Dear Editor: My friend Chula Morel-Seytoux was kind enough to pass on to me your little piece on Josephine Duveneck’s adventure with the “sweet little personality” from Germany [“From the Editor’s Desk,” September/October 2018]. I appreciated that, since I’m what’s left of that little boy – surely not quite as sweet as in 1936, but just as appreciative of Josephine’s extraordinary kindness.
In the Puritan and Calvinist cultures prevalent in 17th century Britain and America, children were believed to be born corrupted by “original sin”. Quakers rejected this doctrine, and Robert Barclay called it “an invented and unscriptural barbarism”. . .
Dear Friends: I went to a children’s writer’s workshop and read the manuscripts of all the participants. They were exceedingly dark, and the child protagonists were thrust into life and death situations that most of us would never face. The hero or heroine was, without exception, the child of impaired, absent, or dead parents.
