Children and Childhood

A central theme of Kaddish for a Child Not Born is how childhood experience shapes adult experience. The narrator remembers his childhood as being bleak and unhappy, full of authoritarian personalities. His parents divorced when he was very young and he spent five years in a strict boarding school. As a teenager he experienced the horrors of a concentration camp. Although he survived, he is forever marked by it. He will not and cannot live a “normal” life with children, a wife, and a house full of things.

The Western idea of childhood is that it is a time of innocence. The thought of children being killed in the Holocaust is terrible to dwell upon, but their survival in some ways is worse because they are freighted to carry what they have seen and heard with them for the rest of their lives. The personal burden...