Giving this book a star rating and a review feels…strangely inappropriate. No piece of literature is above critique, of course, but after I finished this one, I felt like I had the wind knocked out of me a little. Though it wasn’t flawless, but deconstructing it for a full-fledged review didn’t feel like a constructive exercise. . There are undoubtedly small inaccuracies which older readers, in particular, might find frustrating, but the spirit of the book matters more to me given the themes and audience of the story.No matter how many times you read or hear about the Holocaust, the full horror of it remains utterly debilitating.I’m giving it four stars instead of five for a few reasons. As a literary work, it is on par with Between Shades of Gray, which I also gave four stars—this one is written for a slightly younger audience, though it’s no less emotionally riveting. I also feel it may be a little too intense for its intended audience (readers between twelve and fourteen or so). Jane Yolen does not pull punches. Everything short of dying women and children clawing at the walls of the gas chamber is in her. My library has it filed under “Older Teens” in the YA section.The novel is, however, still relatively well-written from an adult perspective. Yolen keeps her prose simple and to-the-point. The parts in the book that take place in the present dragged a little, and modern Hannah’s voice annoyed me (on purpose, I’m sure). I’m not Jewish, but I have attended three or four Passover Seders—if I hadn’t, I’m sure the beginning would have totally confused me, but the dark twist on the “Dorothy goes to Oz” trope during the Seder was clever and well-done.By keeping the cast of characters to a minimum, Yolen also maximizes each character’s importance to Hannah, to the reader, and to the story as a whole. Most of them aren’t fully fleshed out (the novel is more of a novella at just 170 pages), but they’re real enough to tug at the reader’s heartstrings. The Holocaust is often dealt with numerically—even by Hannah herself as she frantically tries to warn her skeptical friends that the Nazis will murder six million Jews. Yolen does a good job of scaling the immediate tragedy down to a handful of that number, thereby humanizing and individualizing the victims.The camp narrative, which takes up about half of the novel, was just fictionalized enough—and given the staggering number of victims and Yolen’s own research, something like it very well could have happened even if this particular narrative is fictional. As I said, she doesn’t shy away from the fear and the trauma, though fortunately she keeps the graphic content (blood, waste, etc.) to a bare minimum. It’s no less horrific for being rather simple. Elie Wiesel’s very real memories in Night are recounted in a similar style.Though the time-travel setup is a bit hokey, I did like the way Yolen handled Hannah’s fading memories and foreknowledge. It fit nicely with the theme of hope, however small, and the need to keep it alive from day to day in order to survive. Would it be better to know the full horror that awaited you—the truth about these “factories of death”—Yolen asks through Hannah, or to be ignorant? My introduction to the Holocaust was the decidedly milder Number the Stars in elementary school, and my first serious contact with it came when I was fourteen during a visit to the Holocaust Museum in D.C.. I’m not sure there’s an age when a child is “ready” to be exposed to that sort of horror, but The Devil’s Arithmetic is not a book I would give to anyone under twelve or thirteen.Effective, touching, haunting, and sometimes poetic, this short novel is worth a few hours of your time even if you fall outside its target audience.
Twelve year old Hannah is sick of spending Passover 'remembering' the past with her relatives. During the Passover Seder, she is transported to 1942 Poland, where she becomes Chaya (her Hebrew name), the girl she was named for. In this time, she is eventually sent to a concentration camp, where the bulk of the story takes place. Throughout the book, she struggles with memory - which memories are real (the future or the now), remembering anything b/c of the trauma of the camp, futilely trying to use her future-memory to warn those around her, etc.The story is chilling. And it is beautiful and sad. And it is an amazing combination of historical fiction and s/f.Some of my favorite quotations:"Passover isn't about eating, Hannah," her mother began at last, sighing and pushing her fingers through her silver-streaked hair. "You could have fooled me," Hannah muttered. (4)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's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason...Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning. (94)"We all have such stories. It is a brutal arithmetic. But I - I am alive. You are alive. As long as we breathe, we can see and hear. As long as we can remember, all those gone before are alive inside us." (113)The days' routines were as before, the only change being the constant redness of the sky as trainloads of nameless zugangi were shipped along the rails of death. Still the camp seemed curiously lightened because of it, as if everyone knew that as long as others were processed, they would not be. A simple bit of mathematics, like subtraction, where on taken away at the top line becomes one added on to the bottom. The Devil's arithmetic." (146)
What do You think about The Devil's Arithmetic (2004)?
The Devil's Arithmetic is a very serious book with very mature themes. A big theme is genocide and even today it's an uphill battle, dealt with very seriously. Many people have been victims of genocide. Them and their families robbed of their life. Some because of who they are and others for no reason at all. No matter the reason of their murder, genocide is an unacceptable problem in this world. In The Devil's Arithmetic genocide is occurring over a period of years. The Holocaust was probably
—Kayla Gaussaint Ivy League School
Yolen employs a "Magic Tree House" trope to move her main character, Hannah, a bored American thirteen-year-old at her family's Seder dinner, through time, space and language, and it comes off as hokey. Once Hannah becomes Chaya, an orphan living in a Polish village in 1942, though, this tale grabs onto the reader and doesn't let go. Hannah opens the door of her family's apartment to welcome the prophet Elijah and is soon crammed into a crowded cattle car with other Jews on a train destined for the "final solution." Yolen makes such a narrative more than a recounting of horror and the inhumanity of humanity with strong characters and a strong story. By the time Hannah re-enters the present and pleasant Passover gathering with heightened respect and empathy for her Holocaust-surviving grandfather and aunt, I was willing to forgive the contrived device. After all, it's one that works for kids in any number of series. And in the end, it did so here. The novel prompts young readers swept up in Yolen's carefully researched tale to make the effort to remember what must never be forgotten.
—Lars Guthrie
The Devil's Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen, is a thrilling story about a girl who is transported back in time to the holocaust and must figure out how to survive in the concentration camps. Hannah Stern is a 13-year-old Jewish girl who is bored and tired of her life in New York. At the end of her family’s Passover Seder, Hannah is suddenly taken back in time to Poland in the year 1941 during the Holocaust. Hannah becomes Chaya, a 13-year-old Jewish girl who lives with her aunt, Gitl, and her uncle, Shmuel. The author made Chaya a believable character for me by giving a lot of details about her feelings during the story.During her Uncle’s wedding party, the Nazis take everyone in her Jewish community, including Chaya, to a concentration camp. In the camp, everyone is forced to do harsh work and Chaya must work in the kitchen, cleaning the dishes and the floor. At the camp, Chaya sees many people shot, starve, and put to death in the gas chambers because they are too sick to work. During this difficult time, Chaya makes many friends including Esther, Shifre, and Rivka, as they all struggle to stay alive in the camp. When Jane Yolen described lif ein the concentration camp, it created a vivid image for me. For example, I felt as if I was crammed in the boxcar train on the way to the camp with Chaya and the other Jews. As a 13-year-old Jewish boy, it made me sad at times when reading this book knowing that some of my ancestors could have been in a concentration camp. I enjoyed The Devil’s Arithmetic because it taught me about the Holocaust and helped me understand what it was like in the contraption camp. This book reminded me a lot of Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry, another book about the Holocaust. The Devil's Arithmetic was an exciting, well-written book with many twists and turns. Readers ranging from teens to young adults who enjoy a great historical fiction book will love The Devil's Arithmetic as much as I did.
—Zach Horowitz
