The Devil's Arithmetic (1988)

Great story. I cried. My throat is tightening as I think back on it. Great ending. Powerful.

The holocaust and the trail of tears are two events that have affected me for decades - all of my adult life and half of my childhood. I remember, in my 20's, trying to convince a close Jewish friend that he cannot think of the holocaust as just the past and something that cannot happen in current times. I told him it was "yesterday" and people and society have not changed. I'm not sure I've changed my mind about that yet.

I remember sitting on the back patio in my middle teens with my family and guests for a cookout and asking about the numbers tattooed on our friend's arm, That was the first time I learned what that meant.

Anyway, The Devil's Arithmetic is an amazing book. And I'm amazed that the same person can write this and also write Owl Moon, one of favorite young children's picture books. I plan on taking a close look at Yolen's other work. ( )

I can't say that I enjoyed this book considering the subject matter, but I definitely think it deserves a place on everyone's reading list. I don't think any book can ever really capture the atrocities of the crimes committed against the Jews during the holocaust, but I think this book puts it in a perspective that younger children can comprehend. I do think it's a bit much for children under the age of 9 because of the use of the yiddish vocabulary and description of the deaths of some of the jews. Overall, this is not the type of book I usually read, but I'm glad I did because I can recommend this book to a younger person who wants to learn more about the holocaust, or who doesn't fully understand the terror or significance behind it. ( )

I wasn't really sure what to make of this book when I first saw it, but after having read it, I would say that I am glad that I did.

This is one of those books that really makes you look at things from a different perspective. I can relate to Hannah, because I remember being 13 and having little patience with traditions and customs, and just wanting to hang out with my friends.

But given the experience Hannah had, she was able to see things in a new way, and was granted a gift, even though it was at a great cost, to be able to know and really understand her family's past and how they became who they are. And because of this, she gains a newfound respect and admiration for them, and her own life, that she might not have otherwise known.

This is the lesson that this book taught me. Yes, it was about the Holocaust and the epic tragedy that occurred, but I think it was more about understanding and respecting where you come from, and not letting trivial everyday teenage life get in the way of honoring your past.

***SPOILERS BELOW***

Ultimately, I gave this one 4 stars only because the book never really explained who/where Chaya was really.
With these types of books, where someone goes back in time into the body of another person, I always wonder where the person who is inhabited goes when the person who is inhabiting them is there.

Did Chaya die when she was ill, allowing Hannah to come back in order make her a hero to her Aunt? Or did Chaya sort of get shunted off to the side when Hannah took over, which means that Chaya had no choice in the sacrifice she made?

I hope the latter is not the case, although near the end it is mentioned that Hannah has 3 sets of memories -- of being in Lublin, of being with Gitl and Schmuel, and of her American family. It seems to me that Hannah should only have had 2 sets of memories if Chaya was not in there somewhere.

The last possibility is that Chaya was Hannah in a past life, whose life Hannah had a vision of (through Chaya's eyes, perhaps?) at just the right moment to attain the perspective she needed... Of the three, this is the most appealing to me, although some aspects of the story don't fit perfectly with this theory.

Overall, I am very glad that I read this book, and would highly recommend it. ( )

For me, picking up a book about the Holocaust is a bit like plunging into an icy-cold lake, on a warm summer day. Not because the experience is refreshing - far from it! - but because there is this sense, while standing on the edge, poised to take that fateful step, of drawing back. An instinctive recoiling from what I know will be a sudden and shocking submersion in a different world - one that I'm never entirely prepared to enter, that I fear will swallow me whole, as I sink like a stone, down and down into the cold, dark depths.

Since the day I stumbled across my first Holocaust memoir - Sara Zyskind's Stolen Years, which chronicles the author's time in the Lodz Ghetto, and then the Auschwitz-Birkenau death-camp - the year I was eleven, I have had an abiding interest in this terrible episode of history, and a desire to understand what made it, and other genocides, possible. I have, over the years, read numerous survivor testimonies, and devoted much time to considering the nature of human evil, the ubiquity of human suffering, and the historical, cultural, and psychological factors that allow them to flourish. I believe in remembering, in bearing witness, and - to the best of my limited ability - in seeking to oppose and change those factors which facilitate such atrocities.

But no one (amongst the "sane," anyway) can remember all the time. I don't spend every waking hour contemplating these issues, and I don't desire to. Which isn't to say I "forget" them, per se, just that the intimacy of my knowledge, of my remembering, varies greatly. I always "remember" the Holocaust. But the remembering involved in sociological analysis, and the remembering that comes of witnessing - even if only through the printed word - a vulnerable young child, violently separated from his only kin, tossed about in a maelstrom born of adult depravity, depart this world through the doors of the gas chamber, and the smokestacks of those infernal human-powered ovens, are two very different things. To read a book about the Holocaust, be it fact or fiction, is to embrace that second kind of remembering, to become acquainted, once again, with madness.

And that seems like an entirely appropriate jumping-off point to me, because this book, this children's novel, is about nothing so much as memory, and our (very natural) reluctance to embrace it. It is the story of a contemporary Jewish American girl who, reluctantly attending her family's Passover Seder, opens the door for the Prophet Elijah, and finds herself in 1940s Poland. Hannah Stern of New Rochelle (five minutes from where I myself live) is now Chaya Abramowicz of Lublin, and a suburban girl who has always lived a life of privilege and plenty is about to discover a world of unimaginable loss and privation. For the small Jewish shtetl in which she finds herself is about to be liquidated - transported to one of the Nazi death camps...

The Devil's Arithmetic is a powerful argument for the importance - the necessity - of remembering, but it is also a meditation on the difficulty of convincing others of the truth, and the limitations of knowledge itself, when confronting the full power of evil unleashed. Hannah/Chaya knows what is coming - she knows what those Nazis and their trucks in front of the village shul mean, she knows where the cattle cars are headed. But although she attempts to warn the others, tries desperately to convince them to flee, no one will believe her. She is, after all, just a child - a child known to say odd things, because of a recent illness - and what she is saying is so unimaginably terrifying to her listeners, that she is silenced - hushed by her "Aunt" Gitl.

Eventually, she is silenced by the loss of memory itself. Horrified, the first night in camp, by the showers toward which she and the other women are being herded, convinced that they are really the gas chambers about which she had learned, in her other life, Hannah/Chaya once again attempts to warn the others. But finally, perceiving that they cannot hear her words, that she is only robbing them of their last protection, robbing them of hope, she desists, only to find this silence reinforced by a horrifying inability to recall who she really is, and what lies ahead:

When the man came to Hannah, she bit her lip so as not to cry and kept her eyes closed the entire time. She concentrated on what was to happen next - after the showers and the hair-cutting, remembering from the lessons in Holocaust history in school. But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. "I cannot remember," she whispered to herself. "I cannot remember." She'd been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason. Opening her eyes, she stared at the floor. Clots of wet hair lay all about: dark hair, light hair, short hair, long hair, and two pale braids. "Gone, all gone," she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning."

Hannah, the girl who didn't want to remember the past, has now become Chaya, the girl who cannot remember the future - a future the Nazis are intent on destroying.

Jane Yolen has created a powerful story in The Devil's Arithmetic, one that will draw young readers in, allowing them - through the plot device of a modern child traveling back through time - to experience the terror of the Holocaust in a uniquely intimate way. That it is necessary for them do so - to enter into this strange and horrifying world of the past, and become one with the victims - is borne out, not just by the maxim that "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it," but by the reality that we are all vulnerable, not just to those forces which might make us victims, but to those which might make us monsters. As Fayge says, at one point, quoting from a story about the Ba'al Shem Tov: "The enemy will always be with you. He will be in the shadow of your dreams and in your living flesh, for he is the other part of yourself."

This "other part" always needs combating. What better way to do this, than to witness the terrible cruelty and suffering that result, when it is unleashed? So... take a deep breath, grab hold of your courage, fix your eyes on the truth, and plunge into that dark water. It has to be done. It always has to be done. And it always has to be done again. ( )

While this book is not as good as her book Briar Rose this book also serves its own independent purpose. This book is trying to tell us that we must still care about history. We must understand, as best as we can, what happened during the Holocaust and try to never repeat those mistakes again. The ride is a magical one to say the least. You are left wondering through the majority of the book just how Hannah got to the past and when she will return to the future. When you get to the ending you will be floored over the lessons learned. I recommend this highly for any teacher that needs to find an appropriate book to read for teaching the holocaust. It is fictional, but it is appropriate. It would be a good introductory text for a younger audience because it begins with a world that they can somewhat understand due to the present day nature of the beginning of the story and then they can become educated when she goes to the past. There are no moments in this book where you could become overly concerned with the subject matter having an ill effect on students, except for the normal because it does deal with the starvation, shearing of hair, and showers that people really had to deal with. This book will help an individual to start down a path to understanding more about the holocaust and hopefully they will continue down whatever path they need to take for themselves. ( )