{"id":85516,"date":"2015-05-07T14:13:04","date_gmt":"2015-05-07T18:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=85516"},"modified":"2015-05-07T14:35:21","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T18:35:21","slug":"another-day-another-doll-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/07\/another-day-another-doll-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Day, Another Doll Hero"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Madchen_mit_Puppe_Schonhauser_1904_oMV\"<\/a>

H. Sch\u00f6nhauser, M\u00e4dchen mit Puppe (Girl with Doll)<\/i>, 1904.<\/p><\/div>\n

Yesterday, after posting about the Edison Talking Doll<\/a>, I was wracked with guilt. I could not believe that I, a lifelong defender of dolls, had turned on them so callously, joining the chorus of ignorant fear-mongering that contributes to the current hostile doll work environment! I was ashamed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I set about to offer a counterpoint. Surely, I thought, there must be some dolls out there whose good works I can acknowledge. I Googled \u201cDoll saves life.\u201d <\/p>\n

And was I ever rewarded! It seems the news is full of hero dolls, if one bothers to look. For every Chucky, I found, there was a manikin<\/a> teaching New Zealanders how to care for critically ill infants. For every Annabelle, a Depression-era rag doll taking a bullet<\/a>. For every life-size toy contributing to the suffocation of a child in 1950<\/a>, a baby-doll was saving a family from a fire<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One woman<\/a> even credits a doll with saving her from the Nazis. Sent to a Budapest Red Cross camp, little\u00a0Tzipi Cohen found comfort in having \u201cconversations\u201d with a beloved doll. \u201cAfter talking to my doll she told me to run away and try and find my way back home,\u201d she recalled in March of this year. The night she ran away, Hungarian soldiers rounded up and killed the Jewish children in the camp. Cohen has now donated the doll to\u00a0Shem Olam Faith and the Holocaust Institute for Education and Research. Says Rabbi Avraham Krieger, who heads Shem Olam, \u201cIn the absence of her parents, Tzipi \u2018listened to her doll\u2019s suggestion\u2019 or in essence, her gut feeling, and found a safety line. The \u2018conversations\u2019 with the doll are an example of her personal struggle to maintain composure within an evil reality that had no logic.\u201d<\/p>\n

And in case you\u2019re wondering, no, that wasn\u2019t a talking doll. Those don\u2019t give that kind of advice. They\u2019re demonic.<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, after posting about the Edison Talking Doll, I was wracked with guilt. I could not believe that I, a lifelong defender of dolls, had turned on them so callously, joining the chorus of ignorant fear-mongering that contributes to the current hostile doll work environment! I was ashamed.\u00a0 I set about to offer a counterpoint. […]<\/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":[18047,18046,10828,8830,18049,10588,18048],"class_list":["post-85516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-annabel","tag-chuckie","tag-dolls","tag-heroes","tag-heroism","tag-nazis","tag-red-cross"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBe a Doll\u2014Save a Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein, full of shame about the Edison Talking Doll, balances the scale with dolls who have saved lives.\" \/>\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\/2015\/05\/07\/another-day-another-doll-hero\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Another Day, Another Doll Hero by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 7, 2015 \u2013 Yesterday, after posting about the Edison Talking Doll, I was wracked with guilt. 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