{"id":79647,"date":"2014-11-17T11:48:46","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T16:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=79647"},"modified":"2014-11-17T16:45:16","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T21:45:16","slug":"banned-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/17\/banned-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Banned Books"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Once<\/a>

An illustration from Once Upon a Potty<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Once Upon a Potty<\/em> was written in 1975 by the Israeli author and illustrator Alona Frankel to help her son toilet train. (Its Hebrew title is\u00a0Sir Ha-Sirim<\/em>, literally \u201cPotty of Potties.\u201d) Since it was translated into English in 1980, it\u2019s never gone out of print, and now it\u2019s regarded as a picture-book classic, a helpful resource for the parents of young children.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was banned in my house. My mother disliked the use of euphemisms she deemed babyish\u2014wee-wee<\/em>, potty<\/em>, \u201ca hole to woo-woo from\u201d<\/em>\u2014and illustrations she found \u201ccreepy\u201d and \u201cdisgusting.\u201d I can still recall first hearing what would become one of her most oft-repeated phrases: \u201cI don’t care for that at all<\/em>.\u201d She sniffed at households that owned the book and curled her lip when we saw it on store shelves.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a result, Once Upon a Potty<\/em> took on the luster of the taboo. Like a nineteenth-century schoolboy with a French postcard, I would read it\u2014or, anyway, look at it\u2014furtively whenever I was unobserved: at other toddlers\u2019 houses, in the children\u2019s room of the library, at the local Y where I did tumbling. Particularly shocking to me was the final illustration: the triumphant coil of tempera feces in a puddle of yellow urine. And the accompanying text! Exuberantly babyish, frankly scatological, my mother’s nightmare incarnate. \u201cBye-bye wee-wee,\u201d it reads as the excrement disappears down the toilet. \u201cBye-bye woo-woo.\u201d <\/p>\n

Beyond its scandalous subject matter, I was struck by the fact that the protagonist, Joshua, had a full head of hair: I was bald. What Freud would have to say about all this is an open question. (There is surprisingly little scholarly work devoted to Freudian readings of the Frankel oeuvre.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not long ago, I was babysitting for a friend\u2019s toddler. And there, on the shelf, I spotted it: a smiling, naked baby, seated on a chamber pot, gaily ringed with forget-me-nots.\u00a0Once Upon a Potty<\/em>. To read it now, I thought, would be creepy, or deviant, even. And yet throughout the following hours it preyed on me. I was wracked with irrational anxiety: What if my charge wanted me to read it aloud? I couldn\u2019t; it would be akin to reading pornography.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the end, it didn\u2019t come to that. When he brought me a stack of picture books, Once Upon a Potty<\/em> was not in it. Instead, there was a copy of Everybody Poops<\/em>. I moved it covertly to the bottom of the pile. I didn\u2019t want to read it\u2014but there was no need to turn it into something forbidden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once Upon a Potty was written in 1975 by the Israeli author and illustrator Alona Frankel to help her son toilet train. (Its Hebrew title is\u00a0Sir Ha-Sirim, literally \u201cPotty of Potties.\u201d) Since it was translated into English in 1980, it\u2019s never gone out of print, and now it\u2019s regarded as a picture-book classic, a helpful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[16062,7068,8892,16060,53,16061,16063,16064],"class_list":["post-79647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-babysitting","tag-banned-books","tag-childhood","tag-once-upon-a-potty","tag-reading","tag-toilet-training","tag-wee-wee","tag-woo-woo"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOnce Upon a Potty<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on the one book that was banned in her childhood home.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/17\/banned-books\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Banned Books by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 17, 2014 \u2013 Once Upon a Potty was written in 1975 by the Israeli author and illustrator Alona Frankel to help her son toilet train. 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