Not Your Fathers "Dick and Jane"

I have a number of hebrew primers at home that I've collected--I'm not even sure where I got them all. This past Shabbos I was looking at one in particular, published in 1961. While it has some illustrated stories meant to teach the hebrew letters and words--some of the stories are not the sort you might expect. They definitely are not the sort you would find in the "Dick and Jane" series, which came out around the same time.

For instance, here is a page that teaches the letter Chet. It might not be clear what is the storyline behind the 3 pictures, so the person who wrote it spells it out at the bottom of the page.

So what is the boy doing in the first picture that illustrates the letter Chet?



According to the bottom of the page, the boy is choking on a fish bone and is unable to get it out. The other pictures tell the rest of the story, where he goes to the doctor who removes it and the boy laughs.

I don't know, but I would think there are other ways to illustrate the sound of the letter Chet. These days, I imagine people would be upset at the image of a child choking on a fish bone, possibly scaring the children reading it.

The next example is from a simple story about a father giving his son a glass of milk. The only problem, as the boy points out to his father, is that there is a fly in the milk. The father replies that there is no fly in the milk--it's just a piece of candy. The boy realizes that it really is a fly, and the father admits it's a fly and gives his son a piece of candy.




I'll bet that you won't find a Dick and Jane reader with dialog like that--which is a shame, because it is typical of a father kidding around with his son. But somehow, people who write readers for little kids are not likely to include that kind of dialog.

The last one is my favorite. The storyline is that the teacher has contacted the mother that her son has not been washing his neck.



The mother comes up with a plan. The next time he is washing up, his mother take 2 toy guns and tells her son that he had better wash his hands...or else.
The boy laughs (he seems to do that alot in these stories) and washes his neck.

I still think the story about the fishbone is a bit much, but the other stories reflect the kind of fun that real families do with each other--and the kinds of things you generally don't find in readers for young children.

Maybe 1961 was a good year for children's readers.

See also The Dark Side of Dr. Seuss

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