Sean Martin's For the Good of the Nation: Institutions for Jewish Children in Interwar Poland is an edition and translation of pre-Holocaust publications of social workers engaged in the development and activities of childcare institutions for Jewish children. From the beginning of the 1920s, these various establishments acted under an umbrella organization named CENTOS (Polish acronym of Central Union of Associations for Jewish Orphan Care). The collection of publications of psychologists, teachers, and social care organizers is supplemented by separate introductions and a long, general introduction to the volume. The former, written both in Polish and Yiddish, describes various aspects of institutional child care activities, their organizational and economic issues, fundraising, children's psychology, and pedagogical problems.
The long introduction to the volume presents wider political, social, and cultural contexts for tumultuous years of the First World War that created a growing need for modern Jewish institutions and the professionalization of social care, especially concerning children, of whom so many became orphans, refugees, or were raised by drastically-impoverished parents. Here, Sean Martin provides an interesting glimpse into the last stage of emerging modern Jewish society in east central Europe, especially its civil dimension. As such, it serves as an important inspiration for further, much-needed research on deeper aspects of Jewish national subjectivity and socio-cultural autonomy in the last decades before the Holocaust. An important aspect of the introduction and of the whole volume is the transnational nature of Jewish civil society, with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) as the main sponsor of Jewish children's care in Poland. Readers will surely note the fascinating and controversial story of the home for Jewish children in Helenówek, its famous founder Chaim Rumkowski (during the Holocaust, the head of the Łódź Ghetto Judenrat), and the accusations over sexual molestation, violence, other pedagogical misbehaviors, and corruption present in the life of this institution.
Despite its many virtues, the volume also has minor weaknesses that invite cautious criticism. The introduction to the volume is quite chaotic. The historical and sociological analysis of Jewish society in general and its childcare problems specifically is intermingled with biographical information of authors cited in the anthology and periodicals in which they have published. The latter could be easily moved to a separate short introduction preceding each section of source materials. In their place, the authors of the introductions could provide us with diachronically deeper and more sophisticated studies of the main mechanisms of the birth and development of Jewish civil society in east central Europe, and Jewish child care specifically, that were not born out of the blue during the First World War but have important, earlier sources of genesis.
The problematic claim raised in the introduction more than once is the rather crude juxtaposition of CENTOS child care institutions as modern ones in opposition to the purely traditional Jewish communities (kehillot) and their forms of social care. The latter, as well as Jewish orthodoxy in general, despite their pre-modern roots, were no less modern than the new secular Jewish institutions. Without research of the kehillah and the orthodox systems of social care, which is still needed to be done, these kind of claims seem to be at least problematic.
The reader might also be confused by the selection criteria of texts for the source material part of the volume. While the importance of issues and stories such as that of Helenówek is self-evident for Jewish children's publications in Yiddish, some others, like stories on children who prefer to play instead of study and work, are not. The volume lacks an editor's voice, informing readers about how each of the selected texts contributes to our understanding of the historical epoch, of children and youth culture, of interwar mentality, and of the state of psychological and pedagogical reflection and praxis.
Nevertheless, all of these are minor problems in this otherwise important volume, which provides a worthy read for scholars from various disciplines. We should especially note that Sean Martin had worked here in a field that is full of white spots, of problems that are still to be researched. For the Good of the Nation should be an interesting book and source of references for researchers of interwar Polish-Jewish society, culture, social politics, and education. All readers will have a chance to discover in this volume something relevant to their research. It may serve also as an important inspiration for the next research undertaking.
