Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli

The last unit I teach to the eighth grade is on the Holocaust. I like to joke with the kids that as graduation looms, I think it is time to get really depressing. One of the best speakers we had this year was a Holocaust survivor that I contacted through the Rhode Island Holocaust and Research Center. She had lived near the Black Forest as a young girl and had memories of Kristalnacht and the early persecution of Jews. Her father had been interred in Dachau but was allowed to leave the over-crowded camp when his family's immigration paperwork was processed. They were on one of the last steamships allowed to leave the country with Jewish immigrants. All of her grandparents died in concentration camps. My 8th graders didn't fidget, they didn't giggle, they didn't poke one another with pencils, or do any of the other annoying things they tend to do.  Nope, they listened!

Warsaw, Poland, 1941. Yad Vashem Photo Archive

But, I digress. The relevant detail for the book Milkweed is a comment that the speaker made about the book Boy in the Striped Pajamas that I think applies here: it is a novel that doesn't portray the historical details of the Holocaust very well (and yes, I understand that it wasn't really intended to). In both cases, the unreliable first person narration requires the reader to approach the novel with a great deal of prior knowledge, or she will miss a lot of the historical allusions. Neither is a book for students who know nothing about the Holocaust; they will simply become confused.

That said, I like Milkweed better than Boy.  Neither book has a realistic narrator, but Misha, the narrator of Milkweed is at least not as epically naive as Bruno in Boy (I'm sorry to be harsh there, but I had a nine year old when I read the book for the first time, and she would not have been so obtuse).  Misha is an orphaned Gypsy boy who roams the streets of Warsaw perfecting the art of stealing.  He befriends other orphans as well as a Jewish family and finds himself forced into the Warsaw ghetto.  This is a story of Misha trying to understand who he is in the midst of a society intent on labeling him as an inferior.  A very interesting story, but one in which some loose ends don't get neatly tied up.  For example, a great deal is made about a necklace that Misha wears leading me to think that it would have some significance later in the book.  However, Misha's friend spitefully throws it over the wall, and it never comes up again.  It really made me wonder if Spinelli had had an idea about how to end, then changed his mind and needed to get rid of the "evidence."  Mention of the Warsaw Uprising is brief and would be missed by a reader not looking for it.

All in all, a very satisfying end to my yearly Holocaust reading.

The Devil's Arithmetic


posted Jun 22, 2010 4:22 PM by D. Carlino   [ updated Jun 22, 2010 4:31 PM ]

I just finished The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen.  This historical fiction novel introduces readers to the Holocaust through a young girl's experience with her family's memories.  While Hannah is reluctantly celebrating the Passover seder dinner, she gets dragged into the past where she discovers why her extended family places so much importance on the family's Holocaust story.  While the novel is realistic about the harshness of this era, it is perhaps a good novel to introduce a reader to this stark and horrifying subject.  I would recommend it to students grades 6 and up especially if parents are reading along with them and can help answer questions that might come up.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

I very much wanted to like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, but I didn't. The premise was excellent: a naive nine year old boy moves from his beloved Berlin to a place he calls Out With, because his father has caught the eye of the Fury. The reader quickly realizes that the boy has moved to Auschwitz so his father can run the camp there for the Führer.

However, once that premise was established, the story wasn't very believable to me. The boy Bruno meets a Jewish boy through the wire, and for a year maintains a friendship with the boy. I just couldn't believe that over the course of a year that no guard noticed these two boys meeting and talking. I definitely did not believe the ending. Without giving it away, I wanted to know why if it was so easy for Bruno to get into the camp, why none of the Jews were able to get out of it.

There are much better books on the Holocaust out there, read those instead. Try Maus and Maus II by Art Spiegelman, some of the original graphic novels, or Friedrich or I Was There by Hans Peter Richter or The Diary of Anne Frank.