Kindergarten by Peter Rushforth

First published: 1979; revised 1980

Type of work: Impressionistic realism

Time of work: December 24-28, 1978

Locale: Southwold, a small English town

Principal Characters:

• Corrie Meeuwissen, an accomplished musician, who turns sixteen at the end of the book
• Jo Meeuwissen, Corrie’s eleven-year-old brother, who is an excellent singer
• Matthias Meeuwissen, the youngest brother at three years old
• Lilli, the grandmother of the three boys

The Novel

Although the action of Kindergarten takes place over only five days during the Christmas holidays of 1978, the text is intercut with so much parallel and peripherally related material that the novel resonates with significance greater than that one might expect from the story of a family Christmas celebration. Kindergarten is about childhood, home, and sanctuary; more than that, however, it is about a close-knit family circle in the context of a larger, often hostile society that seeks to invade and destroy familial bonds.

The novel begins with an excerpt from the tale “Hansel and Gretel” the episode in which Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother suggests that the children be abandoned in the forest and then immediately introduces Corrie Meeuwissen, the protagonist, as he prepares to celebrate Christmas with his younger brothers, Jo and Matthias, and their grandmother Lilli Meeuwissen. Celebration of any kind is difficult for the boys this year: Their mother is dead gunned down in a terrorist attack in Rome nine months earlier in April and their father is in the United States helping to raise money for the families of the other victims. Lilli has promised the boys “a traditional German Christmas,” an event for which she has been preparing secretly for days, and when the three boys enter her dining room for the promised treat, they are stunned by the decorations: a glittering tree, Lilli’s paintings, gifts, a spread of holiday sweets including a gingerbread house (which immediately reminds Corrie of Hansel and Gretel and the enchanted house in the forest), and hundreds of lighted candles.

During the festivities, Corrie suddenly realizes that Lilli’s generous act is not the re-creation of a childhood memory for the amusement of three lonely boys. Being an artist, she has contrived a ceremony that she, being Jewish, knows about only from books. Corrie is overwhelmed by this evidence of his grandmother’s love. He has known about his Jewish heritage (his mother was English, his father only half Jewish) for only two years; as the Christmas celebration proceeds, Corrie puzzles over the meaning of his Jewishness. During the events of the next four days, Corrie often allows his thoughts to wander as he thinks of happier times, occasionally about his mother’s death, and sometimes about being Jewish. While a considerable portion of the novel describes Corrie’s and occasionally Jo’s recollections of happy family events, a still larger portion is devoted to Corrie’s secret: He has discovered a cache of letters from German Jews to a former headmaster of Southwold School, the school now administered by Corrie’s father.

On December 24, while in the school’s music building rehearsing, Corrie succumbs to a long-suppressed curiosity and opens a small locked door in his favorite practice studio. Behind the door are boxes of letters and postcards from Jewish families in Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1939. The letters and cards beg for places for Jewish children at Southwold School, request news of children already enrolled there, and plead for more time to remit fees when the German government forbids the sending of currency out of the country. While Corrie is already fascinated by his Jewish ancestry and by the knowledge that his grandmother was a refugee from the Nazi regime, his interest in the letters is further sparked by two events. First, a week earlier, German terrorists took several dozen children hostage in Berlin, and they are still holding them; the ongoing saga of the children’s ordeal, daily reported on television, is a constant reminder of their mother’s death to Corrie and Jo. Second, in his initial foray into the files, Corrie finds a postcard from a Jewish boy of about his own age, thanking that long-ago headmaster for granting him and his younger brother a place at the school.

Many of the letters and cards are quoted in their entirety, showing the anguish of parents trying desperately to find a safe place for their children. Over the next four days, Corrie returns repeatedly to the file room to read more of the letters, stopping to conjure up faces for the people he has come to know through their pleas and their guarded descriptions of a Germany inhospitable to Jews, particularly the children. A number of parents sent photographs of their children, and as Corrie looks at their solemn faces, he is reminded of Hansel and Gretel, abandoned in the dark forest, and of the Berlin schoolchildren now in their second week of captivity.

All of Corrie’s preoccupations are forced to a form of closure on December 28, his sixteenth birthday. He finishes reading the letters, and a commando raid on the Berlin school frees most of the hostage children. More important, his birthday gift from Lilli is a new painting, her first since her flight from Germany in 1939. She also reveals to the astonished boys a new collection of paintings, no longer illustrations of fairy tales but evocations of the Meeuwissen family in happier times. For the first time, Lilli shows the boys a photograph of her family, all lost in the Holocaust. Corrie recognizes the faces, immortalized as characters in Lilli’s earlier works, and he wonders about the fate of those families whose letters he has read. As the novel ends, Corrie, once again off in his thoughts, recollects the final scene of a school play for which he composed the music.

The Characters

Peter Rushforth has created an unforgettable quartet of precisely delineated individuals made memorable through their thoughts and actions, their fears and preoccupations, their cherished possessions, and their unique relationships with one another.

Corrie, whose point of view informs Kindergarten, is an exceedingly talented sixteen-year-old, whose accomplishments include music composed for a production of a play by William Shakespeare, the organization of an Elizabethan consort, and an opera-in-progress. In addition, Corrie has a tendency toward introspection and analysis by allusion. In Corrie’s mind, all events are interconnected with other remembered events, stories, snatches of poetry or song, and the news on television, and all experience somehow comments on and reflects family life and home. Corrie’s favorite images in Lilli’s German paintings are of rooms, snug and secure with their doors shut against the exterior world or connected with other rooms in the same house, the details of those other rooms visible through open doors but the whole still secure from the outer world. These rooms remarkably similar in Corrie’s mind to the two Meeuwissen houses, linked through a connecting sun lounge connote the security of strong family ties and affection, contained by the doors shut against what he often thinks of as “the pressures of the outer world.”

Known to people in the town as a quiet, polite boy who is taking his mother’s death very well and helping his younger brothers cope, Corrie knows that he is more than the seemingly well-adjusted boy who smiles respectfully when he is greeted. He is “aware of depths within himself; little doors deep inside his head, doors that should never be opened.” His slightly-too-intense sense of family, his preoccupation with certain fairy tales in which children are menaced by adults, his near obsession with both the fate of the Jewish children in the 1930’s and the plight of the terrorist-held schoolchildren all reveal an adolescent perhaps fearful of growing up and certainly aware that, in countless ways, life is hostile to childhood. He reads the letters from the files with a sense of foreboding, knowing that in 1939 the year Southwold School was forced to close a door closed forever, shutting hundreds of children out of the safety and serenity that Corrie and his brothers enjoy.

Jo does not display any sort of obsessive traits; in many ways, he is an average eleven-year-old whose bedroom is decorated with Charlie Brown comic strips and family photographs, littered with schoolwork, clothes, books, posters, drawings, mobiles, and toys. Jo is no more average, however, than is Corrie. Precocious almost beyond belief, his speech is a combination of Shakespeare and the thesaurus, the books on his floor include Kobbe’s Complete Opera Book (1922), and he sings in German; he is in one respect younger than his chronological age. He still frequently wets his bed. During the holidays, he is most affected by his mother’s death; he has nightmares about it, and he insists on going out on Christmas Eve to sing at her grave. That terrorist act in Rome has robbed Jo of the remainder of his childhood; he is now a child struggling with an adult’s awareness of the precarious nature of existence.

Too young to have understood the family tragedy (he apparently believes that his mother is away on an extended trip), Matthias is the unspoiled innocent of the novel, the child Corrie wants to protect, the little boy Jo has not been since their mother’s death. Matthias eats with gusto, paints portraits of a “havverglumpus,” eagerly opens doors on an Advent calendar (never having seen a harp, he mistakes one for a radiator), plays football, romps with the dog all activities redolent of the joys of childhood. As yet, he is unaware that life has other, more painful experiences to offer.

The final character is Lilli, once an acclaimed illustrator of children’s books in prewar Germany, then a refugee in London, and now a grandmother in a small English town. As the cozy, homely details of her paintings indicate, Lilli is as preoccupied as Corrie with preserving family traditions and the innocence of childhood as talismans against the evils of the world. In her careful attempt to provide a special Christmas for the motherless boys, Lilli makes it clear that hope, steadfastness, and faith symbolized by the huge fir in her dining room are values in which she believes, values that have helped her come to terms with a terrifying world that has taken away so many of her family and friends.

Critical Context

Kindergarten, first published in Great Britain in 1979 and later revised for the American edition in 1980, has elicited mixed reactions from critics, who agree that it is a compelling first novel. Winner of the Hawthornden Prize from Great Britain’s Society of Authors in 1980, the novel has been hailed for the originality and intricacy of its montage structure, for its unusual filmic quality, for its intensely riveting story celebrating the strength of family ties, and for its reverberant and intriguing network of images and allusions. Commentators are unified in their praise for Rushforth’s narrative skill and for his thoughtful treatment of the perils of childhood, a theme so easily over-sentimentalized by a less careful and perceptive writer. Most agree that the book requires, indeed demands, rereading for a thorough appreciation of its complexity and the richness of its imagery.

Oddly, it is Kindergarten’s very complexity that has been most strongly criticized, even by reviewers who find the novel extraordinarily well written. There is some truth to the accusations that Rushforth is almost heavy-handed with his use of related but extraneous material, thematically significant though that material might be. At times, the story of Corrie and his brothers is buried beneath a daunting multiplicity of allusions to fairy tales, paintings, books, songs, poems, past experiences, and films and then extricated, pages later, creating an otherworldly quality that occasionally turns the novel into one vast evocation of nostalgia at the expense of the story it is telling. Collagic structure notwithstanding, however, Kindergarten is a fine first novel. With its incredible profusion of detail and tableaux so fully realized in color that they call to mind exquisitely executed paintings or meticulously composed frames in a film, the book transcends the novel genre to become a modern fairy tale.

One of Rushforth’s greatest achievements is the quality of fantasy he has incorporated into his all too painfully real tale. Imbued with the feeling of otherworldliness and remoteness, with the delicious possibility that perhaps Corrie, Jo, Matthias, and their grandmother live in a land far away and long ago, a land where family events are marked with celebrations and children are free to be children, Kindergarten nevertheless has a moral lesson for the real world. Childhood by its very nature will always be an endangered age, its precarious survival threatened by what Corrie instinctively senses as “the vague, powerful forces of the adult world . . . waiting, at the edges of childhood, unseen by the children.” In the adult world, where the future inevitably brings loss and grief, where death is the only certainty, children have but one place of sanctuary where the forces of the outside world are temporarily held in abeyance, one refuge: the family circle secure at home.

Bibliography

Cooke, Judy. Review in New Statesman. XCIX (June 20, 1980), p. 939.

Gunton, Sharon R., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. XIX (1981), pp. 405-407.

Judd, Inge. Review in Library Journal. CV (June 1, 1980), p. 1328.

Locher, Frances C., ed. Contemporary Authors. CI (1981), p. 425.

Yourgrau, Barry. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXII (August 17, 1980), p. 10.