By Charlotte Kelly
There’s a contradictory quality to The World Belongs to the Children. On one hand, Raya Goldtwig’s lyrical memoir was 250 pages of beautifully told heartbreak. But on the other, I read most of this book on the train or bus on my way to work. The juxtaposition of reading about a young girl’s fight for survival as I travelled to a job serving rich, privileged music attendees, was an irony that wasn’t lost on me. But is art not what we fight to live for?
Raya Goldtwig is a 90-year-old Jewish woman born in Warsaw Poland, raised on the run in Russia, and now finding refuge in Australia. She wrote this book at the behest of her grandchildren, with it being revealed in the final author’s note that a major reason for the book’s existence was Raya Goldtwig’s attempt at finding her lost friend—whom she met in the final years on the war and lost in the aftermath. Ouch.
Raya was three when WWII broke out in 1939. Her family was forced to flee Poland in hopes of outrunning the Nazi occupation of the East. From the first chapter, my jaw was dropped—I did get funny looks on the bus, but oh well. The suffering that ensued for her family from day dot was tragic and beautifully written.
Goldtwig has the eloquent ability to recall such fine details, translating them across multiple languages to capture something both haunting and jarring. She writes like a 90-year-old linguist recalling her childhood, but also a terrified child fighting to survive. One moment in particular haunted me: while escaping to a new town in Russia, Raya was separated from her family. As chaos ensued, Raya specifically recalls the white dress with red polka dots she was wearing. A child being bombed in her Sunday best.
From the beginning, Raya was forced hide her fears and emotions in the hope to unburden her parents in an already tumultuous time, to the point of neglect. She essentially raised herself between the ages of 3 – 8. In their travels and different homes, Raya met and befriended a number of Russian uncles, aunties, and babushkas, who took her in and taught her how to survive. She especially found solace in song and dance.
For more than six years, Raya’s life was focused solely on survival. Her distraction from the unrelenting hunger? Singing and dancing. Her method to learning the culture and language of the towns she took refuge in? Singing and dancing. So, her art was not only something to fight for, but it’s also something she needed to survive.
I went into this book with, what I thought, was a pretty clear understanding. The title along is alarmingly pointed. Why would she write a book this late in her life, if not to send a message about the wars raging on right now? And while there is still an attempt to reach towards that, there is also a jarringly pro-Israel message underneath.
In the aftermath of the war, Raya’s family attempted to reassimilate back into their life in Poland. However, they are met with the realisation that feelings towards the Jewish community were not the same as when they’d left. Fleeing West instead, the family hears of a movement that aimed to return European Jews to their “true homeland”.
In fact, Raya’s friend that she was separated from had “returned” there after fleeing her adoptive family.
This out of place adoration for Israel comes in the last few chapters, leaving a sour taste in my mouth. I struggled to appropriately put into words the issues I had with this take, and it felt entirely out of touch with the book’s intended message. It felt conflicting to read about a child of war supporting a nation that is currently committing genocide against another population. Raya is within her right to accurately recount her own lived experience, but the conclusion she arrives at fails to resonate. It felt like as soon as Israel was mentioned, propaganda just spewed onto the page. To write about the “homeland” on one page, and on another, lament about ongoing war is a strange choice. How she can connect to a “homeland” which actively declares war on neighbouring countries, or find refuge in a nation like Russia, which actively bombs Ukraine, is beyond me.
The World Belongs to the Children left me conflicted. On one hand, Raya’s illustration of war’s cruelty from the perspective of a child was both tragic and beautiful. But it left me questioning whether any of us were truly immune to propaganda. Raya had a lifetime of oppression to overcome and use to demonstrate the atrocities of violence, yet she finishes by patting Israel on the back while they do exactly what the Nazis did to her own people to others… Raya said the world belongs to the children, but perhaps she meant the world only belongs to the children ordained by God.
