys vanishes and produces a primal encounter with mortality: “But where is the soul? It’s here that bewilderment and sadness begin.”3 The beginning of imagining stories brings with it frustration that the story is not powerful enough—it is not the real thing. In a connected prose poem entitled “Le Joujou du pauvre,” published nine years later, Baudelaire pursues this thought, as he observes an exchange between a beautiful, pampered child inside the exclusive railed park of a chateau. He has “a splendid toy, as fresh as its master, varnished, gilded, clothed in a purple dress and covered with plumes and glitter.”4 But the rich child is not interested in his doll, for on the other side of the railings a ragged street urchin shows him, in a little cage which he shakes about, a living rat—”drawn...

The Magic Thief (review)

Reviewed by: The Magic Thief Katrina Bromann Prineas, Sarah; The Magic Thief; illus. by Antonio Javier Caparo. HarperCollins, 2008; [448p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-06-137588-0 $17.89 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-137587-3 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 5-9 The city of Wellmet is in serious trouble due to a dramatic decline in its level of magic. The situation threatens to upset the already delicate balance of power between the duchess, who rules the city from her palace on the east side of the river in Sunrise, the Underlord Crowe, who keeps a mafia-like grip on the west side in Twilight, and the magisters, who control the magic from their islands in the middle of the river. Enter Conn, a raggedy street urchin who picks the pocket of wizard Nevery, but instead of slipping a handful of coins, he accidentally snatches the magister's locus magicalicus, or wizardly stone. That his grave trespass does not kill him interests both him and Nevery; Conn thinks he'll make a good wizard's apprentice, while Nevery thinks he'll make a useful servant. Confusion over his exact status gets ironed out after he moves in with Nevery and hired muscle Benet; Nevery constantly underestimates the boy, but quick learner Conn doggedly pursues his own locus magicalicus and his status as a wizard, as well as taking a keen interest and vital role in halting the leaking magic and saving the city. Chapters are narrated by Conn, who tends to play his cards close to his chest; he is a careful thinker, however, and readers are lucky to be privy to his constant reflections, wry observations, and honest assessments. Journal entries at the end of each chapter provide terse recaps from Nevery's point of view, and chapter-header sketches serve to further engage the audience. Prineas exercises tight control over her characters, rendering their actions credible and offering surprising revelations about their histories. Conn's voice is particularly solid, both measured and intense, making this a delight to read aesthetically, and additional appeal stems from the compelling plot and attractive setting. This is the first in an anticipated trilogy, and since Conn has a lot yet to learn, he is sure to draw avid fans back for more. [End Page 490] Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Response to Review of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism—Getting Child Soldiers Right

239 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 17 No. 3 (2007) ISSN: 1546-2250 Response to Review of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism—Getting Child Soldiers Right David M. Rosen Fairleigh Dickinson University Madison, New Jersey Citation: Rosen, David M.. (2007). "Response to Review of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism— Getting Child Soldiers Right." Children, Youth and Environments 17 (3). Read this Book Review The main thrust of my book Armies of the Young is to place the issue of child soldiers in historical and comparative context and in doing so to restore to children’s lives a sense of agency that has been stripped away by contemporary humanitarian accounts of children at war. I appreciate the remarks made by the reviewer. Western attitudes toward child soldiers have undergone a seismic shift. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries the child soldier-hero was widely celebrated in Western literature, ranging from the street urchin Gavroche in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables,to the boy spy Kim in Kipling’s eponymous novel, to Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain. In the real world, young Sioux boys fought against Custer at Little Big Horn, Jewish children served in Zionist and socialist resistance groups that fought the Nazis in the Warsawghetto and in the Sovietbacked partisan armies of Eastern Europe, and boys and girls fought in the Mau Mau rebellion against the British in Kenya. Yet over the last few decades, our image of the child as soldier has radically changed. Johnny Tremain has been replaced by Agu, the battered victim of a nameless war in Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation and the term “child soldier” now denotes the suffering of children at the hand of adults. No one can deny that there are many instances in which children and child soldiers are abused, but the long history of child soldiers in the West should serve as a clue that the situation is not simple. 240 Instead, contemporary Western cultural notions of childhood, which celebrate the innocence and vulnerability of the child, dominate all contemporary discussions of child soldiers and recognize no other reality. As a result, humanitarian narratives tend to be breathtakingly superficial and thin. Accounts from such diverse places as Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone show a striking portability of discourse that mirrors the portability of the entire human rights project, which in itself stems from the transnational movement of human rights personnel—advocates, writers, researchers, investigators, attorneys, prosecutors, judges, clerks— from one global “hot spot” to the next. These accounts of human rights violations, ideologically and methodologically stripped of their context, are unlikely to ever to yield a satisfying account of human experiences in situations of conflict. Treaties such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as humanitarian and human rights groups have created a new international legal definition of childhood as beginning at birth and ending at age 18. Many assume that this definition merely recognizes, secures, and protects children’s rights. In reality the children’s rights movement is a social movement that seeks to replace the multiple understandings of childhood that exist around the globe with a single universal definition. Yet, Western ideas never quite square with the actual experience of childhood in the rest of the world. So despite the many treaties, conferences and accords dealing with the child soldier problem, they have had absolutely no impact upon the number of children under arms. It is only when we understand that the ban on child soldiers is really part of a broader effort to impose Western ideas on more varied social systems that we begin to see why the child soldier problem is so difficult to resolve. International law tends to demonize and criminalize difference. A better way would be a system of international law that also incorporates local understandings of childhood and does not automatically override and restrict local solutions to difficult problems. David Rosen received his Ph.D. in anthropology from theUniversity of Illinois and his law degree fromPaceUniversitySchool of Law. He is currently 241 atFairleighDickinsonUniversity in Madison, New Jersey. His is the author of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in...

Young America: childhood in 19th-century art and culture

In an era of both optimism and anxiety about the nation's future, Americans in the nineteenth century focused attention on the cultivation and education of children as future citizens. Contemporary portrayals of children--in fine paintings, popular prints, illustrated primers, and advertisements--helped to shape cultural expectations: pictures of hardy country boys, intent schoolchildren, and little girls practicing embroidery were examples of the ways model Americans should look and behave. At the same time, images showing street urchins, young slaves, or children at work in factories reflected troubling conflicts in society. This appealing book explores representations of children in relation to the currents of American culture, including urbanization, immigration, separate spheres of the genders, and the nation's professed devotion to egalitarianism. A generous selection of illustrations includes well-loved works by such artists as Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, as well as fascinating archival images. With engaging depictions of children from varied economic, racial, and geographic backgrounds, Young America opens a new window on the life and culture of the United States during a century of vast change and growth.