







































CFR_2009_R4.indb


CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE REVIEW

VOLUME 31 
2008–2009

PUBLISHED BY THE 

CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE SECTION OF THE AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY  

WITH SUPPORT FROM THE DEAN’S OFFICE OF HARPUR COLLEGE AT  

BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY.

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CONTENTS

FROM THE EDITOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5

FATHERS AND SONS: RETHINKING THE BAR MITZVAH AS AN AMERICAN RITE  

OF PASSAGE

 SIMON J. BRONNER  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7

CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST: COMMON GAMES, PLAY, AND PASTIMES  

IN UNCOMMON TIMES

 PRISCILLA ORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  35

“GO TO BED, NOW YOU’RE DEAD”: SUFFOCATION SONGS AND  

BREATH CONTROL GAMES

 ELIZABETH TUCKER  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  45

THE KARMA OF VIOLENCE

 GLEN RETIEF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  59

CHILDREN’S ORAL POETRY: IDENTITY AND OBSCENITY

 C.W. SULLIVAN III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  67

KID CULTURE: NEIGHBORHOOD EXPLORATION THROUGH ENRICHMENT CLUSTERS

 KATHRYN A. MCCORMICK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  79

BOOK REVIEWS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  81

CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE SECTION: 2008 ANNUAL MEETING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  87

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  91

CONTRIBUTORS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  93

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FROM THE EDITOR

ELIZABETH TUCKER

As I finish editing volume 31 of Children’s Folklore Review, I want to thank several 
important people. C.W. Sullivan III, editor of the journal for thirty years, has kindly 
served as associate editor for this issue; his help has been greatly appreciated. I 
have also appreciated the wise counsel of our editorial board: Priscilla Ord, Jay 
Mechling, and Simon J. Bronner. Dana Hercbergs, our new book review editor, 
has done a superb job of soliciting and editing reviews, and I am delighted that 
we have this new section. Kathy Buchta has done excellent work with our layout 
and design, and Sheridan Press has printed the journal beautifully. The generous 
support of Donald Nieman, Dean of Harpur College at Binghamton University, 
has made our whole publication process possible. I am very grateful for Dean 
Nieman’s help.

Our second Binghamton University issue covers a broad range of subjects, with 
emphasis on children’s and adolescents’ creativity, boundary exploration, and rites 
of passage. Simon J. Bronner’s “Fathers and Sons: Rethinking the Bar Mitzvah as 
an American Rite of Passage” closely examines the symbolism of the bar mitzvah 
ritual, finding that it resolves father/son conflicts. The last part of Bronner’s article 
shows how children compete with their parents for ownership of their bar mitzvah 
celebrations, adding creative touches such as skateboard centerpieces. Priscilla 
Ord’s “Children of the Holocaust” also analyzes children’s creativity, tracing the 
persistence of children’s games, play, and pastimes in literary works about the 
Holocaust. My own essay, “’Go to Bed, Now You’re Dead’: Suffocation Songs 
and Breath Control Games,” explores a difficult subject that has seldom been 
studied by folklorists. While suffocation songs seem light-hearted and amusing, 
breath control games have resulted in deaths and serious injuries. Another painful 
subject, bullying, provides the focus for Glen Retief’s “The Karma of Violence.” 
C.W. Sullivan III’s “Children’s Oral Poetry: Identity and Obscenity” offers a very 
interesting overview of the development of children’s rhymes from the 1950s 
to more recent times. And Kathryn A. McCormick’s “Kid Culture: Neighborhood 
Exploration through Enrichment Clusters” gives us a glimpse of a very successful 
elementary-school field project that helps children discover the traditions of their 
home neighborhoods. 

This year, the executive board of the Children’s Folklore Section hopes  
to put Children’s Folklore Review on the Internet. We are exploring various  
ways to achieve that purpose and will discuss the subject at the annual meeting  
of the American Folklore Society in Boise, Idaho. Comments and suggestions  
from all readers are welcome! Please feel free to e-mail me at any time 
(ltucker@binghamton.edu). If you would like to suggest a book for review,  
please e-mail our book review editor, Dana Hercbergs (hercberg@sas.upenn.edu). 
Thanks very much for your support of Children’s Folklore Review.

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7

FATHERS AND SONS: RETHINKING THE BAR MITZVAH  
AS AN AMERICAN RITE OF PASSAGE

SIMON J. BRONNER

The bar mitzvah draws popular as well as folkloristic attention because it is  
one of the few publicly recognized American rituals for entering adolescence. 
Popularly categorized as a Jewish folk tradition, the bar mitzvah is hardly a private 
affair; it is recognized, if not participated in, throughout the general population of 
North America as a result of being featured in popular films, television shows, and 
novels. Some of the notice for the bar mitzvah owes to depictions in the media of 
material excess. Additionally, the bar mitzvah raises a social psychological question 
of the relatively early coming of age at thirteen years old. The age is perceived as 
early in a modern American society characterized by an extended childhood and 
adolescence before adulthood. Elaborating on this critical coming-of-age issue, I 
propose that the folk sources of the bar mitzvah reveal a symbolism that suggests 
the ceremony acts to resolve father-son conflicts. Further, in the American context 
both non-Jews and Jews have heightened the ceremony’s importance because  
the event represents public displays of, or compensations for, uncertain  
masculine status.

Problem Statement and Background: The Folk and Popular Logic  
of Bar Mitzvah

The bar mitzvah is the coming-of-age ritual that everyone knows, in image if  
not in practice. If one has never attended the event, he or she probably has been 
exposed to it in popular television and film. Jonathan and Judith Pearl, discussing 
media portrayals of Jewish themes in The Chosen Image (1999), claim that “of all 
the Jewish rites of passage depicted on popular TV, none has received more 
attention than the bar mitzvah” (Pearl and Pearl 1999, 16). Since their book has 
come out, the bar mitzvah has been dramatized, or spoofed, in popular movies 
such as Glow Ropes: The Rise and Fall of a Bar Mitzvah Emcee (2005), Keeping Up 
with the Steins (2006), Sixty Six (2006) Knocked Up (2007), and Two Lovers (2008), 
and television series such as Entourage (2005), Sex and the City (2000), Frasier 
(2002), The Simpsons (2003), Unfabulous (2005), and Naked Brothers Band (2008). 
It has been the butt of many jokes and cartoons among Jews and non-Jews  
alike, many of which concern the apparently young age, 13, when the boy is 
pronounced to be entering manhood or which question the Jewish boy’s claim to 
manliness. In the Naked Brothers Band episode “The Bar Mitzvah,” for example, 
wordplay is evident when a parent commands the bar mitzvah boy to join his 
friends with the Yiddish word gey meaning “go,” but the Americanized boy 
understands the word as questioning his masculinity for acting “gay.” Related to 
this humor in a surfeit of comic graphics and mocking photographs is the common 
theme of discomfort for the boy in the fabled misfitting bar mitzvah suit. The 
humor depends on the perception that the Jewish boy is uncomfortable in, or not 
ready for, the commanding pose of an adult suit.

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The kind of bar mitzvah commanding popular culture attention is likely of 
non-pietistic Jews, often called liberal or assimilated. In such satirical portrayals, 
viewers become aware of anxieties, not just for the bar mitzvah boy’s relation to 
his faith or ethnicity, but also for the modern consumer society of which he is 
a part. Depictions of the bar mitzvah in popular culture focus primarily on the 
party because of the broader societal interest in modern materialism, or parental 
indulgence, that it raises, but contextualizing the celebration within traditional 
practices and symbols for the bar mitzvah boy leading up to, and during, the event 
sheds light on the inherited, and invented, meanings for the bar mitzvah. To get at 
these meanings, I will examine more closely the folk cultural aspects of the event 
to explain its growing appeal since the mid-twentieth century.

The folk cultural source of the bar mitzvah appears rooted in synagogue 
practice. Along these lines, Jewish parents will probably voice the attitude that the 
bar mitzvah is the most self-conscious expression of Jewishness in one’s life and 
understand that it signifies entrance into what is known as religious majority: the 
ability associated with Jewish maturity to participate in a minyan (quorum of 10 
for prayer), fast, and read from Torah. Orthodox Jews may more clearly recognize 
the obligations it represents to Judaism to put on tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin 
(phylacteries), but the bar mitzvah in Orthodox communities does not have the 
conspicuous consumer display that it does among liberal Jews. For many Jews, it 
signals a finality rather than a transition to another stage; it is an end rather than 
a beginning of religious participation. Ivan Marcus writing on the Jewish life cycle 
observes that the bar mitzvah “can be seen as a finishing rite for many young 
Jewish adolescents. It moves the child from Judaism into the larger world possibly 
without any additional traditional Jewish rites until death, if then” (2004, 123). 

That a traditional ceremony would contribute to discontinuity rather than 
the continuity expected of rites of passage has not only been a concern of 
historians and ethnographers. American rabbis since the early twentieth century 
have complained about the use of the bar mitzvah to conclude synagogue 
attendance. Rabbinical philosopher Mordecai Kaplan during the 1930s, for 
example, in his incisive tome Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction 
of American-Jewish Life (1934) criticized the “spiritual chaos” caused by “so 
casual a contact with Jewish knowledge” in short-lived attendance at a Hebrew 
school before the bar mitzvah (Kaplan 1994, 58). Although acknowledging that 
the Jewish educational focus on preparing for the bar mitzvah kept youth in 
Jewish schools, he advocated for a reorientation to signal entrance into a new 
stage of life or developing a life-long commitment to Judaism (Kaplan 1994, 58-
59). A later popularly known rabbi, Joseph Telushkin, renewed the complaint 
in Jewish Literacy (1991) by stating, “While the bar mitzvah is intended to mark 
the beginning of a Jewish boy’s adulthood, for non-Orthodox Jews it frequently 
signifies the end of his Jewish education” (1991, 612). 

Surveys by Jewish organizations of their youth members verify that children 
perceive the bar mitzvah to be a conclusion to education rather than a transition 
to another stage. Barry A. Kosmin found, for instance, for the bar/bat mitzvah 
that less than a quarter of Conservative Hebrew school students showed a high 
score on their plans for attending synagogue monthly or more after the bar/bat 

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mitzvah (2002, 263). Despite the intentions of this minority, actual attendance 
was even lower, and this disengagement is typically blamed on teens focusing 
on secular high school studies and extracurricular activities with the support of 
their parents (Leneman 1993, 17-19; Sidlofsky 1993, 302). A higher percentage of 
boys go through a bar mitzvah than girls for the bat mitzvah, and the boys report 
feeling pressure more intensely to disengage from religious activities in favor of 
weekend sports and social activities. Of the b’nai mitzvah students, girls having 
gone through bat mitzvah were more likely to volunteer in the Jewish community 
and attributed more importance to being Jewish than did the bar mitzvah boys 
(Kosmin 2002, 253). 

Although civic leaders often point to the structure of American Hebrew school 
education for the rise of the bar mitzvah, rabbis and educators alike insist that 
Jewish education is geared toward wider goals and the bar mitzvah ceremony 
involves an important (and to some the most important) secular component. In 
light of the disappointing effects of the bar mitzvah on religious maintenance 
and coming of age transition, the most common alternative explanation is family 
socialization and community networking it provides (Davis 1995, 2003; Kennedy 
2005; Schoenfeld 1993b). Kosmin’s statistics lead him to consider the familial 
bonding of the bar mitzvah in light of the uncertainty of holding a Jewish wedding 
in the life cycle of the boy for the continued appeal of the bar mitzvah, despite 
criticisms of the bar mitzvah by rabbis for undermining their religious purpose 
and by civic leaders for being too materialistic and competitive. Basing his view 
on the observation that “for many couples it is the first major family and social 
event since their own wedding,” Kosmin hypothesizes that the bar mitzvah is a 
developmental milestone for the parents who “must present themselves publicly in 
relation to their religious tradition to the most significant people in their lives–their 
family, colleagues, and social network” (2000, 236). There is merit in this argument 
because of the background of social and economic anxieties for many liberal 
Jews of on the one hand, appearing integrated into the larger society, and on the 
other, of validating their commitment to Jewish identity among members of their 
religious group. Yet a closer look at the ceremony reveals that the ritual portions 
of the bar mitzvah feature the relationship of the father and son, rather than the 
whole family. 

Related to the question of the bar mitzvah’s modern appeal is its historical 
trajectory since the early twentieth century. Although popular culture may present 
the bar mitzvah as an ancient Jewish rite, its tradition is of relatively recent origin. 
Many scholarly observers have editorialized that its rise among the people of the 
book is remarkable considering there is no mention of the ritual in its sacred texts 
of Torah or Talmud. The term bar mitzvah, or son of the commandment, appears 
in the Talmud (BM 96a) for a person subject to law, but it does not appear in 
reference to assuming religious obligations before the fifteenth century (Chill 1979, 
315). The scholarly consensus is that as a ceremony it dates to local medieval 
German practices which diffused to eastern Europe, but there it did not gain 
the elevated or standardized status now given it in western Europe and America 
(Abrahams 1958, 32; Marcus 1996, 119-26; Marcus 2004, 82-123; Pollack 1971,  
59-62). 

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The key components of the derashah, or interpretive speech, and examination 
drew significant notice in eighteenth century Italy, and it may be from there that 
the ritual made some inroads into north African Jewry (Goldberg 2003, 90-91; 
Ouaknin and Ménager 2005, 335-39). Yet in the substantial Jewish communities 
of Yemen it did not develop at all (Ouaknin and Ménager 2005, 342-43). It is 
also noteworthy that in North Africa, religious majority could be reached any 
time the boy was ready, and among Indian Jews it occurred around five years 
old (Goldberg 2003, 92). The historical explanation of a German-Italian influence 
is often accompanied by speculation on the rise of the bar mitzvah rituals as 
local imitations of Christian confirmation practices, whether out of interests of 
assimilation or modernization (Marcus 2004, 109-13; Schauss 1950, 120-21). Well 
into the twentieth century, Judaism’s rabbinical annals observed that the bar 
mitzvah was a fading tradition or one that the rabbis should eradicate because it 
challenged elite notions of Judaism (Silverman, Morris 1932, 329-31). A leading 
authority for Orthodox Jewry in North America, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (1895-
1986), for example, publicly declared, “If I had the power, I would abolish the bar 
mitzvah ceremony in this country…It is well known that it has brought no one 
closer to study or observance” (Sherwin 1990, 150). For notable modern Jewish 
historians such as Jenna Weissman Joselit, the triumph of the bar mitzvah over this 
rabbinical resistance is the example par excellence of a singular American culture 
within the wider Jewish world. It demonstrates the ascendancy in the United States 
of the creative, upwardly aspiring folk interested in accommodating modernity over 
the elite hegemony of the ancients in the stodgy synagogue (Joselit 1994, 89-118).

Sociological and psychological inquiries have underscored the way the bar 
mitzvah involves the family and could be used therapeutically to link generations 
and create community (Davis 1995, 2003; Kennedy 2005; Schoenfeld 1993b). 
Certainly the bar mitzvah can take on a different character depending on the 
family dynamic, but the unanswered question remains after examining these 
findings about the centrality of the father-son relationship despite growing 
egalitarianism and feminization in Judaism. The sociopsychological interpretations 
positing a social bonding function are not that much different from the folk view 
that the bar mitzvah is something that each family wants to make its own while 
still showing fidelity to tradition. Logically, the bonding is a consequence rather 
than a source of the ceremony.1 This folk view has been contrasted, particularly 
in religious literature, with elite pressures of rabbinical leaders to maintain the bar 
mitzvah’s synagogue function of encouraging participation in the minyan (Kosmin 
2002, 239-41; Liebman 1973; Schoenfeld 1993a). 

The implication of the functionalist analysis is that the bar mitzvah persists 
because it provides benefits to participants, but the bar mitzvah has raised 
conflicts in the Jewish community and surveys affirm the tremendous pressures 
that preparation for the event raises. Folklorists and ethnologists for their part 
have emphasized the expressive ritual components of the bar mitzvah as a Jewish 
version of global pubertal ceremonies. The bar mitzvah is cited most commonly in 
folkloristic textbooks and reference works as a prominent coming-of-age “rite of 
passage” evident in western industrialized countries (Haskell 1996, 410; McKeever-
Furst 1992, 29; Smith, Robert 1972, 165; Spiro 1977). Folklorists and ethnologists 

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are eager to include this example probably because few public coming-of-age 
rituals exist in America and Europe to compare to the anthropological haul of 
so-called primitive puberty initiations that draw attention to themselves as exotic, 
sexually tinged practices of public transition to adulthood (Raphael 1988; Spiro 
1977). The bar mitzvah lacks this sexual undertone, it seems, but it burst on the 
American scene at a time when industrialized countries were extending childhood 
and becoming aware of adolescence as a distinct stage of life (Russ 1993). This 
coincidence is apparent in the connection of the bar mitzvah to rites of passage 
although a correlation cannot be established because of its pre-modern existence. 
The bar mitzvah conceptualized as a rite of passage shows folk tradition to be 
socially functional, presumably needed to mark passage from childhood into 
adulthood. Jewish educator Jack D. Spiro summarizes this view when he states, 
“The process itself may consume most of childhood, but the initiation rite is a form 
of ‘cultural compression,’ when all that is learned is compressed in the rituals. The 
compression itself focuses on the new roles that must be assumed by the initiate 
as he enters into the realm of manhood” (Spiro 1977, 394). For Spiro, this process 
is common among rites of all societies, but what is distinctive in Jewish culture 
is “the high degree of emphasis on learning, the paramountcy of knowledge and 
understanding” (1977, 399). Thus manhood is attained along with Jewish identity, 
he concludes, through the rite of passage, although he has difficulty reconciling 
the “long, arduous intellectual process” of preparation with the relatively short 
“transition” phase on the big day. 

A logical problem with the demarcation line for Jewish male passage is the 
fixed age of thirteen years old. Biblical sources, for instance, cite twenty as a 
legal adult age and do not prescribe rituals for puberty. One can join the minyan 
without being bar mitzvah and could celebrate bar mitzvah at other ages and 
localities. Jewish folklorist Hayyim Schauss hypothesizes that thirteen became 
ritually significant not because of a developmental stage it marked but because 
“thirteen was a sacred number among the Jews in ancient times” (Schauss 1950, 
113). He speculates that the designation of twenty for maturity was a later 
development, “when a more advanced legal system was in force among Jews” 
(Schauss 1950, 113). If a sacred number was applied, however, it would probably 
be eighteen after the mystical numerological equivalent of chai (consisting of 
the Hebrew letters of het and yod) for “living” (indeed, at bar mitzvahs today, 
common cash gifts are denominations of eighteen to signify good luck). And in 
fact, Rabbi Stuart Rosenberg (1923-1990), spiritual leader of Canada’s Jews, writing 
in the influential journal Religious Education on the “right age for Bar Mitzvah” 
advocates for reforming the bar mitzvah tradition by holding it for boys at the age 
of eighteen (Rosenberg 1965). Other liberal rabbis in the twentieth century tried 
to replace the bar mitzvah with a confirmation ceremony at fifteen or sixteen, to 
keep children in Jewish education longer and to align it with an age perceived to 
be more of a coming-of-age period (as in the popular girls’ celebration of “sweet 
sixteen”), but the efforts have been largely unsuccessful (Joselit 1994, 105-30).

Looking to ancient sources for the entrenchment of thirteen in the Jewish 
ritual cycle, folklorist Theodor Gaster was concerned that correlation was difficult 
because neither a pubertal or sacramental rite appears at thirteen in sacred texts. 

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Its cultural significance, he offered, was in being the traditional age for marriage 
in the ancient Near East (1980, 68). The Mishnah, however, gives the expected 
age for marriage as eighteen, preceded by stages of study beginning “at five 
years the age is reached for Scripture, at ten for the study of Mishna, at thirteen 
for the fulfilment of the commandments, at fifteen for the study of the Talmud, 
at eighteen for marriage, at twenty for seeking at livelihood....” (Pirkei Avot 
5:25; see Hertz 1945, 101-3). In this interpretation, thirteen is the appropriate 
age for understanding and enacting commandments in an educational life cycle, 
even though various rabbinical authorities have countered that it is too young 
(Rosenberg 1965). Rather than viewing a religious significance to the bar mitzvah 
because of the sacredness of the number, Gaster observed that the bar mitzvah 
is a custom without meaning; he thought of it in the modern era as an occasion 
for a party without spiritual or developmental importance. Reflecting a common 
rabbinical attitude of “elite” Judaism, Gaster in his influential survey of Jewish 
folklife disparaged the bar mitzvah by concluding, “It confers nothing, imparts 
nothing, creates nothing; it merely celebrates” (Gaster 1980, 67). 

“Merely celebrates”? What about bar mitzvah as rite of passage? Ivan Marcus 
hypothesizes that “In recent times, as Jews sought to mark the life cycle in ritual 
ways even in lives not otherwise filled with Torah observance, the bar mitzvah 
emerged as a rite of passage from Jewish childhood into adolescence and 
acculturation into the larger secular world, especially in American or Israeli life” 
(2003, 123). The reference to “rite of passage” declares its function of moving from 
one stage to another thought to be universally containing a structure of separation, 
transition, and incorporation by French folklorist Arnold van Gennep in 1908. It 
should be pointed out that although van Gennep as a scholar of religion knew 
about the bar mitzvah, the event is totally absent from his foundational book 
Rites de Passage, and in texts such as Gaster’s and the Encyclopedia Judaica it is 
labeled a ceremony that is not about transition to adulthood as much as either a 
celebration of the conclusion of Hebrew education or a display of commitment 
to Judaism (Gaster 1980, 66-77; Kaplan and Roth 1972). For psychologist Jacob 
Arlow the bar mitzvah also has educational more than developmental significance. 
He calls it an “ordeal by recitation,” linking it to nineteenth-century educational 
tests establishing the authority of the patriarchal synagogue (1951, 357). Spiro 
agrees, pointing out, “The boy is on trial, perhaps not the kind of trial involved 
in walking over hot coals. But it is an intellectual trial, no less traumatizing as 
he stands before relatives and authorities to demonstrate his skill, ability, and 
knowledge of Torah and Jewish law. ‘It is, in essence, an academic degree’” (1977, 
397). Ivan Marcus observes that “there is a culmination in the bar mitzvah as well 
as a celebration of youth. It often is the end of a Jewish child’s formal Jewish 
schooling, his or her graduation” (2004, 122). Anthropologist Harvey Goldberg 
in his comparative survey of Jewish rituals surmises that this association with 
examination and graduation is grounded in the bar mitzvah’s evolution out of an 
educational context. In his view, the bar mitzvah displaced the common ritual of 
entering religious education with one to mark its end. Part of the rationale is that 
the transition of thirteen is one from elementary school to higher education of bet-
ha-midrash. 

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Part of the problem with the bar mitzvah as a rite of passage is how van 
Gennep’s structural order for moving from one stage to another of separation, 
transition, and incorporation applies to the event. One would expect much 
transition in a coming-of-age practice, but the bar mitzvah involves an inordinately 
long preparation time, typically starting as early as three years old. The bar 
mitzvah is not separated during the event and is not presented as liminal. The bar 
mitzvah’s central task is to read a Torah portion and provide a speech rather than 
engaging in an initiatory act with male elders. As an incorporation, as sociologist 
Judith Davis noted, it struggles to mark a change in status or passage to another 
stage. Adult privileges outside of congregational life are not granted, and for most 
children, it is something that parents plan for them. It is therefore in practice a 
milestone rather than an initiation.

I contend that meanings exist often outside the awareness of the participants 
that contributed to its spread in folk Judaism since the mid-twentieth century in 
western Europe and America. My evidence comes from participation in a number 
of ceremonies, symbolic reading of liturgical texts, a survey of former b’nai 
mitzvah, and a content analysis of derashah, the interpretive bar mitzvah speeches 
the boys make. Using developmental psychology and historical context in the mid-
twentieth-century crisis of masculinity, I will provide a folkloristic explanation of 
why the bar mitzvah rose to its present status. I look at it as an invented milestone 
tradition that has dealt with father-son conflicts as the boy deals with the uncertain 
status of his masculinity in a wider modern context. 

Identification: Preparation, Fasting, Separation, and Recitation

Let me review the components of the bar mitzvah. Most Jewish educators and 
synagogue administrators encourage participation in Hebrew School beginning 
with the Aleph grade coinciding with kindergarten age as preparation for bar 
mitzvah by being able to read and chant Biblical Hebrew, recite prayers, and 
participate in congregational life. The bar mitzvah is treated as a culmination of 
one’s education demonstrated by reading from the Torah and a speech. In the 
days before the bar mitzvah, no special events are planned, although in some 
communities, the boy may wear tefillin all day, get his hair cut or shaved off,  
or fast. 

The ritual fast for the boy usually occurs on the Yom Kippur before his bar 
mitzvah, and it is distinguished from the fasting he may do with adults afterward 
by lasting until Chatzot (midday as defined by Halakhah or practical Jewish law). 
Rather than being prescribed in Torah, the transitional fast for the boy before his 
bar mitzvah on the Day of Atonement arose apparently as a folk custom in the 
modern period.2 It may be based on the examples of the father’s obligations to 
train a Jewish child mentioned in the Talmud, which include partial fasting on 
Yom Kippur after the age of nine years old (Shulem and Koenigsberg 2007). Yet 
Halakhah calls for fasting as a commandment after the bar mitzvah, with special 
reference to the symbolism of pubic hair growth for maturity: “a boy of thirteen 
and one day who have brought forth two hairs” is considered adult “with regard 
to all of the commandments and must complete the fast as an obligation from 

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the Torah, but if they have not brought forth two hairs then they are regarded as 
minors and complete the fast as a rabbinical obligation only” (Krieger 2006). The 
significance of the occasion of Yom Kippur for the fast on special occasions is that 
it symbolizes a death and rebirth, divesting the individual of his or her previous 
life (Linke 1999, 149). The fast and wearing the white robe traditionally donned 
on Yom Kippur and burial at the end of life will be reenacted, for example, on the 
wedding day along with the same confessional prayers that are said on the holiday 
and at a death bed. The process therefore ritually confronts mortality, which, 
according to clinical psychologist Stuart Linke, “returns us to our core values and 
enables us to perceive ourselves more deeply” (1999, 149). 

On its surface, the ritual fast before bar mitzvah appears to be preparation 
for the obligations that the boy will accrue after reaching the age of religious 
majority. Although fasting on Yom Kippur marks adult practice, the suffering 
it brings, even for the outcome of atonement, hardly could be considered a 
motivator to push on with the home stretch of bar mitzvah preparations, unless 
it is intentionally uncomfortable to metaphorically focus the bar mitzvah as an 
“ordeal,” as psychologist Jacob Arlow points out (1951, 357). If so, then it is a 
risky metaphor of pain and hunger to impose, if as Arlow argues, the period 
before the bar mitzvah “becomes the occasion for rebellion against the parents. 
The boy, for various reasons, may refuse to participate in the entire process and 

Figure 1. Sephardic bar mitzvah ceremony, Brooklyn, New York, 1998. Photograph 
by Simon J. Bronner.

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may repudiate his parents’ authority as represented by the need to go through 
the Bar Mitzvah initiation” (1951, 356). But a symbolic rationale outside of the 
awareness of the participants may be at work to explain why it is important in 
the custom (apparently in defiance of Halakhic authority) to fast rather than other 
mitzvot the boy will practice after turning thirteen. One possible connection in 
religious scholarship is that the sacrifice of fasting is accepted as a purificatory rite 
and declaration of faith because it is followed by a joyous feast (Farrell 1985). On 
the high holy day of Yom Kippur, fasting after the New Year is followed by an 
occasion for a social “breaking the fast,” as it is called in North American locales. 
Occurring during the first Jewish month of Tishrei (from the root for “beginning”), 
the purificatory fast marks a fresh start in the ritual year. Is the comparison being 
made between the enforced fast before the bar mitzvah, then, and the bar mitzvah 
in which the immaturity and irresponsibility of childhood are ritually replaced with 
adult religious obligations, and encouraged by the festive meal? 

If so, the comparison seems strained between the deprivation of food in 
fasting and the central recitation and discourse at the bar mitzvah ceremony. Both 
actions do have something in common, however, in their arousal of parental 
attention, and this clue may lead to an explanation of the tradition. My argument 
hinges on the symbolism of fasting in many religious contexts as the maternal 
provision of food pointed out by theorists of ritual (Dundes 2002; Farrell 1985, 
254). Anthropologist Eileen Farrell, for example, suggests that fasting representing 
birth or infancy in ritual time “evokes the most primitive wish-fulfillment of all, 
the moment when the hungry infant regains its mother’s breast” (1985, 254). 
It is symbolically consistent, therefore, that fasting as a reminder of infantile 
dependence on the mother’s sustenance is accompanied by prohibitions on adult 
male activities of shaving and “seminal pollution” (Trachtenberg 1979, 212). With 
fasting often occurring during periods of mourning, representing, according to 
Theodor Gaster, “the state of suspended animation which ensues at the end of a 
life lease” (1961, 29), it offers a separation from the mother that allows transition 
and growth. In other words, a previous state or life is being let go and a new one 
is being embraced. As with other symbolic practices, oral activity is associated 
with maternal attributes (such as the Jewish folk term mameloshn for “mother 
tongue” or folk language) that leads to patriarchal reading or codification (such 
as Pirkei Avot, literally “chapters of the fathers or patriarchs,” or idiomatically as 
“Ethics of the Fathers,” which is a significant tractate of the Mishnah composed by 
male rabbis). At Yom Kippur and other religious occasions where a connection to 
God is being made, part of that transition is making a transfer from the physical 
dependence on the mother to spiritual guidance from the father (see Smith, W. 
Robertson 1907, 51-53). Worshippers in the traditional Jewish liturgy thus speak 
of God in the central prayer of the Amida as “our God and God of our Fathers, 
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” Even with revision 
of liturgies to reflect egalitarianism, the principle holds, as articulated by folklorist 
Alan Dundes, that “if an infant associates feeling hunger pangs with the coming of 
an adult parent or parent-surrogate, then the adult who wants a deity to approach 
must clearly make himself hungry. Moreover, the hungrier he is, the more likely it 
is that the parent-deity will approach” (2002, 9), and that parent as authority will 

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likely be patriarchal. Many Midrashic legends underscore the idea that matriarchal 
intervention brings the patriarchal God closer. A popular narrated example is of 
the Jewish matriarch Rachel, frequently depicted as the compassionate mother 
weeping for her captured children, who the Midrash recounts arising from her 
grave and imploring God’s clemency for the Israelites driven into captivity. Rachel 
points out her self-abnegation and thereupon God promises her the restoration 
of Israel (Rothkoff 1972, 1489). She also shows up in modern wartime legends 
protecting Israeli male soldiers from terrorist harm in campaigns outside their 
borders (Wagner 2009).

In line with the symbolism of fasting as separation from the mother to invite 
the father-deity, the spread of the pre-bar-mitzvah fast begins to make sense. A 
question that is often posed about the bar mitzvah is how it acts as a coming-of-
age ritual if the mother associated with childhood is absent from the supposed 
rite of passage. The answer is that the separation occurs before the ceremony 
beginning with the ritual fast, and the transition from physical dependence to 
spiritual awareness continues into the ritualized haircut and acquisition of tefillin. 
The task of the ceremony on the big day then becomes through reading and 
discourse to accentuate the role of the father-deity. Still remaining to be resolved 
is the relationship of the familial father who had been an authority over as well 
as provider for the boy. It appears that the rabbi and cantor can act as spiritual 
surrogates for the father who allow the boy to separate from familial paternity. Still 
complicating this ritualistic scenario connected to traditional cognitive categories 
held in Judaism is modern awareness of changing gender roles, especially in 
relation to the boy’s understanding of “becoming a man,” where intellect in the 
Jewish ceremony rather than bodily strength is being used as a ritual measure  
of masculinity.

The ceremony begins with the boy going to the bimah (reader’s stand) to 
recite standard blessings over the Torah that would be heard on any occasion the 
Torah is read. According to Spiro’s ethnography of the event, “the boy separates 
himself from his mother, from his childhood, as he walks to the altar of the 
synagogue,” where he is “wrapped in his ‘tallit’ and surrounded by the males 
who will read with him” (1977, 398). Traditionally, women do not wear a tallit 
and do not participate on the bimah. The mother is a spectator while the father 
takes a prominent position at the platform with his son. Unlike preparations for 
other readings of the Torah, the father recites a short prayer, Barukh shepetarani 
meonsho shel zeh, after the son’s conclusion of the second blessing. This blessing 
is unique to the bar mitzvah; it is not said for the daughter at the bat mitzvah. 
The translation is “Blessed be He, Who has now rid (or freed) me from the 
responsibility or punishment for this one.” Rabbinical literature suggests two 
interpretations from the source of the benediction in the Midrash (a compilation 
of commentaries on the Hebrew Bible) commenting on the phrase, “And the boys 
grew up’ (Gen. 25:27). One is that the father was punished when his son sinned, 
for he failed to raise him properly, and the other is that the son was punished 
for the sins of his father (Nulman 1993, 91-92). Whichever interpretation one 
argues, the common thread is that the opening of the ceremony is thematized 
in relation to a father-son conflict. Unlike other blessings, the name of God is 

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omitted from the prayer and the Hebrew word patoor, meaning to exempt or 
rid, conveys a negative connotation of vexation (Arlow 1951, 357).3 With this 
connotation, Jewish historian Cecil Roth contends, the father’s prayer declaring his 
freedom from responsibility for the boy “was considered an integral part of the 
celebration, hardly less than the boy’s own participation in the service” (Roth 1955, 
18; emphasis added).

The conflict resolution in the ceremony is for father and son to part ways, and 
at that moment the boy’s teacher steps in to guide the boy in the reading, either 
the prophetic portion of the week (haftarah) or an entire biblical portion–the 
sidrah. Indeed, the father will often stand off at a distance at that point. Afterward 
the boy presents a speech that interprets a point of Jewish law or interprets the 
weekly Torah portion (parshah). The speech is a narrative that typically follows 
a tripartite structure: (1) a standard opening of “Today I am a man,” followed by 
an expression of gratitude to parents, especially the father, for having raised and 
educated the boy; (2) reference to Biblical sources (a favorite in recorded speeches 
is the sacrifice of Isaac by his father) followed by its application to his own 
conduct or the society; and (3) a promise of allegiance to the Jewish community, 
often accompanied with acknowledgment of the role of the religious leaders who 
helped him to become bar mitzvah (Glazer 1928; Gruberger 1993; Katz 1931). 
At the conclusion of the speech, it is now common among both Ashkenazic and 
Sephardic services for children in the audience to throw candies at the boy. 

After the service, the parents host a seudah mitzvah (festive meal celebrating 
a commandment), and this has expanded into the bar mitzvah party often held in 
a rented hall. Despite harsh criticisms of the party such as that voiced by Rabbi 
Abraham Chill, “The contemporary custom of celebrating the bar mitzvah with 
lavish and ostentatious parties has no basis in Jewish tradition and it is in fact 
contrary to the spirit if not the letter of Jewish law and morality,” the secular 
celebration has grown and featured various themes geared to the boy’s worldly 
interests (Chill 1993, 317). The party has become tightly controlled by party 
planners, but an expectation among the bar mitzvah boy’s male friends is that 
some pranking or even hazing will occur to torment the center of attention and 
provide a test of his toughness. This might include giving the bar mitzvah boy a 
“wedgie” (lifting his underwear so as to grip his genitals or get stuck between the 
buttocks) and doctoring his food and drink. The boys may sit with the bar mitzvah 
on a dais, and frequently they initiate lifting the bar mitzvah on a chair in imitation 
of a wedding custom for the bride and groom. More sedate and official is the ritual 
lighting of candles by family members during the party. 

Among the Sephardim, the donning of tefillin or phylacteries is featured in bar 
mitzvah practices, and families may hold a separate celebration before the bar 
mitzvah called Yom Tefillin. The tefillin are two cubical leather containers with 
attached leather straps. One is worn on the head (shel rosh) while the other is on 
the arm (shel yad); the thongs for shel yad are wrapped seven times around the 
arm while the straps on shel rosh hang loosely behind the head and shoulders like 
hair strands. The cases hold parchments with four biblical passages, expressing 
four basic Jewish precepts–the law of tefillin, recognition of God’s kingship, 
the unity of the Creator, and the exodus from Egypt (Roth 1955, 23). Betrothal 

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is symbolized in the arm thong which is wound three times around the middle 
finger while reciting “And I will betroth thee unto me forever; yea, I will betroth 
thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment and in lovingkindness, and in 
mercy. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness; and thou shalt know the 
Lord” (Hosea 2, 21-22). In keeping with the laying on of tefillin as a male rite, 
the Exodus story encased in the tefillin (Exodus 13:1-10, 11-16) opens with the 
commandment to consecrate to God “every firstborn male” and relates the promise 
of a “land flowing with milk and honey” promised to “your forefathers” (Exodus 
13: 1, 5). Indeed, the text signals a transference from a submissive state of slavery 
under Pharaoh in Egypt to a liberation with the guidance of Moses to the promised 
land. The bearded rabbi in the ceremony takes on the role of teacher Moses 
guiding his flock to be independent (Moses does not enter the land of Israel). The 
ceremony for Yom Tefillin also brings out patriarchal symbolism between father 
and rabbi in their ritual placement of the tefillin or phylacteries on the boy before 
he does it himself. Typically, the father puts one of the cases on the boy’s head, 
representing his education for which he was responsible, and the rabbi works the 
other case on the child’s arm, representing his action (Roth 1955, 22). The boy 
may give a speech then as well as on the Sabbath, and the boy is blessed aloud 
by the congregation. A ritual practice that appears to reinforce the transition from 
father to teacher as patriarch is the boy walking around the assembly with his new 
decorated tefillin bag into which congregants would drop silver coins, which are 
then presented as a gift to the bar mitzvah boy’s teacher (Roth 1955, 22). 

Figure 2. Bar mitzvah boy with tefillin accompanied by father and teachers, 
Brooklyn, New York, 2008. Photograph by Ronnie Habbaz, courtesy of  Ronald  
and Adi Cohen.

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The mother is involved usually in making arrangements for the event, and a 
modern tradition has been for her to weave or present a tallit to the bar mitzvah 
boy. The significance of the tallit is that after his thirteenth birthday, it can be 
worn on the Sabbath in prayer and thus represents his reaching religious majority. 
It is customary to have a formal photo portrait taken of the bar mitzvah boy in his 
tallit as a keepsake to distribute. The mother’s role is what Judith Davis (1995) 
calls the traditional balabosta, translated from the Yiddish as the woman of the 
house with the implication that she has a managerial role to compensate for her 
exclusion from the ceremony. Her management has extended to responsibility 
for the boy’s Jewish education, although the bar mitzvah ceremony conveys the 
frequent fiction that the father has been overseeing the boy’s religious training 
(See Gordon 1959, 58-59). Nonetheless, at the bar mitzvah the father takes center 
stage with his son, until he is moved aside by the supervising rabbi and cantor.

Annotation: Relation of the Bar Mitzvah to Circumcision, Haircutting, 
Wedding, and Examination

In its structure and symbolism, the bar mitzvah can be compared to four separate 
traditions: bris (Yiddish; brit milah in Hebrew) or circumcision, upsherin (Yiddish) 
or the ritual first haircut, the Jewish wedding, and the final examination or 
dissertation. The comparison to the bris comes up in the discourse of the bar 
mitzvah because of its coincidence with the boy’s birthday, which raises images 
of circumcision. Typical is a memoir I collected showing that the bar mitzvah was 
narrated in relation to the bris:

I was constantly reminded that the bar mitzvah was the biggest 
event in my life after my bris. Since the bar mitzvah came around my 
birthday, my mother brought up her memories of the bris and how 
much I’ve grown. She’s always sentimental, you know. My father 
would make a bad joke about it would be just as painful besides 
telling me that another thing that’s the same is that everyone will want 
to hold me. I did think it was funny when he said they’re not talking 
about my pecker when they say, “my how you’ve grown.” 

More official charting of the Jewish boy’s milestones typically involves the bar 
mitzvah’s relation to ritual circumcision. Roth in the mid-twentieth century, for 
example, declares, “In the traditional Jewish scheme, there were three great festive 
occasions in a boy’s life. There was the eighth day after his birth, when he was 
introduced into the Covenant of Abraham. There was the day when he was first 
initiated to study, being taken to synagogue, blessed by the rabbi, and given 
honey to lick from a slate on which letters of the Hebrew alphabet were written, 
as a token that the Torah should be sweet to his mouth all the days of his life. 
And there was the day when he was first considered legally bound to fulfill the 
obligations of Jewish law and practice, and could be regarded as a Bar Mitzvah, 
a ‘child of precepts’” (1955, 15). With the decline of honey licking to mark the 

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start of study among modern liberal Jews, more attention has been focused on the 
continuity in the Jewish life cycle from circumcision to bar mitzvah.

Like the bris, the bar mitzvah is represented as an induction into faith and is 
prescribed in intervals of time: 8 days for the bris and 13 years for the bar mitzvah. 
The bris also centrally involves the father-son relationship, for the father gives 
the child to the mohel (Jewish ritual specialist in circumcision) who circumcises 
the child. Several college students who gave me memoirs of their bar mitzvah 
mentioned that references to the bris were made in pranking by the boy’s friends. 
Connections were made to binding and cutting in the bar mitzvah suit and ritual 
haircut, often accompanied by checking whether the boy has pubic hair despite 
the “damage” done by the circumcision.

Jewish advisers Marc-Alain Ouaknin and Françoise-Anne Ménager connect 
the haircutting to the importance of manhood to a haircutting ritual (upsherin in 
Yiddish and chalakah in Hebrew) that many orthodox communities observe for 
the three-year old boys (2005, 46-48). An educational connection exists because 
the child is expected for the first time to go to school, where he will learn to read 
Hebrew. They find similarities between the attention in the haircutting ritual and 
bar mitzvah (they could extend this comparison to the bris) to the trauma of loss 
and its provision of healing with cultural identity. Both rituals also are replete 
with reminders of masculinity. The haircut distinguishes the boy from the long 
hair of the girl. According to Ouaknin and Ménager, the immersion into books 
is symbolically consistent with the gendering of cutting rituals: “He goes from 
the maternal language, which is oral, to the paternal language, which is written. 
Hebrew also links writing to the paternal language in an extraordinary way. The 
word ‘alphabet’–aleph-bet in Hebrew–is pronounced av and means ‘father’” (2005, 
48). Further underscoring study as intellectual gain to compensate for physical 
loss is a traditional gift in both rituals of a honey cake or sweets shaped like 
letters (Ouaknin and Ménager 2005, 48). In circumcision, haircutting, and bar 
mitzvah rituals, the boy acquires a new ceremonial garment. In the haircutting the 
boy gains a small tallit to wear as an undergarment known as tzitzit (based on 
the commandment in Torah to wear fringes at the corners of garments and also 
meaning “hair”; see Ezekiel 8:3). Tzitzit or braided fringes are attached to the boy’s 
tallit and are often used in the service to touch the Torah as it is carried around 
the synagogue. 

In addition to the larger tallit conspicuously worn over the shoulders at 
prayer, the tefillin adds long strips of leather on the arm and head. The boy 
usually receives the gift of tefillin before the tallit; a common time to present the 
phylacteries is 30 days before the bar mitzvah. This period is related to a monthly 
cycle in the Jewish lunar calendar and is commonly associated with a mourning 
period of shloshim (from the Hebrew for “thirty.”). A mourning period is simulated 
for the passing of youth, and as in the ritual guidelines after burial, hair of the 
family mourners cannot be cut until after the mourning period (usually just before 
the bar mitzvah). “Laying tefillin,” as the act is called involves a form of binding 
because leather cases attached to the leather straps contain Torah passages. 
One that is especially conspicuous is on the forehead with straps hanging down 
over the shoulders in the manner of hair. Rabbis teaching the laying of tefillin 

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will comment on the placement 
on head and arms as committing 
intellect and body to fulfillment of 
commandments. But there is also an 
important connection to the father-son 
relationship. The four passages from 
the Torah on the tefillin parchments 
are teachings the father will address to 
the child and relate to communicative 
skills: Veamarta for you will say, 
Veshinaneta Vedibarta for you will 
repeat and you will speak, Velimadeta 
for you will teach (Ouaknin and 
Ménager 2005, 161-62). Both tefillin 
and tzitzit are symbolically cut to show 
completion by going over the head and 
removing them after prayer (Ouaknin 
and Ménager 2005, 50). 

A ceremonial connection to the 
circumcision at the bar mitzvah is the 
wimpel (from the German Wimpel for 
“flag” or “sash”), a decorated cloth on 

Figure 3. Bar mitzvah studio portrait, 
New York City, 1961.

Figure 4. Judy Goldberg holding a wimpel she made for a bris/bar mitzvah, 
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 2009. Photograph by Simon J. Bronner.

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which the boy is circumcised and later used as a sash to bind the Sefer Torah.4 It 
might be part of a custom at the age of three when the boy is toilet trained. The 
father gets an aliyah (invitation to the altar) and brings his boy with him to the 
bimah to wrap the wimpel around the Torah. Thought to be of German origin 
like the bar mitzvah, the decorated wimpel gains significance because it is was 
used to swaddle the baby boy at his brit milah and represents the covenant with 
a patriarchal figure, as the Hebrew blessing recited by the father reminds the 
gathered group: “Praised by Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who 
has sanctified us by Thy commandments, and hast bidden us to make him enter 
into the covenant of Abraham our father.” The group responds, “As he has entered 
into the covenant, so may he be introduced to the study of Torah, to the wedding 
canopy, and to good deeds.” Based on this text, wimpels are inscribed in Hebrew 
with the following message underscoring the patriarchal line: “(Name of child, 
called) son of (name of father) born under a good constellation on (day of week, 
date, month, year) may he (or may the Lord let him) grow to Torah, marriage, and 
good deeds.” An artist may illuminate the text with related depictions of a Jewish 
wedding under the traditional canopy (huppah); masculine animals such as the 
lion of Judah, eagles, and leopards5; and a boy holding up a Torah commonly 
interpreted as a bar mitzvah scene (Eis 1979, 32; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1977, 18-
19). One way that the bar mitzvah is thematized in the father-son relationship is 
in the transfer of the wimpel. After the circumcision, the wimpel belongs to the 
father, but after the bar mitzvah, possession transfers to the son.

Bar mitzvah (exemplifying the commandment at the bris to “grow to Torah”) 
and wedding are connected in the custom of giving the groom an aliyah the week 
before his wedding to re-enact the call to the bimah at his bar mitzvah. In a sign 
of readiness for marriage, the groom often donates his wimpel to his synagogue 
before the wedding. The covering of the huppah is frequently composed of the 
boy’s bar mitzvah tallit, and the bride will replace it with a larger tallit she has 
woven or purchased for the groom (Marcus 2003. 117). The transfer of the tallit 
(at a critical part of the ceremony, bride and groom are both covered by the tallit 
to symbolize their unity) and the circling of the bride around the groom indicates 
readiness for sexual relations. Practices at the bar mitzvah suggest the metaphor 
of the wedding is used to represent sexual displacement by immersion in books 
rather than sexual awakening. When the boy is called to the bimah at the bar-
mitzvah he is identified as the “Bar Mitzvah Groom” and the Torah is the bride to 
which he is bound. According to Arlow’s description, wedding and bar mitzvah 
are joined in the recitation, because “Throughout his recitation the initiate is 
observed intently as a young man on trial undergoing a very difficult examination. 
A sense of compassionate participation grips the audience, especially the boy’s 
mother” (Arlow 1951, 357). The anticipation can be related to anxiety over sexually 
consummating a marriage; in this case the enactment is displacing the sexuality 
with potency in touching the Torah with a yad, a metal extension in the shape of 
a finger, and the oral recitation. In the tefillin ceremony described previously, the 
boy places the shel yad on the arm and wraps straps that extend from it around 
the middle finger while saying verses referring to betrothal. Although thirteen 
seems young to invoke the metaphor of marriage, Ouaknin and Ménager find 

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evidence for its enactment as compensation for sexually “losing a part of oneself 
through the body” (2005, 46). They argue that “boys lose sperm (wet dreams and 
first masturbation)” at ages that “correspond closely to the time that the losses 
described above are first sustained” (2005, 46). Further, the ejaculatory praxis of 
throwing candies at the bar mitzvah boy resembles the showering of the bride and 
groom after a wedding. 

Arguably, access to Torah is unconsciously equated with access to a woman 
which the father already possesses. Arlow hypothesized that organizing the ordeal 
as an examination is symbolically important because, in his words, “Failing an 
examination, together with the humiliation which the student experiences, is often 
unconsciously equated with being castrated,” and from clinical cases, he argued 
that examiners are identified with the father image of the oedipal phase (Arlow 
1951, 365). To be sure, the bar mitzvah boy is expected to pass the examination 
by his male elders, but more than any other theme, memoirs mention performance 
anxiety about successfully completing the reading and speech under the watchful 
eye of teacher and father. The chanting for the reading is done by rote, and it is 
all the more challenging because of the absence of vowel aids to pronunciation. 
As Ouaknin and Ménager point out, “This means that to learn it, one has to accept 
being part of a tradition. One cannot learn this vowel-less text on one’s own, even 
if one reads and speaks Hebrew fluently” (2005, 63). The process of tradition they 
are referring to involves an oral “handing down” of performative practices from 
male elder to the boy. In this way, the connotation of identity formation at the 
bar mitzvah is prominent because more than a text is being chanted; tradition as a 
sustaining process for the group is being enacted–and honored. 

A lesson of the boy’s ordeal is that being part of the tradition is difficult and 
is administered by the synagogue patriarchy rather than the familial one. The 
following narratives collected from young men who had experienced their bar 
mitzvah five to eight years before bear out these pervasive themes of performance 
anxiety and participation in tradition at the bar mitzvah:

I was nervous beyond words. The cantor tried to calm me by telling me 
it was my special day, but that made me only feel worse. I felt that all 
eyes were on me and I could never be ready in time. I felt that my voice 
was going to crack at any moment. It’s different from show and tell in 
school, because it was so formal and when I was reading, I was dwarfed 
by these older men who I thought were breathing down my neck. 

I think my mother worried about everyone coming and that the party 
would go well. It was my father who sweated the synagogue part, and 
I sweated the more he did, even though he didn’t have to say much. 
That suit bothered me and my friends teased me about my get-up. 
Older relatives told me they remembered my father’s bar mitzvah that 
was so wonderful and I felt that I had to live up to that. I think that’s 
why I pushed to read faster than I should have. I don’t think my sister 
had as hard a time at her bat mitzvah. There was totally more pressure 
on me.

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I dropped everything as the time got closer so I could concentrate. I 
would have loved to have postponed it but that date was set. I was 
into sports and let that slide for the bar mitzvah. The rabbi told me 
that I would have the support of family to get me through, but I didn’t 
know half these people. I felt that I was singing for strangers, which 
made me nervous. I think it was definitely worth it after everything, 
but I was a wreck before.

The tone of these narratives is borne out by Kosmin’s survey, which showed 
that 51 percent of parents reported that the bar mitzvah dominated the life of the 
family during the year of preparation, but 97 percent still felt that the bar mitzvah 
“was worth the time and trouble involved” (2002, 235-236). Despite complaints 
that the bar mitzvah was time consuming and “nerve-racking,” only one percent of 
the b’nai mitzvah wrote that it “was not worth the time it took” (2002, 235). 

The bar mitzvah treats learning as a masculine attribute because of command 
of the Torah associated with male leadership and the association of the bearded 
rabbi with an especially learned man at a time when the boy is concerned with 
the growth of pubic and facial hair as a sign of masculinity. These images are 
reinforced by cake-toppers (a cake in the form of a Torah is commonly reported), 
a host of figurines often given as gifts that depict the tallit-covered, hairless boy 
at the Torah or bimah under the tutelage of a bearded religious figure.6 Arlow, 
however, did not believe the bar mitzvah was effective in resolving oedipal 
conflicts because of the time lag between sexual maturity and heterosexuality 
sanctioned by modern society. He suggested that as a result of the failure of 
the ceremony to ritualize puberty the bar mitzvah boy chooses a number of 
psychological strategies, including channeling sexual and aggressive energies 
into study, rejecting the father by renewed submission to an exalted father image 
of God, or cessation of religious adherence to either join or rebel against his 
biological father (Arlow 1951, 364-68). Although there is a symbolic replacement of 
the father in the bar mitzvah, the separation from, and competition for, the mother 
characteristic of pubertal rituals is not as apparent. What is manifested more than 
sexual competition is the celebration of the child’s precociousness evident in 
command of the “ordeal by examination.” 

 Instead of independence to another stage, the bar mitzvah presents a 
paradoxical combination of separation and connection. The reading declares 
an early autonomy from education even as it joins the individual to a patrilineal 
tradition. The boy is not integrated into the community as much as he is forced 
to become self-aware of his own development and aspirations. Following the 
symbolic communication of the circumcision (brit milah is literally the “covenant 
of the word”) of which he was unaware, and possibly the upsherin at which 
he begins immersion in the alphabet, the bar mitzvah shows his readiness for 
the world by a performance that draws attention to itself for what Ouaknin and 
Ménager call “creative combinations and recombinations of letters and words” 
challenging the linear structure of storytelling (2005, 63). The boy becomes 
conscious of the attainment of skills that will carry him into adulthood. Rabbis 
hope that the ancient source of the texts will remind him to commit to the 

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synagogue, but the praxis of his “reading in bursts” (words bursting out into letters 
or into groups of letters, making other words and coming together into a new 
order) and exemption of his father allows him to detach (Ouaknin and Ménager 
2005, 62-63). 

Analysis and Explanation: Historical and Social Contexts  
for Jewish Manly Display

If the bar mitzvah is not effective as a sacramental or pubertal rite, its value as an 
ethnic commitment is questionable because of the decline of Jewish involvement 
after the event. If it is not particularly useful for coming of age or revitalizing 
Jewish identity, and parents complain of its exorbitant expense and material 
excess, then what explains its spreading popularity during the twentieth century? 
The Joselit thesis that it became entrenched as a life cycle celebration in which 
the family’s economic success could be displayed and ethnic identity unhinged 
from synagogue life in the post-immigrant generation does not readily apply to 
a different set of social and historical circumstances for Jewish parents with only 
faint memories of the ghetto experience. And if there are traces of this motivation 
of status anxiety still apparent in the suburban conspicuous consumption evident 
in popular-culture portrayals such as Keeping Up with the Steins and Entourage, 
then why did the synagogue component not disappear, particularly since 
prominent American rabbis held a negative or ambivalent attitude toward the 
bar mitzvah? The psychosexual connections of circumcision, examination, and 
wedding are strong in the ceremony, suggesting a developmental explanation, but 
is the ceremony working to resolve oedipal conflicts, considering that the mother 
plays a peripheral role by most accounts and the separation that occurs is from the 
father rather than from the mother as described in other coming-of-age processes? 

With the rush to find a source in antiquity for the age of thirteen as a Jewish 
ritual age, it appears that being forgotten is its modern symbolism as the first year 
of adolescence, or the teen years. The twentieth century, especially the years after 
World War II, was marked by the rise of teenagers as a separate, often troubled 
or rebellious age and marketing target. Many factors went into the creation of 
adolescence particularly within North America and western Europe, including 
the end of child labor and the rise of the high school in attendance as well as 
status within popular culture. Wrapped up in the emerging image of the teen in 
the modern context of compensating for a lack of the provider role is the tough 
guy image of the adolescent relying on strength, competitiveness, and aggressive 
heterosexuality in preparation for economic and social independence. This was 
coupled with the feminized, constricted, suited father of the 1950s vividly spread 
in iconic images such as the rebellious teen’s father wearing an apron in Rebel 
Without a Cause (1955) and the domestication of the father-businessman in The 
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) (see Cross 2008, 95; see also Cohan 1997; 
Gilbert 2005; Gordon 1959, 57-64; Osgerby 2001; Young and Young 2004, 30, 
184-86). Against this background of changing views of age-based masculinity, the 
Jewish emphasis on learning as the basis of masculine identity caused conflicts 
with the dominant society, at least if the goal was to integrate into society. The 

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Jewish body, as Sander Gilman has pointed out in his study of the European 
sources for this conflict, was defined as unsuited for military or strenuous work 
(Gilman 1991; see also Konner 2009, 144-53). Jews were known for brains rather 
than brawn (Gilman 1996). During the 1950s, Jews were notably absent from 
many cultural displays of teen masculine power including music, motors, sports, 
and dance (Kimmel 1996, 277-78). In folk humor, Jews were smart but weak, and 
many jokes about the bar mitzvah boy underscored his inadequacy as a sexualized 
man (Ouaknin and Ménager 2005, 55).

If that pressure to show manly traits came from outside of the Jewish 
community at a time when the bonds of the community began to unravel, from 
within the community, egalitarian ideas about the bat mitzvah began to take 
hold in Conservative and Reform wings of Judaism. The time of maturation 
for girls was defined a year earlier than the boys, adding insult to injury, even 
though her ceremony was not thematized with any declaration of “Today, I am a 
woman.” In the background of the Jewish boy’s maturation is the growth of the 
image through popular sources of the overprotective mother who inhibits the 
Jewish boy’s maturity and stays with him through adulthood (Antler 2007). One 
should also not underestimate the psychological impact of Jewish circumcision as 
another internal conflict among Jews because of the implication that it diminishes 
sexual aggressiveness and masculine identity (Glick 2005; Mark 2003; Silverman, 
Eric 2006). Looking historically at bar mitzvah announcements, the theme of 
the bar mitzvah began to change from a subdued family ceremony of joining 
congregational life to the public celebration of manhood during the 1950s. It 
first becomes a theme of television sitcoms in the 1960s, usually representing a 
Jewish boy’s anxiety about either going through the “ordeal by examination” or 
having missed an opportunity to have one (Pearl and Pearl 1999). Many of the 
parties had as themes the interests of the boy, such as music, sports, and motors 
rather than religious subjects, and these interests along with displays of economic 
power were significant for culturally connecting to a normative, if not precocious 
hypermasculinity. For example, I asked boys who had gone through the bar 
mitzvah how they arrived at the themes for their post-ceremony parties. As the 
following narratives attest, it was a decision that they felt strongly they wanted  
to control. 

If I left it to my parents, I’m sure they would have rented a boring 
hall and made it look like their wedding. I wanted a teen party and I 
wanted it to be cool. I was into cars and skateboards, so I got them to 
put it in an auto museum, which none of my buddies had done, and 
the centerpieces were dudes on skateboards. I told them that I would 
do all the traditional stuff for the synagogue if I could have the party 
that wouldn’t embarrass me. 

My parents did ask me for ideas about the party, and I’m glad they 
did. I was worried that they would want too much of a family 
affair. The ceremony followed the law, and I wanted the party to be 
something that would be mine. I wanted to let go and impress my 

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friends. It had to be about sports to save face after all the stuff I took 
about going through bar mitzvah lessons. There weren’t too many 
Jewish signs, although my parents did want the candle lighting for the 
relatives. But I had a rock band, so the kids could get into it.

More than a celebration of the completion of the bar mitzvah, the party allowed 
the boys to show their connection to normative culture, especially to masculine 
pursuits of sports, recreation, and music. This was especially important because 
the boys recognized that for the most part, their mothers made the arrangements 
for the party. With demonstrations of masculinity and maturity being important 
at the party, the ceremony is remembered in relation to the father’s role. The 
components of the synagogue ceremony emphasizing the boy taking the father’s 
role and the rise in status of the recitation as an “ordeal” were adapted into the 
declaration, “Today, I am a man.” Considering the praxis of the bar mitzvah, one 
might easily construe this declaration as “Today, I am the father”–and I am better 
than he was. Competition for ownership of the event is evident in the idea that 
the successful bar mitzvah reflects on the status of the father, as shown especially 
in Keeping Up with the Steins, in which the materialism of the party conveys the 
father’s male provider role coming into conflict with the boy’s identity formation. 

Figure 5. Skateboarder centerpiece at bar mitzvah held in auto museum, Hershey, 
Pennsylvania, 2006. Photograph by Simon J. Bronner.

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The early age at which the bar mitzvah occurred added to the ceremony’s appeal 
for announcing the Jewish boy’s claim to manliness if not legal maturity. 

Into the twenty-first century under the influence of the women’s movement, 
questions of the proper masculine role taken by Jewish boys increased. Reports in 
books such as Jew-Jitsu: The Hebrew Hands of Fury by Rabbi Daniel Eliezer and 
Paul Kupperberg (2008) along with satirical movies such as The Hebrew Hammer 
(2004) expressed a confusion about whether the answer to these questions would 
be to embrace knowledge as a source of social power or a sign of diminished 
masculinity. I contend that the bar mitzvah gained importance therefore in what 
increasingly became seen as the most important phase of modern life and for a 
group that felt the most conflict in its definition of masculinity. Despite Theodor 
Gaster’s avowal that the bar mitzvah imparts nothing, I find that its symbolism 
of circumcision, examination, and wedding is joined to modern meanings of 
masculine maturity. It is imperfect as a ritual of religious commitment, to be sure, 
but it has persisted and even spread in the modern context, not because of its 
signal of religious majority or adult obligations, but its negotiation of adolescence 
for an ethnic group uncertain in American popular culture of its masculine identity 
and patriarchal continuity.

Implication: Feminization and the Ritual Burden of the Bar Mitzvah

Having made this argument for linking the rise of the bar mitzvah to a crisis of 
masculinity for assimilating Jews within North America, I see signs today that it is 
likely to enter a new phase as an invented tradition. Some of the connections to 
masculinity, for instance, are undermined as the synagogue goes through what 
has been heralded as feminization, including female rabbis and cantors leading 
the bar mitzvah (Goldstein 1991; Marder 1996; Seidman 1997). Mothers are taking 
more of a role, and for my memoir writers concerned for their masculine image, 
that caused more, rather than less, distress. One compensation that several writers 
mentioned was taking more control of the party, infusing it with masculine themes 
and holding it at auto museums, ski slopes, or sports stadiums. Or the party 
exuded a sense of coolness in representation of a modern fashion and electronics 
rather than the process of tradition evoking continuity with Jewish identity. One 
bar mitzvah adviser touched a nerve by showing parents how to highlight their 
son’s hip individuality in step with high style rather than collective tradition 
associated with sameness by offering Mitzvah Chic, subtitled, “How to Host a 
Meaningful, Fun, Drop-Dead Gorgeous Bar or Bat Mitzvah” (Greenberg 2006). 

Some families view holding a bar mitzvah in Israel as a sign of religious 
devotion, but rather than departing from tradition, it fits into the trope of 
announcing masculine attributes at a young age because of the image of 
Israelis as tough Jews. A common post-ceremony activity, for example, is to go 
to Masada, the historic site where a small number of rebellious Jews held off 
legions of the Roman Empire. Many of the boys show their vigor by climbing up 
a steep path to the plateau 1,300 feet high. In addition to this bar mitzvah trip, 
others show a variety of creative ways to engage the boy with a strenuous and 
memorable experience. As the boys seek to declare their own identity, the fathers 

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are frequently involved as the son’s pal engaged equally in sports and music, 
rather than speaking as the authoritarian voice of the elders or sages (see Cross 
2008). If the above argument holds up, then as the popular perception of Jewish 
masculinity changes to the point where it joins normative muscular manliness, 
then the bar mitzvah will carry less of a ritual burden to show the development of 
the boy’s mettle as well as his mind (see Brod 1988, 2004; Bronner 2005, 34-36). 
The bar mitzvah is the tradition everyone thinks they know from popular culture 
as a sign of excess of mass culture generally, although assigned to Jews, but its 
folk cultural practice reveals an uneasy father-son relationship in a society that 
creates conflicts for the boy between brains and brawn as he declares at the age  
of thirteen, “Today, I am a man.” 

NOTES

1. For the logical problem of social functionalism analyzing consequences 
rather than causes, see Oring 1976; Bronner 1986, 74-88; Bronner 2006. 

2. Evidence for the Yom Kippur fast before the bar mitzvah as a folk custom is 
found in discussion groups such as Imamother: Connecting Jewish Mothers (www.
imamother.com). The question of whether to allow children to fast frequently 
comes up. Among Orthodox members, there is reference made to “the three fasts” 
(out of seven Jewish fast days) which are ritually done by the bar-mitzvah-to-be: 
Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement, usually occurring in September or October), 
Tisha B’Av (usually held in July or August remembering the tragedies of the Jewish 
people), and Ta’anit Bechorim (the Fast of the Firstborn commemorating the 
saving of the firstborn in Egypt from plague, observed the day before Passover in 
March or April). On September 10, 2008, for instance, “1st” from Israel posted this 
query, “I am looking for the reason/source behind the custom of the fasting the 
3 fasts before bar or bat mitzvah. Do only people from certain backgrounds do 
this, where does this custom come from? Is there a basis for it? I always learned 
that children under bar/bat mitzvah age should not fast the whole day. Once they 
are at the age of chinuch, they can be encouraged to fast for a few hours in the 
morning (and at night 9 av and yom kippur). And then that when they do eat, 
it should only be what is necessary, not indulging on junk food and continuous 
snack.” I recorded seven replies, none of which proposed any textual sources, and 
rabbis who were cited in the thread were mixed on whether to follow the custom. 
Shalhevet from Israel wrote on the same day, “Our rov says not to do it,” whereas 
ChossidMom replied on October 2, 2008, that “My son who will be Bar Mitzvah 
a couple of weeks after Succos should fast this Yom Kippur, according to the 
rav,” even though he “says it’s a bunch of baloney...He said there is absolutely no 
source for this.” The other replies referred to doing it although they did not know 
the rationale: “we did–but I have no idea why” (greenfire, September 10, 2008); 
“My father holds by it. He told me the reason but of course I forgot” (flowerpower, 
September 10, 2008); “I never heard of 3 fasts before, but one I did. My parents 
always said to fast one fast before also only if you can” (cuteson, September 10, 
2008); “I did, as a kid! I grew up in a modern orthodox community, and my whole 
circle of firends were really machmir on that one. (Then again, we made fasting 

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into a competition–‘how long did YOU fast?’ ‘What did you break YOUR fast on,’ 
etc…) (shininglight, October 2, 2008).  

3. The rhetorical use of patoor in regard to release from manly obligation is still 
apparent in modern Hebrew where it refers to an exemption from military duty.

4. Ruth Eis (1979) states that although the sashes are referred to as “Torah 
binders” in English, “the correct name is wimpel (f.), an old German word for 
cloth or veil, related to the Middle High German bewimpfen, to cover, to conceal. 
Typically, they are made from the cloth which covers the new-born male during 
the circumcision ceremony (11). 

5. Ellen Frankel and Betsy Platkin Teutsch in The Encyclopedia of Jewish 
Symbols (1992) trace the frequent presence of lions, leopards, eagles, and deer in 
ceremonial Jewish objects to the Mishnah (Pirke Avot 5:23) which commands, “Be 
as strong as a leopard, as light as an eagle, as swift as a deer, as brave as a lion to 
do the will of your Father in heaven” (40). 

6. See, for example, the cake toppers at the website Magic Mud (www.
magicmud.com/Judaic a shots.htm) accessed December 28, 2008. It offers 
personalized bar mitzvah cake toppers and figurines at the bimah. Another site 
shows a figurine with the bearded rabbi overlooking the bar mitzvah boy, entitled 
“Bar Mitzvah–Father and Son Figurine” promoted by Liorel Art from Israel: stores.
ebay.com/Art_From_Israel_Figureines-Sculptures_WOQQFsubZ2100394.

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Young, William K., with Nancy K. Young. 2004. The 1950s. Westport, CT: 
Greenwood.

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35

CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST:  
COMMON GAMES, PLAY, AND PASTIMES IN UNCOMMON TIMES

PRISCILLA ORD

Several years ago when I was living in Farmville, Virginia, and teaching at 
Longwood College, now Longwood University, I was involved in an adult Bible 
study class, composed of college professors and other, well-educated professionals 
who lived there. One evening, for some reason, the topic of the Holocaust came 
up. I cannot remember why we strayed off the subject we were studying, how 
we arrived at that one, or even what was being said about it until one woman 
said, “I wonder why almost none of the survivors have ever written about how 
they managed to survive.” Others mentioned that, because those who would have 
survived were getting on in years, one would expect more of what they were 
calling survival literature to have been written. 

I was stunned because I had read numerous books on the subject, almost all 
of them first-hand accounts from the lives of the authors themselves, and then 
it struck me. I was, at the time, teaching children’s literature, and I worked in 
a children’s bookstore on the weekends. All of the books, but one, that I had 
read and, in fact, owned had been, thanks to an eye for marketing, published as 
children’s books. Those who wrote them had been children and had written about 
the experiences they had had as children when they lived through and ultimately, 
sometimes by extraordinary means, survived those awful years of the late 1930’s 
and early 1940’s in various countries in Europe. 

The one notable exception is In the Mouth of the Wolf (1983) by Rose Zar, 
which is well worth reading. At nineteen Rose, Ruszka Guterman, was urged by 
her father to save herself by hiding “in the mouth of the wolf.” Traveling alone 
with false papers under the name of Wanda Gajda, she escaped from the Piotrkow 
ghetto, dug ditches for the German army, and worked as a laundress, a cleaning 
woman, a nurse’s aide, and ultimately, as the war ended, a housekeeper for an SS 
officer, even traveling with the man’s wife when she returned to Germany for the 
birth of her second child.

At our next meeting, I brought several bins of the books that I owned to share 
with those who were interested. Even I had to admit, however, that the books for 
children and young adults had only been written somewhat recently. Why was 
it that they waited for so long? Perhaps Doris Orgel, whose book The Devil in 
Vienna (1978) gave me the idea for this paper, explains it best:

I knew I needed to write it. Why did I keep putting it off? Wonder 
about that reminded me of friends I had in high school—close friends, 
all refugees like me. We talked endlessly about any subject, except 
one: Where we’d come from, what happened there, and how we got 
out (in my case nearly not!). 

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The deepest reason for our friendship was the background we shared. 
Yet talking about it was taboo. We were probably scared, even though 
our lives in Europe were behind us. I know I had fears locked up 
inside—fears all the scarier because they were vague, dating back to 
Vienna and things I’d only dimly understood.

Most of all, we wanted to be popular, do well, and have fun, like 
everybody else. We pushed aside what made us different, and told 
ourselves it didn’t matter. We were Americans now.

So for many years, I did not write this book.

Belatedly, after writing other books, and visiting Austria twice as a 
tourist, with my American husband and kids, I pulled my head out of 
the sand and faced the truth: What happened when the devil came to 
Vienna mattered very much to me.

I started doing historical research. Then I interviewed my parents 
and everyone else I knew who had experienced that time in Austria. 
Finally, I was ready to write about what living under Nazism was like.

It happened a long time ago, but it still matters. I hope it makes 
readers ask themselves: “If someone like Hitler came to power here 
and now, how would I feel? What would I think and do?” (242-43).

Hearing the words children and Holocaust, one’s thoughts are almost 
immediately and invariably drawn to those children who did not survive, particularly 
to the plight of Anne Frank and her family. There were, however, many who 
did survive, and the autobiographical and biographical stories of their survival, 
published predominantly as children’s or young adult fiction because the protagonist 
is a child or young adult, although the content is far from fiction, provide 
interesting and poignant insights of their lives in the most difficult of times. 

The details of how these young people managed to escape, not only from 
occupied cities and countries but also the work details and concentration camps, 
were provided safe passage on the Kindertransports, were hidden, sometimes 
for years, by sympathetic friends or neighbors, were taken in by religious 
organizations for “safe keeping,” were able to pass as non-Jewish, or endured the 
camps until liberation are only part of their stories. They were, after all, children, 
and, as such, when possible, they participated in common games, play, and 
pastimes. 

Somewhat ironically, when one considers the subject matter, a number of 
these accounts appear in books whose titles refer to children’s games or practices 
or, in one case, a children’s song. Among these are Hide and Seek (1991) by Ida 
Vos, translated by Terese Edelstein and Inez Smith; Touch Wood: A Girlhood in 
Occupied France (1988) by Renee Roth-Hano; Tug of War (1989) by Joan Lingard; 

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ORD  CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST 

37

and Dancing on the Bridge of Avignon (1995), also by Ida Vos, taken from the 
French children’s song “Sur le Pont d’Avignon”: 

Sur le pont d’Avignon l’on y danse, l’on y danse. 
Sur le pont d’Avignon l’on y danse tout en rond.

On the bridge of Avignon, they are dancing, they are dancing. 
On the bridge of Avignon, they are dancing in a ring.

In Hide and Seek, based on her family’s life, Ida Vos relates how, as an eight-
year-old Jewish girl living in Holland, she cannot understand why there are 
restrictions on her all of a sudden. She has to go to a different school and wear a 
gold star on her sleeve, she cannot sit on certain benches in the park, and when a 
group of Jewish children are taken away, she and her family go into hiding. 

Renee Roth-Hano, writing in Touch Wood, tells her story and that of her family, 
who, living in occupied France, flee their home in Alsace and live a precarious 
existence in Paris until Renee and her sister escape to the shelter of a Catholic 
school in Normandy. 

 One finds that not all of the children who were affected by the events of the 
Holocaust and World War II were Jewish. Joan Lingard, for example, writes about 
her husband and his family and follows the ordeal of fourteen-year-old twins Astra 
and Hugo Petersons, as members of the family flee their native Latvia in late 1944 
before the advancing Russian armies and find themselves homeless refugees in 
war-torn Germany. These stories and others provide amazing insight into how 
their authors, or the author’s subjects, lived, played, and survived the Holocaust. 

Based on his own childhood, Uri Orlev writes in The Island on Bird Street 
(1984) of Alex who, alone at eleven except for a pet white mouse named Snow, 
struggles to survive in a nearly deserted, bombed-out Polish ghetto. Waiting for 
his father to return after his being taken to a work camp, he lives by his wits and 
hides from the Nazis in an abandoned house. “For as long as we’d been living in 
the ghetto, we children from Bird Street had gone to Number 78 to play hide-and-
seek and all kinds of ‘secret’ war games” (26). 

In Run, Boy, Run (2003), another book by Orlev, there are at least two 
examples of children being able to play games by making do with available 
materials. Eight-year-old Srulik Frydman finds himself on his own when the rest 
of his family is killed following their escape from the ghetto and takes the Polish 
name Jurek Staniak. He goes from village to village seeking refuge and sometimes 
lives with a band of boys in the forest. In one place a woman takes him in who 
needs someone to lead the cows and the sheep to pasture. There he meets a girl 
who takes her family’s two cows to pasture and teaches him to play jacks with 
stones: 

After they ate, Marisza led him to the footpath that ran between the 
meadow and the wheat field. They sat on the hard earth and she 
taught him to play jacks with stones. She was awfully good at it.

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“It’s a girl’s game,” she said. “But what do you care?”

Srulik tried flipping the stones in the air and catching them like 
Marisza. It was hard (58).

In another village, taken in by a Christian family, Srulik plays soccer with some boys 
in the village. The boys, however, lack an actual ball but had made one from rags:

Jurek excelled at rag-ball soccer, … There were also spitting and 
peeing contests. Spitting was no problem. In peeing, though, he 
had to be careful not to let no one see that he was circumcised. 
Fortunately, everyone was looking at where the pee landed. And at 
running Jurek was the champion. No one was faster (79).

Run, Boy, Run is the fourth of Uri Orlev’s books about children in or suffering 
the effects of the Holocaust to win the prestigious Mildred L. Batchelder Award. 
This award, given each year by the American Library Association, honors the most 
outstanding children’s book originally published in a foreign language, translated 
into English, and published in the United States. His others of equal merit are The 
Island on Bird Street (1984), The Man from the Other Side (1991), and The Lady 
with the Hat (1995), which won the award in 1985, 1992, and 1996, respectively.

 It is in The Devil in Vienna (1978) by Doris Orgel that I found, perhaps, more 
examples of folk games and folklore than in others of these books. Orgel writes 
of Inge Dornenwald, who is Jewish and is based in part on her sister and partly 
on herself. Inge and her best friend Lieselotte, a Roman Catholic and daughter 
of an SS officer, play Heaven and Hell, a game similar to hopscotch, which she 
occasionally plays with Evi, a younger child who lives upstairs. It may be inferred 
from what she writes that the game is usually played with another. The game is 
mentioned more than once.

Anyway, she wanted to play Heaven and Hell. She always does, she’s 
at that age.

“All right.” I got my coat. I checked to see if Lieselotte’s lucky pebble 
was in the pocket. It was.

We went down to the courtyard.

The little bit of snow had melted. The ground was dry enough. Evi 
had chalk and drew the boxes.

Heaven is where you rest. Hell is when you miss… 

Lieselotte never used to miss, except when a dog came anywhere 
near. Then her pebble would land in the wrong box, or she’d lose her 
balance, almost on purpose, so she could pet it (Orgel 43-44).

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ORD  CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST 

39

A bit later in the book:

I happened to have a piece of chalk in my pocket. I stooped down, 
drew a line, just to test if the pavement was dry. And before I knew it, 
I’d drawn a whole set of Heaven and Hell boxes. 

The pebble happened to be still in my pocket, from playing with Evi 
yesterday. Quickly I threw it into Box One, skipped to there, picket it 
up; into Box Two; and so on. I felt a little foolish playing alone. But 
I’d already decided that if I got through all the boxes without missing, 
the wonderful something would all the more certainly happen.

I was up to Box Eight, usually a lucky one for me, when I 
heard footsteps down the stairs, looked around—and missed. … 
Interference, it doesn’t count, I tried to think, but that was stupid. I 
quit… (60).

In attempting to determine the actual, graphic pattern for this particular game, I 
came across the following, which may link this version of the game to the cult of 
Mithra: 

In the Mithriac mysteries, adepts finally reached an eighth portal, 
the Gate of Light, where they stood naked, divested of all material 
qualities and ready to be reborn in the spiritual world. … It may 
be that a children’s game something like hopscotch contains a dim 
memory of this mystery cult, which came to Germany and Britain 
along with Roman soldiers: in this game (which is still played), one 
leaps through a ladder-like figure drawn on the ground, and the 
last station in the eighth square is variously called heaven or hell 
(Schimmel 1993, 143).

Inge’s Uncle Herbert on one occasion said, “’Teu, teu, teu,’ … and knocked 
three times on wood—that’s a joking thing one does to keep the Devil away” 
(Orgel 1978, 36). This practice is used in much the same way today to keep the 
opposite of what has been verbally expressed from happening, but according to 
folklorist Stephen Roud, it may actually be a transfer from children’s games of tag 
where one is free or safe if touching wood. 

There is also a reference to the pastime or game of ball where one throws a 
ball against a wall and performs various routines, including clapping hands and 
turning around before catching it again. After Lieselotte and her family move to 
Munich, Inge goes to her old house in an attempt to learn of her address from the 
janitor, Herr Magrutsch, and remembers, “…, he used to yell at us for playing ball 
against the side of the house …” (Orgel 1978, 37).

The two girls become “blood sisters,” based on something Lieselotte has 
learned from a book, Beneath Distant Skies, that belongs to her brother Heinz: 

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“Now let’s drink blood brotherhood,” said Lieselotte.

I’d never heard of that. But I wanted to.

She took down a bottle of cooking wine. She poured a little into a 
glass. “We need a needle.” 

She went to get one. “Now we prick our fingers.”

“How do you know?”

“I read it in a book Heinz has. Want to be first?”

“No, you.”

She stuck the needle in her finger. She didn’t even wince. She 
squeezed two drops of her blood into the wine.

I pricked my finger. I didn’t wince either. I squeezed my blood in.

We stirred up the wine with the blood.

“Now we link arms,” Lieslelotte lifted the glass. “Now we drink blood 
brotherhood.”

“Shouldn’t that be blood sisterhood?” 

“I don’t know. Heinz says there’s no such thing. But you’re right. If we 
drink blood sisterhood, then there will be such a thing. Let’s” (Orgel 
1978, 28).

When Lieselotte and her family are preparing to leave Vienna for Germany, she 
gives Inge Heinz’s book, where she reads:

Then Trapper Charlie unsheathed his trusty hunting knife and pricked 
his finger with it; the noble Apache, Swift Eagle, unflinchingly did 
likewise; whereupon they mingled their blood in a cup of firewater, 
linked arms, raised the cup to their lips and drank. Thus it came 
to pass that these two, though from worlds apart, became blood 
brothers. And blood brothers they remained unto their dying days 
(Orgel 1978, 51).

Liesellotte then signs her letters to Inge, “Much B. S. L.,” for Much Blood Sister 
Love.”

There is also mention of that favorite childhood prank of ringing someone’s 
doorbell and then running before the homeowner is able to answer. One day 

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ORD  CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST 

41

at the skating rink, seeing someone who looks like Heinz, and believing that 
Lieselotte and her family have returned to Vienna, Inge goes to their old home 
and rings the bell. When she hears a dog bark that could not have been theirs, she 
runs before anyone can answer the door: 

By the time someone opened the door, I was already down on the 
first floor. 

“You wait, next time I’ll catch you,” a man’s voice shouted. He 
thought it was children playing the old game Ring a Doorbell and 
Run. (Orgel 1978, 65)

It appears that anyone seeing a bride’s dress, not merely the groom seeing the 
bride, before the wedding would bring bad luck. Mitzi, the Dornenwalds’ maid, 
was planning to marry, and Inge, who would soon be leaving with her family for 
Yugoslavia, wanted to see her dress. “Are you crazy? Don’t you know that’s bad 
luck?” (Orgel 1978, 106)

These are but a few of the wealth of childhood memories that one might find 
in reading the books of and about those who survived the Holocaust as children 
and have somewhat recently written about them or told their stories to others who 
have written them for them. This paper, which is a portion of a larger work in 
progress based on the books for children and young adults about these survivors 
and exactly how they survived, hopes to serve as a record of their activities 
and, where possible, an analysis of the games, play, and pastimes in which they 
participated.

WORKS CITED

Lingard, Joan. 1989. Tug of War. New York: Dutton.
Orgel, Doris. 1978. The Devil in Vienna. New York: The Dial Press.
Orlev, Uri. 1984. The Island on Bird Street. Tr. Hillel Halkin. Boston: Houghton 

Mifflin Company. 
______. 1991. The Man from the Other Side. Tr. Hillel Halkin. Boston: Houghton 

Mifflin Company.
______. 1995. The Lady with the Hat. Tr. Hillel Halkin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 

Company.
______. 2003. Run, Boy, Run. Tr. Hillel Halkin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 

Company.
Roth-Hano, Renee. 1988. Touch Wood. New York: Four Winds Press.
Roud, Steve. 2004. A Pocket Guide to Superstitions of the British Isles. London: 

Penguin.
Schimmel, Annemarie. 1993. The Mystery of Numbers. Oxford: Oxford University 

Press.
Vos, Ida. 1991. Hide and Seek. Boston: Tr. Terese Edelstein and Inez Smith. 

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

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______. 1993. Anna Is Still Here. Tr. Terese Edelstein and Inez Smith. Boston: 
Houghton Mifflin Company. 

______. 1995. Dancing on the Bridge of Avignon. Tr. Terese Edelstein and Inez 
Smith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lingard, Joan. 1989. Tug of War. New York: Dutton. 
This book follows the ordeal of fourteen-year-old twins Astra and Hugo 
Petersons, as they and their family flee their native Latvia before the 
advancing Russian armies in late 1944 and find themselves homeless 
refugees in a war-torn Germany.

Orgel, Doris. 1978. The Devil in Vienna. New York: The Dial Press. 
This novel is about two best friends in pre-World War II Austria—one whose 
father is a Nazi SS officer and the other who is Jewish—and has surprising 
truths to tell about individual acts of bravery and love in the face of mass 
betrayal.

Orlev, Uri. 1984. The Island on Bird Street. Tr. Hillel Halkin. Boston: Houghton 
Mifflin Company.  
Based on the author’s childhood, this is the story of a young Jewish boy’s 
struggle to survive in a bombed-out Polish village during the Second World 
War. Eleven-year-old Alex has to live by his wits as he hides from the Nazis, 
searches for his father, and tries to find a way to safety and freedom.

______. 1995. The Lady with the Hat. Tr. Hillel Halkin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 
Company. 
Seventeen-year-old Yulek is the only member of his family to survive life 
in the concentration camps of the Holocaust. He moves to Palestine, where 
he meets Theresa, a Jewish girl saved from the Nazis by Catholic nuns. 
Meanwhile, an elegant lady in England has seen a photograph of Yulek in 
the paper and recognizes him at once. She is Yulek’s aunt--long estranged 
from her family when she married a Christian and moved to Britain. As 
Yulek and Theresa try to determine their places in the postwar world, the 
aunt begins her efforts to be reunited with Yulek.

______. 1991. The Man from the Other Side. Tr. Hillel Halkin. Boston: Houghton 
Mifflin Company.  
Like many Poles, fourteen-year-old Marek shares a prejudice against Jews, 
but that does not stop him from helping his stepfather smuggle goods to the 
Jews trapped in the ghetto. Stunned to find that his own father was Jewish, 
Marek feels compelled to act, helping Jozek, a Jewish medical student, 
escape, learning to love Jozek as a father.

______. 2003. Run, Boy, Run. Tr. Hillel Halkin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 
Company. 
This novel tells the true story of Srulik Frydman, an eight-year-old Jewish 
orphan living on his own in Poland during the time of the Holocaust.

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Roth-Hano, Renee. 1988. Touch Wood. New York: Four Winds Press. 
In this autobiographical novel set in Nazi-occupied France, Renee, a young 
Jewish girl, and her family flee their home in Alsace and live a precarious 
existence in Paris until Renee and her sister escape to the shelter of a 
Catholic school in Normandy.

Vos, Ida. 1991. Hide and Seek. Tr. Terese Edelstein and Inez Smith. Boston: 
Houghton Mifflin Company. 
Eight-year-old Rachel Hartog, a Jewish girl living in Holland, can’t 
understand why there are restrictions on Jews all of a sudden--she must go 
to a different school, she must wear a gold star on her sleeve, she can’t sit in 
certain benches in the park--and when a group of Jewish children are taken 
away, she and her family go into hiding. Separated from her parents, she 
has to change her name and move from family to family, constantly in dread 
of discovery. Rachel describes the horror of those years, how she lived in 
fear, couldn’t speak to anybody, and wondered whether she would ever see 
her family again

______. 1993. Anna Is Still Here. Tr. Terese Edelstein and Inez Smith. Boston: 
Houghton Mifflin Company. 
Thirteen-year-old Anna, a Jewish girl, has recently been reunited with her 
parents after hiding from the Nazis for three years. Being free is not as easy 
as Anna thought--she’s troubled by nightmares, finds it difficult to speak 
after being silent for three years, and knows that her parents are hiding 
what they went through during those terrible years. Anna finds she can only 
open up to Mrs. Neumann, a fellow survivor who is hoping to be reunited 
with her daughter, who she believes must still be alive. Anna also finds that, 
although the war is over, the feelings of anti-Semitism are still present.

______. 1995. Dancing on the Bridge of Avingnon. Tr. Terese Edelstein and Inez 
Smith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 
Relates the experiences of a young Jewish girl and her family during the 
Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

Zar, Rose. 1983. In the Mouth of the Wolf. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication 
Society of America, 5743. 
Ruszka Guterman, at age eighteen, knows that to be a Jew in Poland in 1942 
is a death warrant. Her father knows this too, and convinces Ruska and her 
brother Benek to flee the ghetto and try to find safe haven in one of the 
larger cities in Poland. Luckily, Ruszka has learned that to show fear is to 
give herself away. Bold, brash, and defiant, Ruszka becomes Wanda Gajda, 
working for an SS Kommandant, and remains safe in the mouth of the wolf.

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45

“GO TO BED, NOW YOU’RE DEAD”:  
SUFFOCATION SONGS AND BREATH CONTROL GAMES

ELIZABETH TUCKER

When I was growing up in Washington, D.C. in the late 1950s, my best friend 
Karen taught me some new games and songs. During the winter when we 
were nine years old, she showed me a game that she enjoyed playing with her 
younger brother Geoffrey. “He’s really good at the game of Smother,” Karen told 
me. “Come see!” Following her into her brother’s bedroom, I heard a faint voice 
from the bottom of a pile of quilts. “More, more!” the voice called. Karen and 
I ran from room to room, pulling blankets off beds and piling them on top of 
Geoffrey. Finally he shouted, “Let me out!” and we removed the pile of sweltering 
bedcovers. None of us told our parents what we had been doing. 

A year later Karen taught me a song called “Suffocation,” sung to the tune of 
the French “Alouette”:

Suffocation, easy suffocation. 
Suffocation, easy way to die. 
First you get a plastic bag, 
Then you put it on your head. 
Go to bed, now you’re dead. 
Oh, oh, oh, oh. 

We thought this song was hilarious. Our mothers had warned us against putting 
plastic bags on our heads, so this song about defying such warnings appealed to 
us. We sang the song for a while, until other topical songs took its place in our 
singing repertoire. 

Almost twenty years after Karen and I learned the above version of the popular 
“Suffocation” song, Mary and Herbert Knapp included a very similar text in their 
One Potato, Two Potato: The Secret Education of American Children (1976, 253). 
In 1995 Josepha Sherman and T.K. F. Weisskopf published four variants of the 
song, identifying them as parodies of the Remco company’s game Fascination. 
Noting that the concept of suicide is “all too intriguing to children and teenagers, 
most commonly the latter” (1995, 71), Sherman and Weisskopf document the 
“Suffocation” song’s circulation in the United States through the early 1970s and its 
popularity at American summer camps. Among the methods of self-strangulation 
that these songs describe are “a big, brown rope” and “a rubber hose,” as well as 
plastic and rubber bags (71-72). Whether or not youngsters had been familiar with 
these suicide methods before learning the verses, they certainly knew about them 
afterwards.

This “Suffocation” song has been documented well by folklorists of childhood, 
but games involving breath control have not. Iona and Peter Opie’s “Daring Games” 
chapter of Children’s Games in Street and Playground includes a thought-provoking 
discussion of hanging and fainting games, with emphasis on the Dangling Man 

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“GO TO BED, NOW YOU’RE DEAD”  TUCKER

46

game in which a child hangs above the ground with a roller-towel twisted around 
his or her neck (1969, 273). With characteristic insight, the Opies explain that games 
of this kind emerge in cyclical “crazes,” sometimes causing injury and death of 
children. They describe one such craze in 1961 and another in 1966. Quoting boys’ 
confident assertion to their primary school’s headmaster, “We can make a boy faint 
for a minute, sir,” they note children’s pride in mastering a risky new game (274).

During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, more information 
about breath control games has become available. It has gradually become clear 
that young people’s activities range from risky pursuits such as the Smother game 
I once played with my best friend and her brother to very dangerous choking 
games played in groups or alone. Accounts of children’s group games have tended 
to stress the brevity of such experimentations. In the fall of 2007, fellow folklorist 
Bill Ellis sent me a long e-mail about levitation games that I quoted in my recent 
article “Levitation Revisited” (2007-2008). The message’s last line was “[Levitation] 
was one of those things, like ‘knocking yourself out’ by hyperventilating that 
went the rounds of preadolescent kids like wildfire, then next week was gone.” 
Experimentation with breath control usually ends quickly, but sometimes it leads 
to permanent damage or loss of life.

Although a short period of hyperventilation may seem relatively safe, all games 
that suppress normal breathing involve risk. In Children’s Folklore: A Handbook, 
I include a description of the game Hangman, collected from a nine-year-old boy 
in Binghamton, New York in 1987. According to his description, “We take a rope, 
and it gots a hole in it, and you put it around their head. We close it as tight as 
we can and see who can choke himself the longest” (2008, 79). This description 
haunts me. How many young people have risked their lives by playing such a 
game? Because breath control games belong to the childhood underground, it has 
not been easy for adults to understand the games’ extent and meaning, but the 
Internet has greatly increased adults’ and children’s understanding of the games’ 
dangers. Warnings against breath control games have circulated actively on the 
Internet during the past five years.

In this essay I examine relevant studies by folklorists, psychologists, 
anthropologists, and specialists in other fields. I also consider portrayals of breath 
control games on the Internet that have significantly influenced public perception. 
After presenting some recent examples of games gathered from young adults, I 
draw a few conclusions and raise questions for future study.

When I began my research on this subject, I asked my son, a young adult, what 
he knew about breath control games. “A lot of my friends played choking games 
in middle school,” he told me, “but I didn’t play myself.” I was not surprised that 
he and his friends had not brought this subject up before. Like Karen, Geoffrey, 
and me, they had known what kind of information belonged to the childhood and 
adolescent underground.

Origins and Explanations

Although the origins of children’s breath control games are unclear, it seems likely 
that such games began through imitation of adults’ activities. In Children’s Games 

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of Street and Playground, the Opies trace children’s imitative game-playing back 
to ancient Rome, when boys played the roles of judges and other officials; the 
Opies also mention sixteenth-century Flemish children’s imitation of christenings, 
weddings, and religious processions (330-31). As Michel Foucault explains in 
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), public executions in pre-
modern Europe restored the sovereign’s authority through spectacles open to all 
viewers. Crowds at these public events often expressed derision and sympathy for 
the criminal in a rowdy way. Hangings, conducted on easily visible scaffolds, drew 
large crowds of adults and children (Cooper 1974, 13-18). The horror, excitement, 
and fascination inspired by public hangings probably encouraged children to 
create their own hanging games.

We know some details about an eighteenth-century hanging game played by 
boys in Melton Ross, a village in England, through a local legend published in the 
first issue of Notes and Queries in 1849. In this legend, three or four boys “[are] 
playing at hanging, and seeing who [can] hang the longest in a tree.” As one boy 
adjusts the noose around his neck, the devil in the form of a three-legged hare 
distracts the boy’s friends, who run away and do not return until after his death. 
Afterwards, a gallows goes up on the site of the boy’s demise (Ashliman 2000). 
Today Melton Ross includes this legend in summaries of its history on the Internet 
(“North Lincolnshire” 2006).

In the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American West, public hangings 
generated excitement for young and older people.1 Memories of these public 
hangings persist through some western towns’ continuing recognition of a 
“hanging tree” in the center of town. In Goliad, Texas, for example, a hanging tree 
outside the town’s courthouse reminds residents of the many public hangings that 
took place between 1846 and 1870. In Shelby County, Texas, a young boy helped 
a mob hang a suspected criminal from a hanging tree (“Famous Texas Trees” 
2005). Houston, Columbus, and other municipalities in Texas also take pride in 
their centrally located hanging trees, which serve as focal points of local history. 
Although I have found no narratives about games played in American hanging 
trees, I believe that often-told stories about these living reminders of hangings 
have made young people more aware of events that have troubled and excited 
members of their community.2 

In 2004, children’s imitation of the hanging of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in India 
resulted in two deaths and a near-fatality. A fourteen-year-old boy died after 
hanging himself with a rope attached to a ceiling fan; a twelve-year-old girl died 
after demonstrating the execution to her younger sibling; and a ten-year-old boy 
almost died after he and his friends took the roles of Chatterjee and his hangman, 
doctor, and prison warden (“Brutalization Effect” 2009). The third case, which 
fortunately resulted in no deaths, demonstrates children’s enjoyment of impromptu 
multi-role dramas. We might wonder why all of these children engaged in similar 
imitative play soon after Chatterjee’s hanging. The answer seems to be that this 
execution, the first in India since 1995, received a great deal of public attention. 
Chaterjee’s hanging occurred as the result of a rape/murder of a girl in 1990, so 
it is not surprising that children felt fascinated and horrified by the details of his 
execution.

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Besides imitation and excitement, pursuit of pleasure explains the development 
of breath control games. Getting a “rush” or a “high” from choking increases 
young people’s interest in playing dangerous games of this kind. After oxygen 
deprivation, the brain responds to normal airflow with a euphoric sensation 
(“Unintentional Strangulation Deaths” 2008), although other effects may be 
alarming (Ullrich, Bergin and Goodkin 2008). Frank Dattilio’s study “The Versatile 
Effects of Breath-Holding” (2006) asks whether breath holding alleviates anxiety 
and makes people feel better. Young people who have told me about their own 
breath control experiments have tended to emphasize pleasure and entertainment. 
One of my recent interviewees, a twenty-four-year-old male student who watched 
friends play Pass Out in middle school, told me, “What you do is, you put your 
hands around somebody’s throat and then push their chest in. They get a rush, 
pass out and wake up. It’s a funny thing to do.” In this interview and others, the 
word “rush” has repeatedly came up. Clearly, feeling euphoric makes this game 
attractive to young people, as does the intriguing strangeness of the breath control 
process.

Forensic pathologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have documented 
the quest for pleasurable sensations that has motivated some hangings. The term 
“autoerotic asphyxiation” (called “AeA” by specialists) means self-strangulation for 
the purpose of erotic pleasure. Children, adolescents, and adults have pursued 
this solitary process, which differs from group games without a specific sexual 
orientation. A 2006 study by Anny Sauvageau and Stéphanie Racette, “Autoerotic 
Deaths in the Literature from 1954 to 2004: A Review,” identifies the age range 
of AeA practitioners as 9-77. Since this study analyzes 408 deaths reported in 57 
articles, it covers a wide range of situations resulting in the same tragic outcome. 
Sometimes it is difficult to know whether or not young people have intended to 
commit suicide. Careful studies such as the one by Sauvageau and Racette have 
made it somewhat easier to distinguish between dangerous game-playing and 
deliberate self-destruction.

Psychologists and psychoanalysts have raised interesting questions about breath 
control. E.C. Schneider’s “Observations on Holding the Breath” (1930) suggests 
that will power, not physiology, determines how long a person can hold his or her 
breath. Psychoanalytic studies of autoerotic asphyxiation have found that breath 
control results from regressive and masochistic fantasies. J.M. Johnstone’s, A.C. 
Hunt’s, and E. Milford Ward’s “Plastic-Bag Asphyxia in Adults” (1960) interprets 
the use of a plastic bag in asphyxiation as a symbolic attempt to return to the 
womb. Robert R. Hazelwood, Park Elliott Dietz, and Ann Wolbert Burgess, authors 
of Autoerotic Fatalities (1983), find that the need for oxygen deprivation has a 
strong connection to masochistic fantasies and sexual arousal through risk-taking. 
Similarly, Edward Saunders’ “Life Threatening Autoerotic Behavior: A Challenge for 
Sex Educators and Therapists” (1989) emphasizes the prominence of risk-taking 
and thrill-seeking. Saunders suggests that castration anxiety and masturbation guilt 
account for autoerotic behavior. These psychoanalytic treatises and others have 
raised thought-provoking points that deserve further consideration.

Besides pursuit of pleasure, excitement, and risk, a search for understanding 
accounts for young people’s motivation for playing breath control games. 

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According to Jean Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, children in the 
concrete operational stage (ages 7-11) build concepts based on trial and error, 
while adolescents in the formal operational stage develop more abstract and 
logical thought (2001). Legend specialists have documented children’s and 
adolescents’ efforts to understand death by telling stories and taking trips to places 
associated with death and dying. According to Linda Dégh, author of Legend and 
Belief, “Most of the adolescent legends are quest stories” (2001, 253). Some of 
these quest stories describe attempts to communicate with dangerous spirits, as in 
Janet Langlois’s essay “’Mary Whales, I Believe in You’: Myth and Ritual Subdued” 
(1978). Numerous studies of legend trips, including Bill Ellis’s “Legend-Tripping 
in Ohio: A Behavioral Study” (1982-83) and my own chapter on legend trips in 
Haunted Halls (2007, 182-210), have demonstrated young people’s eagerness to 
probe the borderline between life and death.

Learning how breathing works and what happens when breathing stops 
constitutes a significant quest for understanding. Simon J. Bronner suggested in a 
recent e-mail message that adolescents’ questioning of life may include wondering 
“whether breath as life can be controlled” (2009). His suggestion rings true. Since 
living requires breathing, it makes sense that young people ask what will happen 
when breathing changes or stops.3 This question makes breath control games part 
of a larger search for understanding of life and death.

Studies of breath control games played by groups of children have been less 
common than studies of solitary autoerotic asphyxiation by children, adolescents, 
and adults. The earliest anthropological essay, A.W. Stearns’ “Cases of Probable 
Suicide in Young Persons without Obvious Motivation” (1953), observes that 
Eskimo [Inuit] children hang themselves in games that involve sexual stimulation. 
Psychologist H.L.P. Resnik explains in his essay “Erotized Repetitive Hangings: 
A Form of Self-Destructive Behavior” (1972) that children of Shoshone-Bannock 
Indians play suffocation games; this generalized statement does not seem 
persuasive. A more convincing, detailed observation of a hanging game played 
by a group of boys appears in DeCoccola and King’s The Incredible Eskimo: 
Life Among the Barren Land Eskimo (1986). DeCoccola and King describe what 
happens when most of the boys playing the game get distracted and run away; 
with no friend nearby to help, the boy with the rope around his neck chokes to 
death. This sad account makes the reader wonder how many other boys died in 
similar circumstances. 

Stories told by British boarding school students show that hanging and fainting 
games have flourished in school settings since the 1950s; these games seem to 
have entertained boarding school students for quite a long time. Like levitation, 
which an informant of Iona and Peter Opie learned at boarding school in Bath 
in the 1940s (1959: 309), hanging and fainting games give students an intriguing 
alternative to games organized by adults. 

Journalist Jack O’Sullivan describes variants of fainting games played by male 
and female boarding school students from the 1950s to the end of the twentieth 
century in his essay “So You Still Want to Send the Kids to Boarding School?” 
(1999). He identifies three kinds of games: breath-holding games that involve 
bending the knees, hugging games, and strangulation games involving a cord. 

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Tragically, a game of the third kind resulted in the death of Nicholas Taylor at 
Eton in February of 1999. This well-publicized death increased parents’ and 
teachers’ awareness of the games’ dangers.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, authors have given more attention 
to young people’s breath control games. Forensic specialists Sergey Sheleg and 
Edwin Ehrlich have written a very informative study, Autoerotic Asphyxiation: 
Forensic, Medical and Social Aspects (2006). Their chapter devoted to “AeA and 
Adolescents” includes detailed descriptions of children’s and adolescents’ efforts 
“to induce unconsciousness in various ways to gain approval of their peers, 
without apparent sexual intentions” (93). Sheleg and Ehrlich note that games 
involving a “bear hug” replicate the Valsalva Maneuver (VM), weight lifters’ breath-
holding and abdominal muscle-squeezing to improve their ability to lift heavy 
weights (93). This similarity suggests that children and adolescents may have 
imitated weight lifters in developing hugging games. 

There have also been a number of books for parents of children and 
adolescents. Dr. Lisa Boesky’s When to Worry: How to Tell if Your Teen Needs 
Help—and What to Do (2007) offers parents practical advice about young people’s 
experimentation with drugs, choking games, and other challenges. Similarly, 
Moira McCarthy’s The Everything Guide to Raising Adolescent Girls (2008). tells 
parents about breath control games played in groups. These books and others 
sold at commercial bookstores and on the Internet have given parents much useful 
information.

Educational Websites

Twenty-first-century websites have significantly heightened public awareness of 
breath control games. YouTube, the video-sharing website that went online in 
2005, has made it possible for children and adolescents to post their own videos, 
including graphic enactments of life-threatening games. Grieving parents of 
children and adolescents who died playing these games have opposed posting 
such videos to encourage others to play and have created educational websites. 
As a result of their work, many educational websites currently offer help for young 
people and their parents on YouTube.

One of the most influential websites of this kind, “ChokingGame.net (Passout, 
Fainting, Blackout, Space Monkey),” comes from the DB Foundation, founded by 
Kate B. Leonardi in January of 2006. Leonardi’s eleven year old son, Dylan, died 
in October of 2005. Her activism in helping other parents become aware of breath 
control games’ dangers has been recognized by the New York Times and the Today 
show (Forsloff 2009). It is noteworthy that Leonardi’s website lists multiple folk 
synonyms for “the choking game” in its title: “Passout, Fainting, Blackout, Space 
Monkey.” While these are some of the most widespread names, there are many 
others, including “gasp game,” “the scarf game,” “suffocation roulette,” “American 
dream,” “California dreaming,” “purple dragon,” “purple hazing,” “flatlining,” and 
“the tingling game.” As in the drug culture, a multiplicity of names makes it harder 
for parents to understand what their children are doing. Now that Leonardi’s 

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website and others list many of the names, parents and educators can better 
identify this part of the childhood and adolescent underground.

According to “ChokingGame.net,” 148 young people were seriously injured or 
died after playing suffocation games from 1974 to 2004; 96 were seriously injured 
or died in 2005, 117 in 2006, 63 in 2007, 50 in 2008, and 25 in the first half of 
2009. These figures show an encouraging downturn in the yearly total of deaths, 
but the website’s list of victims reminds readers how important it is to be vigilant. 
This same list of victims is printed on the backs of “Choking Game Awareness” 
t-shirts, which visitors to the website can purchase.

Memorial websites dedicated to young people who died playing breath control 
games provide heart-rending evidence of the games’ lethal impact. Most of these 
websites, lovingly created by grieving parents, contain warnings, folk terms for the 
games, details about the tragic loss, and links to other websites and newspaper 
articles, as well as tributes to the lost child. Nicholas Serna’s memorial website, for 
example, includes photographs, music, and strongly worded warnings. The “bio” 
section explains that Nicholas learned to play a choking game at summer camp 
before his death at the age of sixteen in Arizona in 2005. A photograph shows 
Nicholas passing out during a game at camp. As of August 6, 2009, 15,929 people 
had visited Nicholas’s site.

Another moving memorial website is “Still Loving My Gabriel” (2005). Gabriel 
Harry Mordecai, aged thirteen, died in 2005 in Paradise, California after playing a 
choking game. Gabriel’s twin, Samuel, found his brother lying unconscious with 
a noose around his neck. Admitting that he had played the same choking game 
about five times, Samuel explained that a friend from another town had taught 
him and his brother how to play. Trying to describe how the choking game felt, 
Samuel said, “It’s like a dream world, kind of, and then you wake up.” Usually, 
adults would not hear such explanations of a game’s transmission and appeal. 
After a suffocation game tragedy, however, parents may put the story of events 
that preceded their child’s death up on the Web in an attempt to prevent similar 
tragic losses.

Sometimes news of a game-playing fatality elicits reminiscences from adults. 
After Gabriel Mordecai’s death, his mother, Sarah Pacatte, received mail from 
people who had played suffocation games, including a woman who had played 
one in 1939. Pacatte herself remembered playing the game but not liking it. 
Having learned about the game through personal experience, she understood its 
dangers and warned her twins not to play. Unfortunately, only one of the twins 
stopped playing (Warner 2005).

One of the most informative and emotionally wrenching websites devoted to 
choking game prevention is “G.A.S.P.: Games Adolescents Shouldn’t Play” (2008). 
This website’s video begins and ends with the “911” emergency call that Samuel 
Mordecai made after discovering his brother’s body. Samuel’s heartbroken crying 
and desperate appeal to the operator, combined with visual images of his home, 
give the video a painfully intense impact. The narrator explains the deadly effects 
of oxygen deprivation with the help of an anatomical diagram. He states that 
between 250 and 1,000 people die from suffocation games each year but that 
“many [of these deaths from game-playing] are reported as suicides.” Designed 

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to stop high school students from playing choking games, this video seems very 
effective.

Some parents’ blogs have also warned others about swimming pool games that 
involve breath control. Catherine Holecko’s “Family Fitness Blog,” for example, 
describes “see how long you can hold your breath” games played in bathtubs 
and pools (2009). Holecko notes that some swimming pools have banned such 
games because of the risk of drowning. “Mama Lisa’s World Blog,” by Lisa 
Yannucci, presents swimming pool games in a more positive way; one of her 
commentators calls the Canadian pool game Hen Rooster Chicken Duck “a great 
game for kids as it gets them to hold their breath and put their heads under the 
water” (2009). This blog-based dialogue has raised parents’ consciousness of pool 
games’ perils. Folklorists have documented the traditionality of children’s pool 
games (Knapp and Knapp 1976, 52; Bronner 1988, 179; Tucker 2008, 74) but have 
not emphasized these games’ risks. In a recent e-mail message, Simon J. Bronner 
told me that his students have played both “tame” and “extreme” versions of the 
traditional pool hide-and-seek game Marco Polo; in extreme versions, “the ‘it’ is 
supposed to hold his or her breath for extended portions of time” (2009). Twenty-
first-century children’s love of “extreme sports” seems to be raising the risk level of 
pool games. 

Recent Game Descriptions

During the fall of 2008, I asked the students in my Children’s Folklore class at 
Binghamton University what they knew about breath control games.4 Of the 51 
students in the class, aged 19-24, only four seemed completely unfamiliar with 
such game-playing traditions. One male and one female student remembered 
taking leadership roles in games as young teenagers because of their expertise 
in passing out. The other students had participated briefly, watched friends play, 
or heard friends talk about games. None of them knew of injuries or deaths 
from breath control games in their own communities. As a result of our class 
discussions, several students asked friends to give them information about breath 
control game experiences.

One male student, Alan, told me about “The Couch Game,” played by a small 
group of boys during sleepovers. To take one member of the group by surprise, 
the other boys would suddenly catch him between the mattresses of their fold-out 
couch. Trapped between the two mattresses and caught inside the couch’s heavy 
metal frame, the hapless boy would try to stay inside as long as possible. Anyone 
who begged for a quick release earned the hated nickname “baby.” Before tiring 
of the game, the boys held competitions and praised the ones who could last 
the longest with little air to breathe. In this way they tested their bravery and 
endurance. Fortunately no one got injured during the long game-playing sessions, 
about which their parents knew nothing.

Another male student, Phil, described learning the choking game Space Monkey 
at summer camp, then teaching it to his friends. His memories of the game follow:

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My camp friends had instructed me to take ten deep breaths and hold 
the last one in, while one friend would push on either side of my 
larynx until, to my surprise, I fell asleep. I went into the game with 
honest expectations and had no idea that I would be experiencing 
such a rare sensation, which is only usually obtained right before/
during sleep. I woke up confused, disoriented, and on the ground. 
When I finally realized what had happened, it was such a thrill that 
I immediately started laughing, right along with my cackling friends. 
I thought the game was great. I had no qualms in doing it over and 
over—I didn’t consider the physical harm I could have been doing to 
myself.

Phil’s statement offers valuable insight into this choking game’s appeal. Even 
though the game makes players feel “confused” and “disoriented,” it takes them by 
surprise and makes them laugh. Like many other young players, Phil did not stop 
to consider the possibility of harm.

Besides providing these interesting details about the game’s appeal, Phil 
explained that Space Monkey made his friends “babble and talk like babies.” 
He and his friends videotaped each other acting strangely while unconscious, 
laughing when anyone did something especially odd. These filming sessions 
lasted until one of the boys accidentally fell through a large piece of glass, cutting 
himself. Suddenly, the game stopped seeming harmless and funny. The boys never 
played it again.

One other description came from my female student Marie, who had 
interviewed her friend Emily. During high school, Emily had enjoyed playing a 
version of the Passing Out Game that involved taking turns while sitting in a circle. 
Her description follows:

We were on vacation with another family, and they had two boys and 
the older boy had played it with his friends before, and he’s the one 
who introduced it to us. He’s such a bad influence…You’d have one 
person sitting down and another person get down behind them on 
their knees, and what they would do is they would kind of put you in 
a headlock. You weren’t supposed to breathe, so they just put you in 
a headlock in case you started to breathe. They’d put their elbow by 
your windpipe, and once you went limp, they would let go…We were 
bored and the older kid said that people do all kinds of crazy things 
when they were unconscious and that it was funny, so we were just 
looking for a source of entertainment.

Emily’s graphic description of the Passing Out Game sounds frightening.5 “Were 
you ever scared?” her friend Marie asked while conducting the interview. Emily 
replied, “Yes, I was. You kind of just got the black spots around you and then you 
don’t remember anything after that. I don’t know. All I remember is waking up 
and people laughing at me.”

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After her interview with Emily, Marie commented, “After being forced into 
a risky situation, you get to sit back and enjoy the humor of seeing others lose 
control. Thus, to be in this state of control, you also need to be put under 
control as well.” This insightful observation helps us understand how the more 
complex breath control games work. Although the excitement of discovering 
unconsciousness partially explains the game’s dynamics, an exchange of power 
keeps the process moving. Players voluntarily submit themselves to friends’ control 
and possible mockery so that they can enjoy exerting the same power themselves. 
Watching friends do “all kinds of crazy things” seems so rewarding that giving up 
control does not seem as difficult as it might under other circumstances.

Conclusions and Questions 

Writing this essay has made me draw upon several roles from the past and 
present: nine-year-old game-player, ten-year-old singer, professional folklorist, 
and parent. Memories of childhood game-playing have helped me understand 
how easily children and teenagers take risks; my academic training has given me 
a methodology, and my experience as a parent has made me grieve for parents 
who have lost their children. Knowing that any parent could experience a loss of 
this kind, I have felt acutely aware of the importance of studying breath control 
games. Folklorists of childhood usually try to maintain objectivity, but in this 
case, the need to protect young people from danger seems more important than 
maintaining a professional distance. I am glad to express the hope that children’s 
breath control games will stop endangering lives.

Can we, however, expect children and adolescents to stop teaching each other 
popular, long established games because of adults’ warnings? One of the greatest 
pleasures of playing dangerous games has been rejection of adult authority, so it 
seems unlikely that kids will stop playing breath control games just because their 
parents and teachers worry about their safety. Game-playing traditions tend to 
keep going, and kids’ belief in their own strength makes them resist warnings. 
Although recent breath control game death totals have shown some improvement, 
deaths and serious injuries still occur.

 Why do children and adolescents have such a strong desire to experiment with 
unconsciousness? Some players’ explanations show that they find unconsciousness 
to be exciting and compelling. Pushing each other to the brink of a seductive 
dream world, they probe boundaries between conscious and unconscious 
awareness and between life and death. This kind of boundary probing seems to 
facilitate passage from youth to adulthood. By losing consciousness in a risky way, 
young people prove their bravery and readiness for more complex challenges.

Building upon the literature that psychologists, anthropologists, and forensic 
specialists have generated, folklorists can contribute to the ongoing dialogue about 
breath control games. Depth psychology offers one possible approach. Having 
applied Jungian theory to late adolescents’ ghost stories (2005 and 2007, 94-114), I 
see potential for analysis of children’s and adolescents’ encounters with their own 
negative, death-seeking “shadow sides” through breath control games. Folklorists 
who study group dynamics should find some of these games’ focus on role-

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playing and control-taking to be worth exploring. Other approaches can also lead 
researchers in productive directions.

There is much research to do and many questions to answer. Amid restrictions 
on research with human subjects, can one ask children about this sensitive subject? 
How have choking games developed in Korea, Australia, Pakistan, and other 
nations in which they have become popular? And how does gender influence the 
playing of these games? These questions and others need answers. I hope to read 
new studies of breath control games by folklorists of childhood in the years ahead.

NOTES

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Gabriel Mordecai, Nicholas Serna, 
Chelsea Lynn Dunn, Jason Linkins, and other young people who died after playing 
choking games. I want to thank Simon J. Bronner, Janet Langlois, C.W. Sullivan III, 
and Geoffrey Gould for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of the essay.

1. Public hangings have also occurred in other parts of the United States and 
in the American colonies; among the most notorious hangings are those that took 
place in Salem, Massachusetts during the witchcraft trials of 1692. 

2. The American tourist industry has also done its part to preserve memories 
of hangings. While visiting the Wild Wild West casino in Atlantic City, New 
Jersey in the summer of 2009, I noticed a sign on the casino’s wall: “Hangings on 
Tuesdays.”

3. The film Flatliners (1990) portrays young medical students’ experiments 
with induction of near-death, causing terrifying consequences. While this is a 
commercial film designed for entertainment, it mirrors young people’s quest for 
understanding very well.

4. To maintain confidentiality, all students who participated in our class’s 
dialogue and Marie’s interviewee are identified with pseudonyms.

5. An interesting article that explores the connection between breath holding 
and fright is “Piracetam in Severe Breath Holding Spells” by Matloob Azam, Nasera 
Bhatti, and Naheed Shahab (2008).

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Boesky, Lisa. 2007. When to Worry: How to Tell If Your Teen Needs Help—and 
What to Do. Saranac Lake, New York: AMACOM Books.

Bronner, Simon J. 1988. American Children’s Folklore. Little Rock: August House.
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American Children. New York: Norton.

Langlois, Janet. 1978. “Mary Whales, I Believe in You”: Myth and Ritual Subdued. 
Indiana Folklore 11: 5-33.6

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Essential Guide to Bringing Up Happy, Healthful Girls in Today’s World. 
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Opie, Iona and Peter. 1969. Children’s Games in Street and Playground. New 
York: Oxford University Press.

______. 1959. Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. New York: Oxford University 
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O’Sullivan, Jack. 1999. So You Still Want to Send the Kids to Boarding School? The 
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August 9, 2009).

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Behavior. American Journal of Psychotherapy 26:1: 4-21.
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59

THE KARMA OF VIOLENCE

GLEN RETIEF

When I was twelve years old and skinny as a grasslands cheetah, my parents sent 
me away to boarding-school. They had no choice in the matter. We lived in a 
staff village in a game park more than an hour away from the nearest secondary 
school, so boarding-school was both an unavoidable and unremarkable rite of 
passage for all of those entering Standard Six (eighth grade). One baking hot, 
glaring Monday afternoon in January 1983, the day before the start of the school 
year, they drove me to Nelspruit, a shady farming town on the main road between 
Johannesburg and Mozambique. Here, they dropped me at a complex of red 
brick buildings in a newly-built first-floor dormitory still smelling of concrete dust, 
builders’ tape and paint, and lined with metal lockers and identical blue-and-
white-quilted beds.

It didn’t take me very long to get into trouble at my new school. That very first 
afternoon, after the parents had left, all of us had to stand, according to boarding-
school tradition, in the downstairs showers and wait for our two seventeen-year-
old dormitory prefects to finish soaping and rinsing themselves. After a minute or 
two one of them, a skinny blond muscular boy named John, with bright red acne 
all over his face, announced an initiation ritual which involved dropping our towels, 
placing our hands on our heads, and singing an athletics song while jumping up 
and down in the nude. At some point he caught me looking at his groin.

“You,” he said, beckoning me to come to the front.
He asked my name, then told me to bend over. From somewhere he produced 

a cricket bat. He proceeded to give me six hard strokes on my bum. I remember 
that he put tremendous force into them, swinging back on his strokes so that the 
cracks echoed through that stark concrete bathroom. I also recall that the burning 
on my buttocks was absolutely extraordinary, a fierce, searing agony that caused 
my throat to harden and my eyes to mist up. I was terrified. Bile rose in my 
mouth. It was tough to breathe.

“Let that be a lesson to you, Standard Six,” he said when he was finished. “We 
are fighting a war in this country, and there isn’t any room here for queers and 
weaklings.” He actually used those words—queers; weaklings. After my whipping 
I had to ask Martin, the skinny freckled boy who slept in the bed opposite mine, 
to explain to me what queers were; when he told me there were men in the world 
who lived together and had intercourse, at first I refused to believe him.

“It’s true,” Martin said, “and John thinks you’re one.” And so many other boys 
all agreed that Martin was right, that in the end I had to bow to their superior 
numbers.

Unfortunately, that was just the beginning of it. Over the next ten months, 
and especially during the first three of them, when John lived in the Standard Six 
dormitory with us, I, along with to varying extents the other Standard Sixes in the 
dormitory, would, in the name of “initiation,” face an avalanche of sexual violence 
and torture. I would be given hidings with a cricket bat for walking past candy 

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wrappers lying on the floor or not greeting a matric (twelfth-grader) energetically 
enough when I saw him. I would receive electric shocks to my genitalia and be 
beaten with pillowslips full of athletics spikes; for laughs I would be made to 
pretend that my penis was a drill bit and I had to plow through the concrete floor 
into the building foundations. I would have my food and snacks confiscated from 
me; on an afternoon when the temperature in the shade was more than a hundred 
degrees, I would be confined to my bed under a pile of blankets, with the rest of 
the Standard Sixes forbidden from bringing me water. By the end of that calendar 
year – easily the worst year of my life to date, and certainly my closest brush 
with the kind of oppression that society usually metes out to those on its furthest 
margins—I would be gaunt and skeletal as a stray dog; so petrified, fragile and 
shell-shocked that I would spend afternoons hidden away in the toilets, lying with 
my head on my hands and listening to the water drip into the septic tank; and 
touched, for the first time in my life, with a kind of existential sadness that has 
never quite left me, a sense that something was fundamentally out-of-kilter both 
with myself and the larger world, and that whatever this thing was, it wouldn’t be 
easy to restore to balance again or put right.

These memories are hard to summon up in the daylight. They lurk, somewhere 
in the shadows of my mind, as much a part of me as the freckles on my arms or 
the oval-shaped birthmark on my left thigh, but in some mysterious way they also 
seem separate from me, disassociated film clippings of things that happened to 
someone else. On rose-tinted South Florida mornings, when I drive to the private 
high school where I teach, and I see the tranquil school buildings surrounded by 
the banyans and poinsettias, the lawns and sports fields and neat little wooden 
benches where the students sit at break and eat their sandwiches, the thought that 
crosses my mind is: None of that was real. All of that porn-flick, Abu Ghraib-style 
stuff was just a bad dream.

In my daily sequence of high school English classes, there is little to remind me 
of my past. At this school, which is attended mostly by the ultra-wealthy sons and 
daughters of investment bankers and mogul land developers, a strict anti-bullying 
policy makes even the slightest suggestion of physical violence or intimidation 
punishable by detention, suspension, or expulsion. All over campus, rectangular 
brass and steel plaques remind students of their contractual obligation to report 
all instances of hostile teasing to the administration. According to my tenth and 
eleventh graders, students here settle their differences either through conversation 
or through threats, humorous or actual, to contact their fathers’ hot-shot lawyers. 
“If one student really bullied another here, there’d be a lawsuit before you could 
dial 911,” they tell me, and I believe them, these fresh-faced, optimistic ruling-class 
denizens of the world’s richest and most powerful country.

There are times, watching my students, that I pity them for living such sheltered 
lives. The gleaming SUVs bringing them to school seem obscenely far from the 
barefoot African children who trudged to school near where I grew up. (“Don’t 
forget how much harder the black people have it,” the teachers said whenever 
we complained about our own rough boarding school, and of course, in a sense 

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they were right). The case management meetings called for every flunked test 
or irritable outburst by a student in Math class, where a thoughtful, sympathetic 
school counselor suggests anger management strategies or procrastination-beating 
mental tricks—these seem from a different universe than our mock hangings in 
school bathrooms, where once my friend Andre involuntarily stained the wood of 
an improvised gallows with his urine. (“Disgusting! Phew!” said the seniors when 
he did this, and they, too, were in a sense correct). 

I look at my American students in their polo shirts, wedged between their 
counselors, homeroom advisors, parents, teachers, and administrators, and I think: 
I’m happy you’re so spoiled, even though you don’t have a clue.

But then, after the school day, superciliousness gives way to envy—a blind rage 
at them and their lucky country, accompanying me on the I-95 highway past the 
billboards and the palm trees. This, in turn, later decomposes in its constituent 
elements: a naked pain as I sit in front of the television, and unadulterated 
abandonment plaguing me as I try to do my grading. A hole throbbing in my chest, 
right above my diaphragm. A cold terror in my hands, spreading over my body.

And I ask myself yet again: why was there no one? Why did no teacher take 
the trouble to notice what was happening, all of those years ago, in bathrooms 
with doors left unlocked and open, in dormitories with glass windows open to the 
clouds and birds? Why did no one snap Abu Ghraib-style pictures of our grinning 
and jaunty tormentors—cause a local scandal? At that year’s final honors assembly, 
when John received the award for community service and moral leadership for 
making sandwiches for the neighboring old age home – everyone in the audience 
rising to applaud, John standing in the amber-colored spotlight, smiling his aw-
shucks grin, holding up his trophy for the school photographer—why did no one 
heckle him from the back rows?

A memory: late afternoon, perhaps a week or so after the beating in the shower 
room. The sun is a luminous blood-red, the color of the hostel bricks. I stand at a 
wooden door, the entrance to the apartment of the teacher-on-duty. The teacher 
answers it, a ruddy-faced man with ginger hair and thick, stocky arms full of 
blonde hairs. I try to explain to him that John has been beating me several times 
a day ever since I arrived, for everything from walking past an empty Coke bottle 
left on the landing to not folding the corners of my bed hospital-style. In my 
mouth these jumbled complaints transmute into a mangled story about how I need 
to cover my textbooks and John won’t let me do this during study hall because he 
wants all the Standard Sixes to go to a dance the next evening. Sometime during 
this jeremiad I begin to sob and ask if I can call my parents from his phone. The 
teacher touches me on the arm, firmly but not unkindly.

“You tell John I say he needs to let you cover your textbooks,” he says. “Be 
strong now. You’ll be OK, I promise you.” Why does he never mention this 
incident to me again?

Or here is another one: another late afternoon, just before sunset, the quality 
of light heavy-red and golden. I am in my parents’ car driving back to the game 
reserve, the first weekend I have been permitted to go back home—along with the 
other boarders, I am required to stay in the hostel and cheer at sports events when 
the school is playing one of our neighbors. I have contacted my parents several 

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times since the abuse began, mostly from my aunt’s office in the newsroom of a 
community newspaper across the street: I have been stealing away, unseen, after 
lunch, and spending entire afternoons sitting on piles of phone books and stacks 
of returned tabloids. My father shifts the vehicle into third gear to go up a hill. 
Then he sighs, a sigh deeper than any I have heard him issue before, a moan that 
seems pregnant with a grief that is far beyond my twelve-year-old comprehension.

“The thing is, it’s not true, Glen,” he says. “I know it isn’t. You’re not a sissy or 
a nancy boy, or another of the other things they’re calling you. This is what makes 
this all so unfair.” Perhaps the tremble that starts on his lip also indicates that he is 
angry with them; his shoulders and neck tense up. Is he also annoyed at me? 

He says: “Some of these young guys just act like walking penises.” I don’t 
understand what he means. He says: “This does happen to everyone, you know.” 
He never, to my recollection, articulates the sentiment that in retrospect I so long 
to hear from him, the words that will touch my inner ache: The fact that this is 
happening is a moral abomination, and I will do everything, I mean everything, 
my son, to protect you from it.

Or here, at last, is the most painful memory. It is late one afternoon at school—
I think the afternoon after John made me lie under a pile of blankets. Somehow 
I have made my way to the top of the school, to the fourth storey of the building 
we called the East Wing, with the view over rolling green hills covered with 
citrus orchards and the ribbon of tarred road leading to Johannesburg. I can see 
the little toy houses where my grandparents live, on an orange farm ten minutes’ 
drive away: these are the grandparents whom I have begged my parents to let me 
live with, but they have refused. I lean over the railing, the top half of my body 
precipitously hanging above the hard ground. Death’s release exerts a strong 
attraction. I pray: “Please, if I jump now, Lord Jesus, send your angels and carry 
me over there, to Granny and Grandpa, and make it so that I don’t have to come 
back here.”

But there are no angels, at least none that I believe in enough to risk my fate. I 
do not jump. 

A significant part of my adult life has been spent trying to come to terms with 
these experiences. “I am a survivor of torture,” I have said to myself, by way 
of trying to force myself to take my own victimization seriously. But the words 
survivor and torture stick in the throat like fruit pits; they clang hollow and untrue, 
sound to me like self-pity and dramatization. I long to spit them away from me 
– even though, reading through the incidents listed in reports by Human Rights 
Watch and Amnesty International it is hard to see how the actions of John and his 
friends back in 1983 could not at some level have qualified as war crimes. 

Denial is complex and multi-faceted, universal, pernicious. To confront it 
means not just to challenge the multiple lies and half-truths embedded in the 
self, but also to face loved ones and personal anchors, family and friends, the 
communities that provide structure and identity. 

Until age twenty-four, when I first arrived in New York City as an immigrant 
and expatriate, I truly had no idea there was even anything strange in the story 

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of my early adolescence. All of my life I had simply thought of myself as unlucky 
for having been hit “harder” than the average Standard Six, because of being 
visibly homosexual. Being stripped naked, though, and forced to enter a pillow 
slip lined with menthol muscle relaxant; being punched and clobbered and called 
names; dealing with jokes and high jinks, a little telephone-crank “cock-shock” 
machine here and some humorous armpit hair-burning over there: all of this I took 
for granted as a regular part of growing up. When, after three months of John’s 
depredations, my parents managed to persuade the school authorities to transfer 
him to another passage—an action they took without telling me, for fear I would 
give away the secret and become more of a target—the abuses continued, albeit 
at a reduced intensity, and in fact they persisted throughout high school. My father 
was not wrong in telling me these things happened to “everyone.” A 2001 report 
of the South African Human Rights Commission, authorized by the new democratic 
parliament, found that such abuses were widespread and accepted in schools 
“within an institutional culture of authoritarianism and bullying.”1

It took several years and the utterly anguished, horrified expressions on the 
faces of friends of several different nationalities—American, Swiss, Spanish, 
Brazilian and Chinese—for me to realize that, say, having one’s head shoved in a 
tiny wooden mailbox while being caned with a three-foot hockey stick was not a 
universal coming-of-age ritual. Even then, I was reluctant to acknowledge that my 
childhood wasn’t “normal,” “happy” and “safe.” It is no exaggeration to state that 
it is those moments sitting around in Brooklyn brownstone apartments watching 
faces crumple into utter bewilderment at the descriptions of my childhood and 
adolescence that I felt the first serious stirrings to provide a fiction and nonfiction 
of witness; to share with the wider world my story and its implications. 

In talking to my family over the years, and in sharing my published memoirs 
and personal essays, it has been hard to share this newfound international 
perspective. My parents tend to be sympathetic, yet guarded. “We did the best 
we can,” says my father. “In those days, that’s the way things were done.” It is all 
but impossible to communicate frankly with my former teachers who still live and 
work in the town where I grew up. Recently, when I suggested to one of my old 
Math instructors that school discipline may have been cruel in the old days, she 
proceeded to regale me with a diatribe about how, under democracy, academic 
standards have collapsed and the blacks have brought drugs, laziness, and knife 
fights into previous citadels of order. “Yours was the last generation,” she tells me, 
“to be educated in safety.”

At the political level, the denial of the abuse of young white male 
preadolescents under apartheid is a glaring absence in the national discourse 
about reconciliation, healing, and the building of the so-called “rainbow nation.” 
Existing narratives of the apartheid era rely heavily on notions of white aggression 
and black victimhood. To some extent feminists have succeeded in adding to 
the mix concepts of male belligerence and female injury. Entirely missing from 
this world view is any sense of white males themselves as dual victims and 
perpetrators, stuck in a perverse, topsy-turvy karma of oppression—not being 
subjected to the ills that they inflicted on others, as in the Hindu cosmology, but 

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rather treating others they way they were once treated, and thus perpetuating the 
cycle ad nauseum.

And yet in the universe of apartheid, this is exactly what happened. At 
countless institutions like my boarding school, spread across the African veld like 
red-brick blisters, boys without hair on their bodies became, for a time, honorary 
black South Africans. As the years went by, these boys, with all the verve of 
understudies stepping into stage roles, went on to bully the juniors under them, 
shouting orders to polish shoes or make beds, walloping them in the kidneys 
when they took too long to bring back Coca-cola from the corner store. When 
the time came for these seventeen-year-olds to be conscripted into the South 
African Defence Force, the roles flipped once more. This time, they were made 
to do push-ups over mud puddles until their arms collapsed, or run miles with 
backpacks on their shoulders, or perhaps even have sexual intercourse with 
female prostitutes to prove their masculinity. According to at least one post-
apartheid human rights study, if they showed signs of gentleness or effeminacy 
they were made to endure punishments including electric shock treatment and 
having their genitalia rubbed with shoe polish and inspected by whole platoons.2

In white male South African society, the final step on this ladder of suffering 
and oppression was to become a soldier or officer entrusted with the task of 
maintaining white supremacy. According to the report of Desmond Tutu’s Truth 
and Reconciliation Commission, here there were few limits on the exercise of 
brute power. Herero and Ovambo women on the Namibian border were beaten 
and gang-raped. Captured guerilla fighters got fried alive on the engines of 
armored cars. At the higher levels of military command, white men who looked 
and spoke just like John and his friends gave orders for the engineering of civil 
wars and famines that would claim millions of lives. Like so many mad Kurtzes, 
many white men seemed to lose all sense of themselves in those days, to become 
intoxicated with power and cruelty, and to have no qualms about destroying 
individuals, families, and nations. By time it all came to an end, the damage 
done, both to South Africa and its neighbors—the child soldiers with their legs 
blown up, the families left abandoned and destitute—simply beggared the human 
imagination. 

Perhaps I was either too gentle or too tough a soul to succumb to the karma of 
violence. Perhaps it was simply that as a gay man I was a natural misfit in my 
own society, with no hope, under apartheid, of ever being comfortable in the 
laager, the circle of wagons drawn against indigenous Africans. Perhaps, back in 
those humid summer days when John was standing over my bed, with his smell 
of Clearasil facewash and his ironed black boxer shorts, trying to plant in me the 
spiritual kernel of what he was—perhaps on one of those, another seed managed 
to blow into my soul, much as, even on the hottest afternoons in the dormitory, a 
breath of honeysuckle would come in through the open windows. Grace, divine 
or otherwise, is inevitably mysterious. 

When I myself reached Standard Ten, I never participated in the torture of the 
younger boys. I never punched them full-force in the chest or struck them with 

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canes and athletics spikes; I never seized them, thrust them up into corners, and 
threatened to bash out all the teeth in their mouths. But I cannot claim to be a 
hero. I never reported or spoke out against any abuse or bullying. I never looked 
at the juniors while they were being tormented, never offered them as much 
as a commiserating shake of the head. On one occasion, so as not to appear a 
weakling in front of my peers, I did make a Standard Seven in my passage bend 
over for being disrespectful to me, and I hit him as hard as I could with a cricket 
bat, until he begged me to stop. I remember that when I was done I threw up in 
the passage toilets.

I never joined the South African Defence Force. At age nineteen, a student 
at the University of Cape Town, I joined the End Conscription Campaign and 
declared that I was a conscientious objector, that I would not fight for white 
supremacy. Along with many thousands of white men of my generation, I decided 
simply to ignore the call-up papers, not to show up at one of those train or bus 
stations where we were supposed to shave our heads, heave our duffel bags onto 
our shoulders, and be transformed into killers. The penalties for refusing military 
service were six years’ prison, if they caught you. By that time, though, the laws 
had become virtually unenforceable.

I have said that the karma of violence was repetitious and unchanging, but that 
is not strictly true. By the time I reached matric, the so-called initiation rituals in my 
school were already markedly reduced in intensity, and soon after that, under the 
leadership of a new school principal, they were forbidden. After the transition to 
democracy in 1994, all forms of corporal punishment and bullying were outlawed. 
The rest of the story of the South African transformation is well-known. Today, the 
liveliest wars fought are on the soccer fields, cricket pitches, and rugby stadiums.

As I write these words, summer has once again descended on Miami. Days 
so scalding that when I leave the air conditioning it feels like I have stepped 
into a furnace give way to cool, fresh evenings lit up by thunderstorms. The 
poinciana trees are all in red, fiery bloom; my students are on summer vacation. 
Before leaving, one of my favorite students, who plans to one day become a 
memoirist herself, ran up to me early one morning and told me that she had not 
only managed, with the help of a peer counselor, to defuse a bullying situation 
between an older boy and a younger one, but that she had joined the local 
Amnesty International club, and would be working next year to secure the release 
of political prisoners in Guantanamo, Havana, Mexico, and the Middle East. She 
was so exuberant and happy; her arms wheeled as she talked about going to 
Washington, D.C.; her mouth opened wide as she laughed about the fun she was 
going to have in Chiapas. You, too, I thought, are going to be a witness. And this 
time, instead of provoking jealousy, her open, innocent face, so full of youthful 
happiness, gave me hope.

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NOTES

An earlier version of “The Karma of Violence” appeared in Hotel Amerika.

1. See South African Human Rights Commission 2001. 
2. For examples of such violations within the SADF, see Van Zyl, Mikki,  

et al. 1999.

WORKS CITED

South African Human Rights Commission. 2001. Report into Initiation Practices 
at Educational Institutions and a Preliminary Report on Cultural Initiations. 
Cape Town: SAHRC, October.

Van Zyl, Mikki, et al. 1999. The Aversion Project: Human rights abuses of gays and 
lesbians in the SADF by health workers during the apartheid era. Simply Said 
and Done: Cape Town.

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67

CHILDREN’S ORAL POETRY: IDENTITY AND OBSCENITY1

C.W. SULLIVAN III

I offered this paper for publication not so much for any original insights present 
but as it may be (or may not be!) an example of how to take children’s folklore 
scholarship into other venues—in this case, children’s literature, at a conference 
where this was the only children’s folklore paper.

Introduction

We were all children once, and according to children’s folklorist Jay Mechling, 
that might pose a problem for collectors of children’s folklore. In an essay entitled 
“Children’s Folklore,” in Elliott Oring’s collection, Folk Groups and Folklore Genres, 
Mechling begins his argument by saying, “The white, male folklorist recognizes 
that he will never really know what it means to be a black woman, but we all 
think we know what it means to be a child” (1986, 91). But our knowledge of 
what it means to be a child is filtered through a lens that is thick with the years 
that have passed since we were children, years during which we have forgotten or 
glossed over much, years during which selective memory has compressed some 
experiences and expanded others, years during which we have developed our 
own “presumptions and emotional responses” to the very subject that we think we 
are treating objectively (91).

In fact, some adults, when confronted with certain materials collected by 
children’s folklorists, deny the reality of those materials or, worse, accuse 
folklorists of unethical behavior. I, as editor of Children’s Folklore Review, was 
accused of providing children with obscene materials when I published a series of 
articles by sociologist Gary Alan Fine on pre-adolescent male slang. My accuser, a 
local high school principal, neither recognized that the publication was for adults, 
not children, nor remembered that children of that age, especially perhaps boys, 
were capable of such language. Thanks to an understanding department chair 
and dean who defended me and the journal, I suffered no professional ill effects 
from the situation and CFR has continued on as a successful and, I hope, a well-
repescted journal of children’s folklore research.

Other scholars have not been so fortunate. An Australian collector 
photographing girls’ playground games took a picture of girls flipping up their 
dresses and showing their undergarments as such an action was described in the 
rhyme they were chanting:

Flintstones, Flintstones, yabba, yabba, doo! 
(repeat) 
Fred does the bow, 
Wilma does the curtsy, 
Pebbles shows her Knickers, 
And we all go “Wow!”

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His dissemination of these photographs caused him to be arrested and suspended 
from his university position for distributing child pornography. The case dragged 
on for six months or so until it came before an understanding magistrate who 
threw it out of court (Australian Children’s Folklore Newsletter 1994, 1). Neither of 
these cases is about the children, but both illustrate adults’ misperceptions about 
childhood, adults projections of their own attitudes onto what they see happening 
on the baseball field or the playground.

These projections arise for at least two reasons. One one hand, as Mechling 
recounts, our imagination is still dominated by “[e]nlightenment and romantic 
era portraits of the child,” by our “American commonsense understanding of 
childhood…[as] a period of separation, protection, preparation, and innocence,” 
and by the “various schools of child psychology” that are all “bound by cultural 
assumptions and biases” (93). On the other hand, it seems to me that the American 
(if not western) process of “growing up” encourages us to leave childhood behind. 
How often are children told “Act your age,” “Don’t be a baby,” and “You’re too 
old for that”? Children are told, with regard to rivalry with younger siblings, “You 
should know better; you’re older.” Some growing up, “Act like a lady” and “Big 
boys don’t cry,” is gender coded. This attitude is nothing new, as an often-quoted, 
ancient passage indicates: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as 
a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things” 
(1 Corinthians 13:11).

The solution, Mechling argues, is for the folklorist to “approach the child’s folk 
group assuming very little” (93). One of the definitions of a folk group is that it 
operates on a very “high context” level; that is, things happen in the group that 
outsiders would not understand without explanation. This is especially true of 
folk speech; within a folk group there are words and phrases that members of 
the group will share with each other and understand that outsiders would need 
explained—if, in fact, members of the group were willing to share such words and 
phrases with outsiders. Mechling continues his argument by suggesting a solution: 
“the folklorist [should take] an approach that views children’s folk cultures as if 
they were fully complex, developed, and autonomous. This ‘as if’ assumption 
means that we approach children’s folk cultures just as we would any unfamiliar 
culture” (93).

To rephrase Mechling, then, one might say, “The adult folklorist recognizes 
that he or she no longer really knows what it means to be a child and approaches 
the collection of children’s folklore as one would apporoach the collecting of 
folklore from any group of which he or she is not a member.” What I would like 
to present here, then, is a look a children’s oral poetry as the creation of a culture 
significantly different from the adult culture around it and examine the ways in 
which the members of this culture use poetic forms to create, first, an identity 
separate from the adult culture and, second, especially through the medium of 
obscenity, an identity in opposition to the adult culture.

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Identity

Much of what I wish to say about identity in general has been said before, but 
I hope to be able to add something to the discussion. In American Children’s 
Folklore, Simon Bronner asserts that the division between adult authority and 
the children under adult control is reflected in children’s folklore in general: “For 
children, we must remember, do not simply ape the mores of adults. They want 
to declare their own identity, and lore is their protected expression of cultural 
connection to one another” (1988, 29).2 Bronner continues, “Besides rebelling 
against adult norms, children’s folklore reflects children’s concerns about their 
rapid growth, the appropriate responses to adult society, and traditional roles and 
values in a nation being modernized” (31). Oral poetry, whether handed down 
traditionally to deal with recurring situations or created and circulated in response 
to contemporary cultural stimuli, forms a very large part of younger children’s 
folklore.

Children use traditional rhymnes in what Iona and Peter Opie, in The Lore and 
Language of Schoolchildren, call “oral legislation” (1959, 121-153); that is, they 
use rhymes in the way older children and adults use books of rules. Counting-
out rhymes, for example, such as “Eenie, meenie, miney, moe” or “One potato, 
two potato,” are considered unbiased ways of selecting the first “IT” in a game, 
the sacrificial person who has to be “IT” without having been caught.3 Game or 
play rhymes are not always legislation, but they do structure children’s activities; 
examples include game rhyme “The Farmer in the Dell,” hand-clapping rhyme “I’m 
a pretty little Dutch girl,” ball-bouncing rhyme “My name is Alice,” and the largest 
category of all, jump-rope rhymes “Cinderella Dressed in Yellow,” “Teddy Bear, 
Teddy Bear, turn around,” and “Policeman, Policeman do your duty.” Such rhymes 
have been circulated by children for generations as they organized their own 
play, without direct adult supervision, long before they were whisked off to such 
regulated activities as adult-organized football or baseball leagues, Boy Scouts, or 
Girl Guides.

In addition to regulating their own games, children have a series of rhymes that 
attempt to enforce conformity. Children have their own ideas, independent of (but 
to some extent derived from) the adult culture that surrounds them, and they have 
rhymes which make fun of or insult transgressors within the group. Overweight 
children hear “Fatty, fatty, two-by-four,” a child hastily dressed might hear, “I see 
London, I see France / I see [name]’s underpants,” informers to authorities hear, 
“Tattletale, tattletale, / Hanging on the bull’s tale,” liars hear “Liar, liar, pants on 
fire,” and, of course, immature or sensitive children hear, “Cry, baby cry, stick your 
finger in your eye.” There are many more such rhymes, and the point is that they 
are circulated by children, not taught by adults, and address what the child’s folk 
group considers proper or, more to the point, improper behavior.

On a slightly more complex level, and more obviously influenced by the adult 
community, perhaps especially by the family, are rhymes that insult people outside 
the child’s immediate peer and age group. The Opies, collecting in the 1950s, 
included the following rhymes in a chapter entitled “Partisanship.” Some rhymes 
have historical origins:

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The Irishmen ran down the hill, 
The Englishmen ran after, 
And many a Pat got a bullet in his back 
At the Battle of Boy’an Water. (1959, 343).

Other kinds of partisanship can be directly religious. Protestants may say, 
“Catholic, Catholic, ring the bell, / When you die you’ll go to hell” and be 
answered by the Catholics, “Protestant, Protestant, quack, quack, quack, / Go to 
the Devil and never come back” (344). Still other rhymes can be political, this one 
based on an Oscar Meyer bologna commercial jingle:

My peanut has a first name 
It’s J-I-M-M-Y 
My peanut has a second name 
It’s C-A-R-T-R [sic] 
Oh, I hate to see him every day 
And if you ask me why I’ll say 
’Cause Jimmy Carter has a way 
Of messing up the U-S-A (Sullivan 1980, 9).

What are serious matters to adults—war, religion, and politics—become fodder for 
children creating parodies of that adult seriousness.

There are also national and ethnic attitudes in some children’s rhymes. When 
I was young, we caught “a Nigger by the toe,” although later and more sensitive 
versions of “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe” change “Nigger” to “tiger.” In One 
Potato, Two Potato: The Folklore of American Children, Herbert and Mary Knapp, 
collecting collecting and publishing some twenty years after the Opies,4 include, 
in addition to political rhymes, what I would call derisive rhymes about African-
Americans, Asian-Americans, Jews, and “Polacks”5 (1976, 190-206). One that the 
Knapps collected covers several bases:

Franklin said to Eleanor, 
“Eleanor, how are you?” 
Eleanor said to Franklin, 
“I’ve got some advice for you. 
Roses are red, violets are blue, 
You kiss the niggers, 
I’ll kiss the Jews, 
And we’ll stay in the White House 
As long as we choose.” (1976, 201).

Rather than reinforcing internal conformity, these rhymes solidify the folk 
group’s identity in opposition to what anthropologists and sociologists, as well 
as folklorists, would call “The Other”; i.e., those people who are obviously and 
demonstrably not “Us.”

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Another way in which children assert their own identity is through parody. 
This seems to me a more subtle kind of partisanship or derision in which children 
take what is presented to them by the adult culture and parody it; that is, they 
take something serious and change it to make it humorous. Bronner suggests 
that “Children are fond of parodying the standard and familiar, especially when 
in the process of doing so they can establish that they have a world of their own 
making” (1988, 77). Nothing is out of bounds as far as children are concerned. 
They will parody religious materials from evening-meal grace, “Good bread, good 
meat, / Good God, let’s eat” to evening prayers, “Now I lay me down to sleep, 
/ A bag of peanuts at my feet,” to Christmas carols, “Joy to the world, the school 
burned down.” School is a particular target; “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” 
becomes “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school” and in a 
parody of “On Top of Old Smokey,” we hear “I shot my poor teacher / With a 
forty-four gun.” Commerical jingles, too, are prime targets: “MacDonald’s is your 
kind of place, / They throw french fries in your face,” “Pepsi Cola hits the spot, / 
Smells like vinegar, tastes like snot,” or “Sani-Flush, Sani-Flush, / Cleans your teeth 
without a brush.” And there are many more parodies of this sort.

While most parodies serve to establish children’s identity as separate from the 
adult world, some parodies indicate different levels within children’s folk culture.6 
By parodying the theme song from the television show, Barney and Friends, older 
children can indicate that they have outgrown a program directed at the very 
young viewer. In “‘I Hate You, You Hate Me’; Children’s Responses to Barney the 
Dinosaur,” Elizabeth Tucker, while also acknowledging timely references to topics 
like the AIDS epidemic, asserts this very point. The original theme song, which 
begins “I love you, you love me,” becomes in parody versions:

I hate you, you hate me. 
Let’s go out and kill Barney  
And a shot rang out and 
Barney hit the floor 
No more purple dinosaur (1999, 28).

And as Judy McKinty points out, there are similar songs about the Teletubbies set 
to the Barney tune:

I hate Po, Po hates me, 
We’re not a happy family, 
With a dagger in his back and a bullet in his head, 
Uh-oh Laa Laa, Dipsy’s dead (2000, 49).

The older child’s execution of Barney or one of the Teletubbies signals his or her 
rejection of that earlier stage of life and is part of the putting behind of childish 
things I spoke of earlier.

By far, the most popular area of parody is the nursery rhyme. Nursery rhymes 
are among the earliest rhymes to which children are exposed, the earliest rhymes 
they learn themselves, and the earliest rhymes they parody. Moreover, the 

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parodies show both the separation from the adult world and the development of 
the child within his or her folk group. The earliest of these, that is, those said by 
the youngest children, are usually innocent.

Mary had a little lamb, 
It was a greedy glutton, 
She fed it on ice cream all day, 
And now it’s frozen mutton (Opie 1959, 90).

And one of my favorites:

Mary had a little lamb, 
Her father shot it dead, 
Now Mary takes her lamb to school, 
Between two hunks of bread.

But as children get a bit older, the parodies become somewhat more daring:

Mary had a little lamb 
She tied it to a heater 
Every time it turned around 
It burned its little peter. (Bronner 1988, 80).

And then more sexually suggestive and linguistically complex:

Mary had a little lamb, 
And, boy, was the doctor surprised.

And:

Mary had a little lamb, 
She also had a bear; 
I’ve often seen her little lamb, 
But I’ve never seen her bear [bare].

What is true of the “Mary had a little lamb” parodies is also true of other nursery 
rhymes. Parodies tell what Jack burned when he jumped over the candle stick, 
what Jack and Jill were really doing up on that hill, what happened to Mother 
Hubbard when she went to get her dog a bone from the cupboard, how having 
so many children affected the Old Woman who lived in the shoe, and what Jack 
Horner was eating in the corner—just to name some of the most popular.

Obscenity7

This obviously brings us to the R-rated section of the performance. Children’s rude 
or off-color or obscene humor (let’s just settle on “obscene” as the cover term) 

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has been a problem for folklorists for some time. On one hand, as Iona Opie has 
testified (see note #4), publishers would not accept such materials in the 1950s. 
By the time of the Knapps’ One Potato, Two Potato in 1976, things had changed, 
and materials that could not have been published in the 1950s could be published. 
When Simon Bronner published American Children’s Folklore, in 1988, it seems 
as of anything was allowed. However, the Opies said, “Genuinely erotic verse…is 
unusual” (1959, 95), and the Knapps echoed that sentiment, “Little erotic verse 
shows up in grade school” (1976, 85); however, as the Knapps admitted on the 
very next page (86), it wasn’t easy, and was sometimes impossible, for adults to 
convince children to tell them such materials—and for obvious reasons.

As the Knapps suggest and Bronner’s examples reinforce, such erotic materials 
become plentiful among junior high school age children. As with the “Mary had 
a little lamb” parodies, children’s obscene humor is developmental within the 
folk group; that is, as the children get older, their obscene verse changes. The 
first subject of such verse is feces. One of the first insults a child learns is to call 
someone else a “doo doo head,” and there is an attendant verse, “Nanny, Nanny 
boo boo / Stick your head in doo doo.” The very first obscene verse I learned 
from an older boy in the neighborhood was:

1944 
The monkey climbed the door 
The door split 
The monkey shit 
1944

Why this made me laugh heartily, I now have no idea. A rhyme reported by the 
Knapps may illustrate its age with a reference to a chain-pull toilet, “Push the 
button, pull the chain, / Out comes a little black choo-choo train” (1976, 62). 
Bronner includes

The night was dark 
The sky was blue 
Down the alley 
A shit wagon flew 
A bump was hit 
A scream was heard 
A man was killed 
By a flying turd

and remarks that “These rhymes comment on children’s growing understanding of 
taboos on certain images and words” (1988, 81). They are also opportunities for 
children to engage in what Mechling might call “obscene play” or “forbidden play” 
(1986, 94), a kind of play which is their own and in which they engage in direct 
opposition to the attitudes of the adult folk group. And feces is just the beginning.

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In addition to feces, there is a general interest in all eliminatory and excretory 
functions. A rhyme in which the reciter points to the general areas of chest, crotch, 
and buttocks creates interesting food metaphors:

Milkly Milky, 
Lemonade, 
Around the corner, 
Hot dogs made.

As the title of Donna Lanclos’ article “Bare Bums and Wee Chimneys,” indicates, 
there is a great deal of children’s lore—rhymes, jokes, sayings, and songs—about 
those two areas of the body. In addition, underwear, which covers those body 
parts, is another topic of more than passing interest to children, and in addition to 
the “I see London, I see France” admonitory rhyme, there are others; and most of 
the rhymes in this category involve someone’s having lost his or her underwear. 
One such rhyme begins:

Tarzan, Tarzan, through the air 
Tarzan lost his underwear 
Tarzan say, “Me don’t care— 
Jane make me another pair” (Bronner 1988, 78).

In that rhyme and its many variations, Jane, Boy, and Cheetah are also naked. 
These rhymes about body parts and underwear, as well as the jokes and songs 
and sayings about them, allow children to engage in some forbidden language 
play, and because adults would find at least some of that language play 
objectionable, the children have, once again, delineated and taken possession of 
something that is not only their own but in opposition to adult norms.

From a focus on body parts and their excretory and eliminatory functions, it is 
probably not a huge step to focus on body parts and their reproductive functions. 
The information children have about sex and reproduction is often incomplete, 
hazy, and/or erroneous; but as soon as they are aware that babies come from 
women’s bodies, their lore begins to reflect this. The Knapps report the following 
recitation by a ten-year-old boy: “Now I lay her on the bed, / I pray to God I’ll use 
my head” (1976, 172), both a parody of “Now I lay me down to sleep” as well as 
a rather vague rhyme about sexual activity. More familiar, but no less vague, is a 
parody of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”:

My Bonnie lies over the ocean 
My Bonnie lies over the sea, 
My daddy lies over my mommy, 
And that’s how they got little me. (Knapp 1976, 185).

About a variation of the song, Bronner reports the person from whom the song 
was collected learned it in second or third grade; he comments, “Within the 
apparent innocence of this ditty, the singer is declaring her astute awareness 

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of sexual knowledge supposedly kept hidden from children” (1988, 218, n.22). 
Children’s questions about where babies come from show that they are, indeed, 
interested in the subject, and the rhymes, songs, jokes, and sayings indicate not 
only a sort of innocent knowledge, but also a willingness to know and share 
whatever information they have.

While it may be obvious that children know what they are talking about in the 
immediately previous examples of innocent sexual rhymes, it may be that they are 
saying more than they know in others. According to Roger Abrahams (1969, 31-
32), the single most popular jump-rope rhyme is:

Cinderella 
Dressed in yellow 
Went upstairs  
To kiss a fellow 
Made a mistake 
And kissed a snake 
How many doctors 
Did it take? 
1, 2, 3, 4, 5…(Bronner 1988, 70).

In a variant reported by the Knapps, Cinderella “Came downstairs with a 
bellyache” between “Kissed a snake” and “How many doctors did it take?” (1976, 
125). Mechling argues:

One way to account for the popularity of this rhyme is to see in 
it a disguised discussion of sex and pregnancy. The rhyme begins 
innocently enough with a fairytale character, probably known to 
children through the Disney film and storybooks. But the Cinderella 
story itself is about the sexual awakening of a young woman. In 
the jump-rope rhyme, the young woman goes upstairs to kiss her 
boyfriend, but she kisses a “snake” instead, and one way to interpret 
the meaning of “kissing a snake” is in sexual symbolic terms. In 
the child’s vague understanding of reproduction and the difference 
between the womb and the stomach, sexual contact could result in a 
“stomach ache”—that is, pregnancy (1986, 101).

The “bellyache” figures in numerous hand-clapping, jump-rope, and other game 
rhymes; and it is important to note that these are girls’ game rhymes, making the 
sexual interpretation even more convincing.8

Conclusions

Where does one draw the line? I do not mean with children; this is their material, 
and forbidding it to them would be as successful as King Canute’s fabled attempt 
to halt the incoming tide. I do not mean in this presentation, although I will admit 
a certain trepidation in presenting increasingly obscene materials (as well as some 

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I have already presented) to such an august gathering as this. No, I mean where 
do we draw the line between children’s and adolescents’ folklore?

Folklorists often talk about age-group folklore (Brunvand 1998, 54-56), and that 
almost works here, ending childhood at 12 and beginning adolescence at 13, but 
some children learn things sooner and others later. Perhaps it might be better to 
look at intent. I mentioned earlier the Opies’ and the Knapps’ comments that little 
erotic verse exists at the grade-school level. It does exist at the junior-high and 
high-school levels, where it is recited or told perhaps expressly for its erotic value 
(the basic knowledge of sex and sexuality being fairly well understood by the 
tellers at that age). 

In other words, the intent of the adolescent teller is different from the intent of 
the child teller. The adolescent teller intends to be erotic; the child teller, generally, 
does not. On the first level, “Identity,” the child tellers are creating and passing 
on verses that are their own, outside of and sometimes in opposition to what 
they hear from and see in the adult community; and it is difficult to tell just how 
important it is for those who are essentially powerless to have something of their 
own, something that they can control. On the second level, “Obscenity,” the child 
tellers are also asserting their independence from the adult culture, especially 
with the verses about bodily functions and the like; but they are also beginning to 
show an awareness of, in their own language, direct and metaphorical, that most 
secret of all adult knowledge, the knowledge of sexuality. But the child’s intent, 
whatever else it is, is not to be erotic.

We will read our children poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses, When We 
Were Very Young, and Now We are Six, and our children will love those books and 
poems, but when they are on their own, on the playground or in the woods, it is 
more likely that they will be reciting some of the materials, or variations thereof, 
mentioned above. And this is as it should be; they are entitled to their own poetry 
and to their identity as children as they express it in that poetry.

NOTES

1. A shorter version of this article was originally presented at the “Poetry and 
Childhood Conference and Exhibition” sponsored by Cambridge University and 
the British Library, London, 20-21 April 2009, and will be published in a volume of 
selected papers from the conference.

2. By “protected,” I assume that Bronner means that children protect their lore 
from adults, not that someone else is protecting the children.

3. Examples, unless otherwise noted, are from my own experiences or 
collections.

4. The publication date is important. Iona Opie has since said to me in private 
conversation that Oxford University Press would not publish some of the ruder 
materials that she and Peter collected.

5. Polack jokes, of course, are not really about Polish people but are actually 
an iteration of the Numbskull jokes that have circulated about various groups with 
ethnic and religious labels suitable to the time.

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6. See Donna M. Lanclos’ “Bare Bums and Wee Chimneys” for an extended 
discussion of defining lines between children and adults.

7. I am omitting the larger category of what Simon Bronner (1988, 81-82) calls 
gross rhymes, as violence and other subjects of gross rhymes are not generally 
considered “rude” or “obscene.”

8. Prior to the twentieth century, boys may have participated in what are now 
considered girls’ games. For a discussion of gender and hopscotch, see Derek Van 
Rheenan, “Boys Who Play Hopscotch: The Historical Divide of a Gendered Space” 
1998.

WORKS CITED

Australian Children’s Folklore Newsletter. 1994. 26 (August): 1-2.
Abrahams, Roger, ed. 1969. Jump Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary. Austin: University of 

Texas Press,
Bronner, Simon J. 1988. American Children’s Folklore. Little Rock: August House.
Brunvand, Jan H. 1998. The Study of American Folklore. 4th ed. New York: Norton.
Fine, Gary Alan. 1979-1981.Pre-Adolescent Male Slang, I-VII. Children’s Folklore 

Newsletter II.1, II.2, III.1, III.3, IV.1, IV.2, and IV.3 (Fall -Winter).
Knapp, Herbert, and Mary Knapp. 1976. One Potato, Two Potato: The Folklore of 

American Children. New York: Norton.
Lanclos, Donna M. 2000. Bare Bums and Wee Chimneys: Rudeness and Defining 

the Line Between Child and Adult. Children’s Folklore Review 22.2 (Spring): 
7-48.

McKinty, Judy. 2000. E-Contributions. Children’s Folklore Review 22.2: 49.
Mechling, Jay. 1986. Children’s Folklore.. In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres, ed. 

Elliott Oring. Logan: Utah State University Press, 91-120.
Opie, Peter, and Iona Opie. 1959. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. 

London: Oxford University Press.
Sullivan, C.W. III. 1980. Peanuts and Baloney. Center for Southern Folklore 3.1 

(Winter): 9.
Tucker, Elizabeth. 1999. “I Hate You, You Hate Me”: Children’s Responses to 

Barney the Dinosaur. Children’s Folklore Review 22.1 (Fall): 25-33.
Van Rheenan, Derek. 1998. Boys Who Play Hopscotch: The Historical Divide of a 

Gendered Space. Children’s Folklore Review 21.1 (Fall): 5-34.

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79

 KID CULTURE: NEIGHBORHOOD EXPLORATION  
THROUGH ENRICHMENT CLUSTERS

KATHRYN A. MCCORMICK

Public school calendars of cultural and historical events are a resource for those 
who want to view cultural exchange at work. Urban environments give students 
the opportunity to understand folklore through connecting to their neighborhood 
and describing their experiences. A 2007 enrichment project at P.S. 261 in 
Brooklyn, New York introduced local lore and solicited students’ responses to 
literature, visual presentations, and neighborhood walks in a study of their own 
neighborhood. Students were encouraged to record with all of their senses, 
cognitive mapping, interviewing, photographing, diagramming, and planning  
food tasting to relate their experiences in their neighborhoods.

How to Get Famous in Brooklyn was used as an inspirational piece of literature 
to tap students’ knowledge and awareness of places in their neighborhoods. Third 
grade students in the Enrichment Cluster Project had done neighborhood study in 
grade 1 and the bridge study in grade 2 and so were quite aware of the working 
environment of their world. Daily travel to school by walking and taking subways, 
buses and cars provides various levels of awareness and involvement, as does 
experiencing playgrounds, games, parks, favorite stores and restaurants, gathering 
places, places they go with parents, street memorials, funeral traditions, and even 
lost or changing places.

The book The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey was used to stimulate 
conversation about transportation, and harbor life in New York City. Students 
created a model of New York Harbor, the working home of the historic fireboat 
that was activated as an evacuation boat on 9/11. The book emphasizes the 
working fireboat’s value as a survivor of an earlier time on New York Harbor. 
Students appreciate the will of restorers to keep the boat as well as the heroic  
use of it for a present day event. 

Social Outcomes

Visual presentations of street memorials stimulated conversations about death, 
remembering loved ones, accidents, and funerary practices in families and 
communities in the city. Students adopted the appropriate moods for these 
presentations. In fact, the social outcomes of local lore were many, reflecting 
the importance of recognizing the value children give to their own experiences. 
Students demonstrated pride in discovering their culture and sharing other 
students’ cultures.

Students shared their interests and concerns about their community, their 
play spaces, and their safety and illustrated neighborhood planning strategies 
to implement model neighborhoods. Their sense of belonging was enhanced 
because they researched and presented material on their own culture, traditions, 
customs and choices within their living environment. Play was affirmed and 

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categorized as “just fun,” and serious play as an interesting means to understand 
and communicate “kid” culture. Lastly, students became skilled fieldworkers and 
evaluators of their own lore.

What Teachers Learned

Students were less interested in the monuments and museums of Brooklyn than 
the everyday life within their neighborhood. Their stories were travel narratives 
of “spatial practice,” as in Asim and Eli’s model of their favorite park before the 
renovation planned by the Parks Department. They related exactly which activity 
took place in each space of the park, taking ownership of the space. Other 
students showed their skills as keen observers and recorders of physical space, 
showing how changes to that space impact their daily experiences. Emeka and 
friends demonstrated the use of space where they played games before and during 
the renovation of their school playground. Although they spoke nostalgically about 
the loss of particular corners of the schoolyard, they pointed out new small spaces 
which they had adopted for their games during the playground renovation.

Students recognize ‘folk’ culture and the dynamic clustering of culture as a 
concept of generative life in the city. They are receptors and communicators 
of culture, enthusiastic about learning and sharing their own customs. Ali and 
Raymond’s model of ‘life on the block’ related what Michel de Certeau refers to 
as “spatial narratives…narrated adventures, producing geographies of actions” 
signaling where they observe their own culture being transmitted, where 
they shop, eat and spend time with relatives in the Middle Eastern stores and 
restaurants on Atlantic Avenue (1984, 115-16).

Students are receptors and transmitters of lore involved in making themselves 
“famous in Brooklyn,” as the book How to Get Famous in Brooklyn suggests. 
Participation in activities and festivals in their neighborhoods as well as daily travel 
and use of the neighborhood roots students actively in their environment. They 
proudly display a sense of ownership, enthusiasm and confidence in knowing 
their own displays of culture. In addition, students utilize their own cultural codes 
and ‘kidspeak’ for their neighborhood and playground. These codes are not 
necessarily understood or used by adults, and that may be the point; students  
like to own their place in their local environment.

WORKS CITED

De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Los Angeles: University  
of California Press.

Hest, Amy. 1995. How to Get Famous in Brooklyn. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Kalman, Maira. 2002. The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey. New York: 

Putnam Juvenile.

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BOOK REVIEWS

Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of 
Children. By Marta Gutman and Ning De Coninck-Smith, eds. (New Brunswick, 
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Pp. vii + 346, introduction, photographs, 
epilogue, index.)

CATHARINA I. KESSLER 

Designing Modern Childhoods is a collection of fifteen illustrated essays that  
draw from a vast variety of sources, accompanied by a foreword by Paula S. Fass 
and an epilogue by social and cultural historian John R. Gillis. Marta Gutman is 
an associate professor in the School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape 
Architecture at the City College of New York, and Ning de Conninck-Smith is 
an associate professor in the Department of Educational Sociology at the School 
of Education at Aarhus University in Denmark. The book is partly a result of an 
international, multidisciplinary conference organized by the two at the University 
of California, Berkeley in 2002 and assembles contributions from architectural 
historians, social historians, social scientists, and architects.

The essays are grouped into four parts: ‘Child Saving and the Design of  
Modern Childhoods’; ‘The Choreography of Education and Play’; ‘Space, Power 
and Inequality in Modern Childhoods’; and ‘Consumption, Commodification, and 
the Media: Material Culture and Contemporary Childhoods.’ Drawing on data 
from the USA, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Europe, Turkey, Senegal and 
Indonesia from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the collection covers a 
broad spectrum of landscapes and time periods. The essays are framed by the 
thesis “that spaces and settings made for children are pivotal to the construction  
of modernity in global society” (2).

The first two sections of the book are mainly historical and discuss and 
challenge the concept of the “islanding of children,” described by Gutman  
and de Conninck-Smith in the introduction as “the specialization of space and 
material culture” (5) designed by adults for children, thus systematically separating 
the lives of the two groups by relegating children to the home (as in the paper 
by Annmarie Adams and Peter Gossage), schools (Anne-Marie Châtelet, Zeynep 
Kezer, Kristin Juul), special children’s hospitals (David C. Sloane), playgrounds  
and special parks (Roy Kozlovsky, Anéne Cusins-Lewer and Julia Gately), and 
summer camps (Abigail A. van Slyck). An essay by Annmarie Adams and Peter 
Gossage on “Sick Children and the Thresholds of Domesticity” sits well in this 
volume and highlights the large “extent of healthcare practices that took place 
beyond the thresholds of the bedroom and the home” of Canadian families 
of the Victorian era (77). The authors ask to reconsider notions of the passive 
child in their analysis of letters written by members of John William Dawson’s 
family, culled from the McGill University Archives. Adams and Gossage show 

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how Dawson’s healthy teenage daughter manages the everyday affairs of her 
sick siblings while her mother is away, actively reordering the domestic spaces, 
opening windows to provide them with fresh air, and reporting back to her mother 
about her activities, in which she is aided by a close network of relatives and other 
families (70). The study challenges historians’ suggestion that in the past, sick 
children of middle-class Canadian families were tended by mothers before being 
admitted to hospital, isolated from other families or outside institutions. Rather, it 
argues that sick children inspired travel and connection beyond the home. 

The second half of the collection is mostly ethnographic, focusing on the 
historical present of childhood with one section on power and inequality, and 
another on consumption, commodification and the media. The chapters in 
this section complement the first, historically-oriented portion of the volume 
in positioning children as actors in their own right. They highlight children’s 
strategies of using, co-creating and influencing spaces of the house and backyard 
(Rebecca Ginsburg), street (Harriot Beazley) and school (Mary S. Hoffschwelle), 
or their use of material goods and associated cultural practices such as presents 
(Alison J. Clarke), McDonald’s Happy Meals (Helene Brembeck), snowboards 
(Olav Christensen) and anime media (Mizuko Ito). The insightful essay by 
architectural historian Rebecca Ginsburg on “The View from the Back Step,” set 
in the context of South African apartheid, draws attention to the tight nexus of 
dominant social values and spatial order by examining how white children learned 
about apartheid by observing and partaking in its racial geography. Through the 
analysis of interviews with white people who were children in the 1960s and 
1970s and former African servants from the same period, Ginsburg traces the 
relationships of white children and their black nannies, who used to live in huts 
in their backyard. The authors show how their understanding of racial hierarchies 
led many children to change their views of these maids from integral figures 
to peripheral ones, while others defied their parents’ expectations by regularly 
venturing into the backyards and spending time with their nannies. The chapter 
provides a nuanced view of children’s varied responses and actions in a social 
world where behaviour appears to be spatially restricted.

Overall, the volume is a good example of comparative, multidisciplinary 
childhood studies, demonstrating especially the importance of material culture 
to, and the impact of design on, children’s lived experience. The broadly 
conceptualized book appears to be very useful for classroom instruction in 
Folklore, Childhood Studies, Architecture and History, as it introduces readers  
to a wide-range of topics as well as to different forms of data and analysis,  
making it a valuable source for any instructor willing to contextualize the  
special scientific and theoretical backgrounds of the different chapters.

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From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood: Children’s Literature and the 
Construction of Canadian Identity. By Elizabeth A. Galway. (New York and 
London: Routledge, 2008. Pp. 1 + 196, notes, selected bibliography, index.)

JON D. LEE

Focusing on children’s literature from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, From 
Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood provides scholars of folklore, literature and history 
with a much-needed text that examines the role children’s literature played in 
forming Canadian national identity. As a whole, the book is well-written and 
free of academic jargon, and Galway, using 115 primary sources (i.e. 19th and 
20th century children’s literature) and at least twice as many secondary sources 
(largely contemporary academic texts from various disciplines, including history 
and English), details well the many themes and ideals that permeated children’s 
literature in this formative era.

Galway argues that literature provides a source for ongoing contemplation 
of identity and that children’s literature plays a crucial role in their own 
understanding of belonging and difference. She examines how the books and 
stories of the age dealt with questions of loyalty, differing in their opinions about 
whether Canadians should remain faithful to the British Empire, show greater 
political and cultural alignment with the United States, or attempt to establish 
themselves as independent of both. Next, Galway demonstrates how, on the 
basis of these three alternatives, authors proposed varying ideas for how to best 
construct a national identity, some attempting to do so on “a racial or ethnic 
basis” that placed dividers among Anglophones, Francophones, and First Nations 
people and others adopting a “biracial, bilingual system” free of hierarchies (175). 
Finally, she establishes that the literature was also attempting to formulate national 
values like pacifism, environmental concern and freedom, around which Canadian 
citizens could unite. 

As Galway proves, the problems associated with the struggle between 
belonging and differentiation are numerous and varied. Some of these problems 
were overt, such as questions relating to which country Canadians should remain 
loyal, or indecision concerning how “Indians” should be represented in stories—
as “noble savages,” as unmitigated protagonists, or (as was unfortunately less 
common) as equals. Paraphrasing Canadian children’s literature critic Roderick 
McGillis, Galway notes that the treatment of First Nations people functioned “as 
a means of negotiating the boundary between ‘self’ and ‘other,’” a debate that 
helped structure “who and what the Canadian identity should represent” (114). 
Another debated issue was the fact that much of the children’s literature available 
at the time was published not in Canada, but in Britain or the United States, and 
was often written by citizens of those countries.

As post-Confederation Canada struggled to form a national identity separate 
from that of England, children’s literature increasingly featured Canadian, English, 
and American children interacting, with Canadian children having to instruct or 
rescue their foreign friends. For example, in The Captain of the Club, a novel from 
1889 that Galway references frequently, the author presents Canadian children 

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as “physically superior to their American counterparts” at canoeing (68) and 
instinctively aware of landscape as “a source of pride” (159) as they teach their 
friends about the benefits of interacting positively with nature.

Galway makes a valuable contribution to the study of children’s literature 
as a source of debates on identity and nation-building. As she traces these 
arguments Galway maintains an intelligent, objective, and insightful commentary. 
The scholarship is impressive for its coherent synthesis of a wide scope of data, 
resulting in a text that should be easily accessible to undergraduates. Indeed, 
a class on children’s literature in Canada would be remiss not to assign this as 
a textbook, so valuable are the ideas presented here. The book is not without 
its small faults, however, and there are some sections where data could have 
been better organized. For instance, page twelve of the introduction lists the 
assassination of Louis Real, the Boer War of 1899, and the 1903 Alaska Boundary 
Question as important historical points in the development of children’s literature. 
However, these events receive no elaboration until pages thirty-eight, forty-six, 
and fifty-five, respectively, and there is no notice in the introduction that these 
elaborations are forthcoming. It would be easy for readers—especially if they are 
unfamiliar with this era of Canadian history—to glean from such an introduction 
that the book assumes a far greater comprehension than it actually does. Still, such 
faults are relatively minor, and are few in number. Overall, the text is exceedingly 
well-organized and lucid. Though the book focuses only on Canadian children’s 
literature of a specific period, it should be required reading for students of any 
aspect of children’s literature, regardless of concentration. The lessons learned 
in these pages about the importance of literature for national identity would be 
well emphasized in other works, and Galway provides an excellent and attention-
worthy method of analysis and discussion. The book is a wonderful and valuable 
contribution to the field.

Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses. By Elizabeth 
Tucker. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Pp. vii + 241, illustrations, 
references, index.)

JODI MCDAVID

Haunted Halls is a unique approach to the somewhat familiar subject matter 
of campus legends. Elizabeth Tucker, a professor of English at Binghamton 
University, comes to this material through an interesting set of circumstances; she 
has been Faculty Master of a residential community on the Binghamton campus 
for a number of years. Her experience as a folklorist and residence coordinator 
creates a unique viewpoint for this readable and academically grounded book. 

Haunted Halls straddles the line between legend collection and analytic 
text quite well, providing tale type and motif index references for many of the 
narratives. The chapters all stand well on their own, due in part to some of their 
previous lives as articles which have been edited for the current publication. Four 
chapters draw on articles which were published elsewhere. Tucker links legends 
thematically across campuses, for example, finding “Wailing Women” at a variety 

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of institutions. Other chapters include discussions of topics such as legend quests, 
encounters with ghosts, evidence of them, and ghostly lovers (jilted, waiting and 
so on). A variety of campuses are surveyed: Tucker conducts interviews and 
searches university and folklore archives to provide a well-rounded selection of 
legends from at least fifty universities and colleges. Types of ghosts are compared 
to those found at other institutions, and a typology of sorts is exposed through 
the subject matter of each chapter (although the author herself may not suggest 
this) with ghosts under the categories of “desperate lovers” found at a variety 
of colleges. Chapter Seven, “Spectral Indians,” goes beyond campus legends to 
discuss legends told by non-Indians and to analyse these types of legends and 
their function. This chapter would lend itself well to American Studies courses,  
as well as to a discussion of the concepts of emic and etic folklore that are 
frequently discussed in introductory folklore courses.

One issue of concern for some readers may be the use of psychoanalytic  
theory and Jungian approaches. This mode of analysis is limited to Chapter  
Four, “Troubling Encounters,” where Tucker cites several academics who have 
used Jungian approaches, for example, in studying Bloody Mary. In some ways, 
the use of psychoanalytic theory can be limiting, but it is necessary in a literary 
review of previous work by folklorists in the area of “adolescent legends.” The  
use of fieldwork methods which are conducive to the collection of narratives 
within this age group (approximately aged 17-25) is indeed a contribution to  
the field. Student culture maintains a highly oral component even as students 
employ a variety of social networking sites and digital communication media. 
Throughout the text, Tucker cites legends culled through oral sources as well  
as those documented via instant messaging and email, a very useful means  
of collection for the age group that forms the crux of the study. 

As an instructor, I was delighted to see Tucker use these forms as she  
provides a wonderful example of how they can be studied academically. I  
can see positive implications for using this book in teaching courses in American 
Studies, Children’s Folklore, Narrative, Legends and so on. The book could be 
used in whole or in part for teaching, although the subject matter of some chapters 
(rape, murder and suicide) may not be suitable for a high school curriculum. 
Those wishing to use it at this level—to spur creative writing or encourage 
discussion about legends—may find some chapters to their liking. Overall, the 
book provides interesting approaches to some compelling subject matter, and 
several pages of my copy are marked for future reflection, citation  
and exploration.

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CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE SECTION: 2008 ANNUAL MEETING

The Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society met on  
October 23, 2008 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. John 
McDowell, the Section’s president, called the meeting to order, and those  
present introduced themselves.

Secretary’s Report: The minutes of the 2007 section meeting in Québec were 
distributed and approved.

Editor’s Report: Elizabeth Tucker reported that Volume 30 of the Children’s 
Folklore Review will be complete and in the mail soon. C.W. Sullivan III, editor of 
the journal for thirty years, co-edited this thirtieth volume. Binghamton University 
has provided generous financial support for the publication and mailing of one 
issue per year.

Information about the 2008 Aesop Award winners, taken from the Children’s 
Folklore Section website, follows:

2008 Aesop Prize

Ain’t Nothing But a Man: My Quest to Find the Real John Henry. Scott 
Reynolds Nelson, with Marc Aronson. National Geographic, 2008.

Scott Nelson’s outstanding work is a meticulously documented historiography 
of his lengthy search to find the historical roots of the legend of John Henry, 
rather than a retelling of the well-known story and song. Derived from his 
academic book for adults, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry and the Untold Story 
of an American Legend (Oxford University Press, 2006), his research has been 
recast, with the assistance of Marc Aronson, as non-fiction for a younger audience, 
heavily illustrated with period photographs of railroad history. The research on the 
origin of the legendary figure is fascinating, while the work also provides insight 
into what it means to be a historian or a folklorist. Nelson stresses the open-ended 
nature of history as process, not simply an endless account of facts and dates. 
In examining the historical process, he demonstrates the role that research into 
folklore can play in revealing previously unwritten history.

Nelson is not the first to ask whether there was an actual historical figure 
behind the well-documented song recounting an epic battle between man and 
machine, in which a steel-driving man outperformed a steam drill, but died as 
a result of the contest. However, he has unearthed new evidence and presents 
it persuasively to suggest that there was a real John William Henry, incarcerated 
in the Virginia Penitentiary in 1866 at the age of 19, who was one of over 300 
African-American prisoners who died as a result of being contracted out to work 
on the C&O Railway. He includes an intriguing picture , taken in 1863, of a young 
black man named John Henry who worked in the Union Army’s 3rd Army Corps 
in Virginia, but he acknowledges that he can not prove that this is the same man. 

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The Aesop committee’s comments note that “by exposing the racial complications 
of the story, [Nelson] provides insight not only into the history of one song, but 
also into the complex relationship of history, race, and folk memory.” Aronson’s 
afterword, “How to Be a Historian,” extends the importance of the story to young 
readers by emphasizing ways that they themselves can participate in the historical 
process.

2008 Aesop Accolades

Dance in a Buffalo Skull. Told by Zitkala-Ša. Illustrated by S. D. Nelson. Prairie 
Tales Series, no. 2. South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2007.

S. D. Nelson’s stunning illustrations bring new life to the language used by Zitkala-
Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) when in 1901 she retold a story she heard as a 
child on the Yankton Sioux Indian Reservation. In this small-format picture book, 
the breathtaking artwork by Nelson, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, 
heightens the suspense of this tale of night on the prairie, as happy mice feast and 
dance inside a buffalo skull, heedless of danger, while a wildcat silently creeps 
close, attracted by their merriment. The sensory imagery is rich, drawing out the 
sights and sounds of the prairie. Zitkala-Ša’s powerful storytelling makes this an 
excellent choice for reading aloud.

Zitkala-Ša, herself Lakota, born in 1876 on the Yankton Sioux Indian 
Reservation in South Dakota, served as a bridge between the tribal people of her 
birthplace and the white society that educated her in a Quaker mission boarding 
school, Earlham College, and the New England Conservatory for Music. As a 
writer, political activist, and musician, she sought to convey for a white audience, 
the traditions, values, and worth of her Indian heritage. This voice from the past 
is still strong today as her love for the teaching tale she learned from the Elders 
shines through in this story. One Aesop committee member commented, “For 
someone writing a hundred years ago as an indigenous author, trying to present 
her culture to an outsider audience, I think she did an incredible job - and I 
love the way Nelson’s illustrations enhance the language for a modern audience 
and make it clear how well-done her telling really is.” The work of the South 
Dakota Historical Society Press, in its ongoing efforts to reflect the rich and varied 
history of South Dakota and to preserve its colorful culture and heritage, merits 
recognition.

The Adventures of Molly Whuppie and Other Appalachian Folktales. Anne 
Shelby. Illustrated by Paula McArdle. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Storyteller Anne Shelby’s updated Appalachian sensibility brings a charming twist 
to a collection of stories based on traditional tale types. The dynamic storytelling 
voice has the ring of folk wisdom, with a flair for the fun in the familiar. Heroine 
Molly Whuppie encounters witches, giants, an ogre who refuses to do housework, 
unwanted boyfriends, and a spectrum of puzzling predicaments. This clever and 

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courageous girl manages to circumvent catastrophe with a potent combination 
of nerve, trickery, and plain old luck. Other characters include Molly’s sisters 
Poll and Betts, the famous Appalachian hero Jack (rescued more than once by 
Molly herself), and three cornbread-baking mice. In looking for stories with a 
strong woman or girl character, Shelby brings together the British Molly Whuppie 
with the Appalachian Munciemeg or Mutsmag. She also borrows some stories 
more commonly associated with Jack or the less well-known Appalachian male 
Merrywise. Whimsical illustrations complement the witty delivery and enliven the 
text.

Shelby is frank about the liberties she has taken in bringing a modern 
sensibility to her adaptations, but she carefully notes her sources and 
acknowledges the changes she has made. While she sometimes transforms male 
characters to female, she also brings existing women characters to the forefront, as 
in her version of “Raglif Jaglif Tartliff Pole,” in which the often anonymous giant’s 
daughter who saves Jack’s life is transformed into an Appalachian Molly. She notes 
her driving criteria: “I had to have some evidence of the story’s having been told 
in the Appalachian region, and I had to like it.” The Aesop committee especially 
commends “the care with which she preserves unique cultural expressions that 
give her stories such a strong flavor of Appalachian language;” a language she 
herself grew up with in eastern Kentucky in the 1950s. This collection is sure to 
appeal to readers, young and old alike.

Opie Prize Report: There was no Opie Prize nomination this year. Carole 
Carpenter (York University, carolec@yorku.ca) chairs this committee.

Children’s Folklore Section Sessions: The section sponsored one panel, “Youth, 
Ritual, and Play,” at the AFS meeting in Louisville. Participants were:

Elizabeth Tucker, chair
Elizabeth Tucker (Binghamton University) “Levitation Revisited”
Simon J. Bronner (Pennsylvania State University) “Fathers and Sons: Rethinking the 

Meaning of the Bar Mitzvah”
Priscilla A. Ord (McDaniel College) “Children of the Holocaust: Common Games, 

Play, and Pastimes in Uncommon Times”
Bill Ellis (Pennsylvania State University), discussant

We had a lively discussion of ways to make information about children’s 
folklore scholarship more readily available. It seems particularly important to 
explore ways to put back issues of Children’s Folklore Review on the Internet. With 
Section members’ approval, John McDowell and Elizabeth Tucker will investigate 
some possibilities for the future.

At the end of the meeting, we gave prizes to winners of our Children’s Folklore 
Section raffle. Prizes included a complete set of back issues of Children’s Folklore 
Review and a folkloric Barbie doll.

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NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

Newell Prize

The Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society annually offers 
the William Wells Newell Prize (which includes a cash award) for the best student 
essay on a topic in children’s folklore. Students must submit their own papers, and 
published papers are eligible. Instructors are asked to encourage students with 
eligible papers to enter the competition.

Papers must be typed, double-spaced, and on white paper or a Word 
document. On the first page, include the author’s name, academic address, home 
address, telephone numbers, and e-mail address. Deadline for this coming year’s 
competition is September 1, 2009. Submit papers or write for more information to 
Dr. C.W. Sullivan III, English Department, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, 
27858-4353; electronic submissions should go to sullivanc@ecu.edu.

Book Reviews

Children’s Folklore Review is seeking book review submissions for its next issue, 
to be published in October of 2010. This is an excellent opportunity for graduate 
students interested in building their writing credentials and demonstrating breadth 
in folklore, literature, and childhood studies. Books are selected for review in 
Children’s Folklore Review according to their relevance to the field of children’s 
folklore and their year of publication (within the past two years). If you would 
like to request a book for review, please contact the book review editor, Dana 
Hercbergs (hercberg@sas.upenn.edu). Book reviews should not exceed 750 words.

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93

CONTRIBUTORS

Simon J. Bronner is Distinguished University Professor of American Studies and 
Folklore and director of the doctoral program in American Studies at the Pennsylvania 
State University, Harrisburg. He is the author or editor of over 25 books, including 
American Children’s Folklore (awarded the Opie Prize for outstanding book on 
children’s folklore), Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Student Life, and the 
Encyclopedia of American Folklife (4 volumes, awarded an Editor’s Choice Award). 
Formerly president of the Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore 
Society, he also serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Play, 
Folklore Historian, Folklife, and Children’s Folklore Review.

Dana Hercbergs is a doctoral candidate in Folklore and Folklife at the University 
of Pennsylvania and a visiting assistant professor of Judaic Studies at Siegal College 
in Cleveland, Ohio. Her dissertation focuses on Palestinians’ and Israelis’ narratives 
about growing up in Jerusalem throughout the last sixty years. Her research and 
teaching interests include Jewish and Arab relations and identities, children’s 
folklore, memory and narrative, and healing traditions.

Catharina Kessler studied Cultural Anthropology, Media and Communication 
Studies and English at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, Germany and 
Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. She has completed her MA thesis 
on the jokes of children and teenagers and currently works on the interdisciplinary 
research project “School Culture,” in which cultural anthropologists and 
educational scientists seek to develop a comprehensive concept of school culture 
based on ethnographic research at two Gymnasien [German secondary schools].

Jon D. Lee received his Ph.D. in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland 
in 2009. He divides his time between folklore and creative writing, and is currently 
working on a second book of poetry, as well as an academic text on the role of 
narratives in disease outbreaks. He currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and 
teaches literature at various universities.

Kathryn McCormick is a guidance counselor and independent folklorist who 
has used folklore in guidance and education in Brooklyn schools. Utilizing skills 
learned from the Folklore Department at UCLA and from NYU’s Department 
of Performance Studies, she has designed enrichment and guidance projects 
linking the child with family, neighborhood and the larger community, often with 
cognitive mapping and child-centered narratives.

Jodi McDavid is a doctoral candidate at Memorial University of Newfoundland, 
researching counter-clerical narratives in Atlantic Canada. Her Folklore MA thesis, 
also from MUN, is titled “‘We’re Dirty Sons of Bitches’: Residence Rites of Passage 

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at a Small Maritime University.” McDavid works at Cape Breton University, 
teaching Atlantic Canadian Folklore, Urban Legend and Custom. She is also a 
researcher at the Centre for Cape Breton Studies.

Priscilla A. Ord lives in Westminster, Maryland, where she is an adjunct lecturer in 
English at her alma mater, McDaniel College, formerly Western Maryland College, 
which was founded in 1867 as the first co-educational college south of the Mason-
Dixon Line and is now recognized as one of the forty “Colleges That Change 
Lives.” She holds a BA in English education from Western Maryland College and 
an AM in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught English 
at the secondary level and English, children’s literature, and linguistics at several 
colleges and universities.

Glen Retief’s memoir about growing up gay and white in South Africa, The Jack 
Bank, is forthcoming in 2010. His writing has appeared in numerous journals here 
and abroad, including Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, and 
the flagship South African journal New Contrast. He teaches creative nonfiction at 
Susquehanna University.

C.W. Sullivan III, the associate editor of Children’s Folklore Review, is Harriot 
College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at East Carolina University 
and is a full member of the Welsh Academy. His major publications include Welsh 
Celtic Myth in Modern Fantasy, The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays, Fenian Diary: 
Denis B. Cashman on Board the Hougoumont, 1867-1868, six other books, and a 
variety of articles on mythology, folklore, fantasy, and science fiction. He edited 
Children’s Folklore Review for thirty years and is currently the editor of  
the e-journal Celtic Cultural Studies.

Elizabeth Tucker, the editor of Children’s Folklore Review, is Professor of English 
at Binghamton University. Her areas of interest include the folklore of children 
and college students, legends, and folklore of the supernatural. She has published 
three books, of which the most recent is Children’s Folklore: A Handbook (2008), 
and various articles, book chapters, memoir pieces, and poems. She is the editor 
of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research’s e-newsletter, 
FOAFtale News, and an editorial board member of Voices: The Journal of New  
York Folklore.

CFR_2009_R4.indb   94 10/25/09   6:19:29 PM




