HIROSHIMA, MON PETIT

By Charles Krauthammer

IT'S A LONG WAY FROM DICK AND JANE TO HIROSHIMA. YET check out the books at your kid's school library, and you will see how thoroughly we have traversed that distance. Curriculum "relevance" used to be the battle cry of bearded university students. It has now made its way into the picture books of seven-year-olds.

The revolt against the blandness of Dick and Jane has given us a wave of socially conscious tomes for little ones. They are to be exposed to the underside of life as soon as they can read. As if to confirm the trend, Smoky Night, a picture book about the L.A. riots, has just won the 1995 Caldecott Medal, one of America's most prestigious children's book awards.

Still, learning to read by way of a race riot is a stroll in the park compared with some of the other offerings in your child's school library. Let the Celebrations Begin!, for example, is a cheerful little picture book about a Nazi concentration camp. Its characters--ragged, emaciated children with shaved heads--are relentlessly upbeat, in keeping with the theme of the story, as explained on the book jacket: "a moving testament to all that is good in mankind."

Considering that Auschwitz is the distillation of all that is evil in mankind, the result is a volume of grotesque moral confusion. The very intent of the book--to bring the Holocaust to seven-year-olds without being depressing--is absurd, and so Celebrations becomes the reductio ad absurdum of this genre of young people's realism: at once confused, dishonest, disturbing and false.

Yet even if the book had been well executed, the question is, Is this necessary? Teaching the most wrenching social history to the very young assaults their innocence by deliberately disturbing their cozy, rosy view of the world. For what purpose? Is moral complacency among second-graders a growing social problem? They live only once, and for a very short time, in a tooth-fairy world. Why shorten that time further?

"What used to be saved for nonfiction for the intermediate grades is now fiction for the early readers," says Steven Herb, education librarian at Pennsylvania State University. Smoky Night and Celebrations are part of a larger trend among publishers toward "expanding what is publishable."

Why this trend? Partly iconoclasm. Partly a misguided attempt at social awareness--often social awareness of a distinct, politically correct kind.

Smoky Night, the story of a young boy burned out of his home by the L.A. riots, is almost totally nonjudgmental. One tenant does yell "hooligans," and mother does nod when the boy asks if televisions are being stolen. But perhaps the key moral passage is the rather blank "Mama explains about rioting. 'It can happen when people get angry.' ''

This is not to say that the book should have had a graphic depiction of the assault on Reginald Denny (or Rodney King). On the contrary. I challenge the premise that we must deal with inflammatory events in books for little children. But if we are going to anyway, we should at least treat them with moral honesty. The L.A. riots were not some natural disaster.

Not all picture books, mind you, are so nonjudgmental. When America is the cause of suffering, punches tend not to be pulled. Consider three picture books--all designed to reduce children to tears--about the American bombing of Japan in World War II.

The most notorious of these, the one that in 1980 helped launch the whole trend toward social realism for kids, is Hiroshima No Pika, a shockingly graphic picture book about the dropping of the atom bomb and the horrible deaths that ensued. The book is not coy about who caused the suffering.

It identifies the offending country, the military service, the plane, even the bomb ("given the name 'Little Boy' by the B-29's crew" [sic]). It notes additionally that among the dead at Nagasaki "were people from many other countries, such as Korea, China, Russia, Indonesia and the United States." These are about the only historical facts in a story otherwise devoted to burning flesh and dying babies as seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl.

Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People and War is more subtle. It describes how the animals in Tokyo's Ueno Zoo were put to death by their keepers for fear that the bombing of Tokyo might set them free in the city. The Japanese protagonists, the zoo keepers, are portrayed most tenderly. There is not a hint, not a word about the motivation--let alone the humanity--of those manning the "enemy planes."

Might our children be told amid their sobs how this war began? My Hiroshima, another searing picture-book memoir, is typical. It has this single sentence of historical context: "In the winter of my fourth year at school, a big war started."

Again, no one is asking for a picture book on the Bataan death march. But if we must--which I deny--introduce our seven-year-olds to the agony of the Pacific war, might we not start with a bit of historical honesty?

These books go beyond the robbing of innocence. They are a perversion of innocence. They don't just forcibly bring the young face to face with evil. They lie about it.