Fanny got a letter telling her that Tante Rose and Lila were dead — killed in one of Hitler’s concentration camps.” This was fiction — Sally’s life, not Judy’s — but it gives a flavor of what it was to be an American Jew in the years after the war. Judy, three years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked, had never not known war. In the introduction to a British edition of Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, Judy wrote, “The war had so colored my early life that it was hard to think of any- thing else…. There were no bombs dropped on America, we were not starving, we felt reasonably safe. And yet I could not help worrying that it could happen again, could happen to us. I knew that Adolf Hitler was a menace. I knew that he wanted to kill all the Jews in the world. And I was a Jew.” Still the same girl who had permanently borrowed Made- line from the Elizabeth public library, Judy looked for books to console her. “In Miami Beach we have a school library,” Blume wrote years later in a short, unpublished sketch re- calling her two years by the beach. “It has murals on the wall. I read prairie girl books”— the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. “None of the girls in these books are
they play Concentration Camp, “and nobody has to be Hit- ler because he is away on business.” In one of Sally’s vivid daydreams, she heeds a call from President Roosevelt for volunteers to travel to Europe on special missions. Once in Europe, she manages to save her cousin Lila, whom she happens to encounter, huddling be- neath a tree, dressed in rags. In another daydream, Sally is captured by Adolf Hitler, who has traveled to Union Coun- ty, New Jersey, to round up the Jews. And in Miami Beach, Sally has decided that Mr. Zavodsky, a neighbor with “slick, dark hair and a small black mustache,” is in fact Hitler, hid- ing out in south Florida. She composes letters to Mr. Za- vodsky, never sent, threatening to out him. “Give yourself up before I report you to the police,” Sally writes. “Don’t think you can get away with this disguise of yours.” In a 2008 speech at the University of Wisconsin, Judy reflected on the origins of Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. “Sally J. is my most autobiographical book,” Judy told the audience. “My reason for writing that book was in the mid-1970s [I got] a letter from a teacher saying she was
JUDY NEVER PREFERRED FANTASY OR SCIENCE FICTION. SHE HAD NO INTEREST IN A MYSTICAL MEDIEVAL PAST, STILL LESS IN ROBOTS. SHE WANTED TO READ ABOUT RECOGNIZABLE FAMILIES, WITH PROBLEMS LIKE THE ONES SHE SAW AROUND HER.
anything like me. They don’t think about the things I think about. Their families are nothing like mine. I make up my own stories inside my head.” This was the beginning of Judy’s love for realism. Her love for Oz notwithstanding, Judy never preferred fanta- sy or science fiction. She had no interest in a mystical me- dieval past, still less in robots. She wanted to read about recognizable families, with problems like the ones she saw around her. Nanny Mama listened to soap operas, and Judy would sit by her side and listen with her. (“Aunt Frances, who teaches fourth grade, scolds my mother for letting me listen.”) The fiction she wanted to read, like the fiction she would someday write, was set in the present, or in the near, familiar past. No castles in the sky, or houses on the prairie. The stories inside Judy’s head had a dark side. They were “high drama . . . with paper dolls,” in which the dolls “would be in terrible automobile accidents and have to go to the hospital, and I was the surgeon and I had to put them back together”—and Judy used these dark fantasies to mas- ter her real-world fears. These stories were her response to the violence around her in the world, and in the news. In one scene, Sally suggests to her friends that instead of playing Love and Romance, they play War. “Oh, I’m sick of playing War,” Sally’s friend Alice says. “I always wind up being Hitler!” To which Sally replies, “Well, you can’t ex- pect me to be Hitler. I’m Jewish.” She then suggests that
doing a study of adults in creative fields, and asking what they were like as children. Instead of answering her ques- tion, I sat down and wrote a book. Trying to explain it not only to that teacher but to myself.” Judy would eventually write three strongly autobiograph- ical books, two of which, Wifey and Smart Women, were about the complexities of adulthood: sex and marriage, di- vorce and step-parenting. Only in Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself did she revisit the time, place, and people of her own childhood. In fact, all of Judy’s other books for children were set in about 1970 onward, in the world that her chil- dren inhabited, not the one she had grown up in; she was a mother by then, an anthropologist in the playground. But the two years in Miami Beach got special treatment; for the rest of her life, Judy would remember them with more immediacy, and speak of them more fondly, than the years to follow, the years filled with friendship drama and sexual experimentation. For despite the terrors that stalked her every day in Miami Beach—Nazis, her brother’s frag- ile health, her father’s mortality— Miami Beach was the last idyllic time. Even if one is separated from a beloved dad by over a thousand miles, even if one is so Holocaust- haunted that Hitler is sitting on every park bench, there is still a purity to the early elementary school years, a safety, that vanishes in middle school, when the drama of adoles- cence snuffs out the easy innocence of the playground.
50 SPRING 2026
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