Dorothy M. Broderick
When at 10 p.m. you say, I'll just read a few pages to get started and next you look up and it's midnight, it is hard to be critical of a book, and even harder to explain how so engrossing a read leaves one annoyed, frustrated and stomping around the house. The plot of Chernowitz! is the first person narration of Bobby Cherno's harassment by bully Emmett Sundback solely because Bobby is Jewish. There are name callings, a fiery cross (albeit it very small) tossed on the Cherno lawn, a swastika painted on a family car, and isolation from the other boys in the class. All because this bunch of suburban boy sheep follow blindly the leadership of an adolescent victim of child abuse by his divorced, drinking father. When Sundback injures Bobby's cat by swiping him with his motorcycle, Bobby vows revenge and sets Sundback up as a thief. True to the adolescent code, Bobby shares none of his harassment with anyone until his sense of guilt forces him to confide in his parents. The antisemitism being experienced is a personal problem and he will cope with it.
And therein lies the problem and weakness of the book. A book on such a serious problem must offer some insight into motivation, both of the victim and the victimizer. Antisemitism is not in the same category as harassment because one is too fat or too tall or too short. It is NOT a personal problem of the victim but a social problem and to treat it as less is to deny reality. Bobby is a reasonably okay kid: he plays soccer, skates, has a sailboat, is smart in school and has one reasonably good friend, although he is not a mad socializer. What escapes the reader is why Sundback singles Bobby out for harassment when in the community being portrayed there must be many Jews. As for bully Sundback, why does he choose antisemitism as his cause? Is being a battered child enough to make an antisemite? Why, being successful in his harassment does he not expand his harassment to other Jews?
A book that raises that many questions must be bought and discussed. It should be in the hands of history teachers and those dealing with values education and human relations. What the individual reader will gain from it is anyone's guess…. Both Sundback and Bobby are exactly the same at the end and while I know in my gut there are people who learn absolutely nothing from experience, I resent books with that message, particularly when I suspect the message received was not the message the author thought she was sending.
Dorothy M. Broderick, in a review of "Chernowitz!" in Voice of Youth Advocates, Vol. 4, No. 3, August, 1981, p. 23.
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