50 pages • 1 hour read
Jane YolenThe Devil's Arithmetic
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Link Between Memory, Hope, and Personal Experience
The story begins and ends with memory. In the novel’s first sentence, Hannah tells her mom: “I’m tired of remembering” (11). In the last sentence, Hannah informs Aunt Eva: “I remember. Oh, I remember” (156). Thus, the theme of memory anchors the narrative, and links to the theme of knowledge. Hannah is exhausted by remembrance, but she remembers nonetheless: She knows her family; she knows they survived the Holocaust; and, specifically, she knows her Grandpa Will’s behavior, and it bothers her. She remembers he grabbed and screamed at her when she drew a concentration camp number on her arm, and she has “never quite forgiven him” (17). At nearly 13, Hannah has memories and knowledge.
Hannah’s family has memories and knowledge too. Grandpa Will continues to remember the concentration camps. As a member of the Sonderkommando, he had to deal with countless dead people, and was left with haunting knowledge. Aunt Eva also has memories of the concentration camp. She says: “We all changed our names. To forget. Remembering was too painful. But to forget was impossible” (156). Eva and the other survivors wish they didn’t have terrible memories, but their knowledge of the concentration camp doesn’t disappear when they change their names. What defines a person isn’t their name but their memories—what they’ve been through.
In Poland in 1942, Hannah tries to use her memories to help Jewish individuals. She remembers what she learned about the Holocaust and tells Jewish people about the concentration camp, the ovens, and the six million dead. She says: “I know. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do” (65). Memories are a kind of knowledge, or knowledge is like memory. For Hannah to know these facts about the Holocaust, she has to commit them to memory.
Other Jewish individuals doubt Hannah’s knowledge. Rabbi Boruch tells her: “There are not six million Jews in all of Poland, my child.” He adds: “There will always be Nazis among us” (65). Rabbi Boruch doesn’t know Hannah means the Nazis will kill six million Jewish people from across Europe and the Soviet Union. His memories make him less fazed by the persecution. The Nazis are another form of oppression. The Rabbi remembers that, throughout history, societies have targeted Jewish people, but they survived; he believes there’s no reason they won’t survive the present iteration of oppression.
The Jewish individuals in the novel have hope, another reason they don’t heed Hannah’s memories and knowledge. What Hannah knows isn’t promising. The information doesn’t give Jewish individuals a decent chance at survival. Hannah’s memories and knowledge turn her into a symbol of pessimism and doom. She becomes something of an antagonist. Gitl continually shushes her, and then, in the camp, Hannah scolds herself for letting her memories and knowledge obstruct an optimistic outlook. She says: “I will not take away their hope, which is all they have” (91). Near the end of the story, Hannah figures out how to link her memories to optimism. She still tells the girls about the Holocaust, but now she tells them about the Jewish individuals that survive, and about Israel and Jewish movie stars.
The novel emphasizes memories that come from personal experience. Aunt Eva and Grandpa Will didn’t have to study the Holocaust: They were there. Hannah learns about the Holocaust in school and from her family. Yet she wasn’t there—she didn’t experience it firsthand. After Hannah goes back in time, she returns with memories and knowledge based on personal experience. Yolen’s story suggests that memories and knowledge attached to firsthand experience lead to greater understanding and empathy.
Privilege, Suffering, and Life or Death
Privilege marks Hannah’s life in New Rochelle, where she doesn’t suffer critical privations. She has plenty of food. She eats “a big dinner at Rosemary’s” and “jelly beans and Easter candy” (11). At the Passover Seder, there’s more food for her. Hannah also doesn’t have to concern herself with shelter. As she tells the girls in Poland: “I live in a house that has eight rooms and the toilets are inside the house. One upstairs and one downstairs” (51). Violence, too, keeps its distance from Hannah. Before she goes back in time, media informs her idea of violence. She watches a zombie movie on TV and recites the “gruesome tale about the walking dead” to her brother (14). Hannah has a comfortable life.
Yet privilege doesn’t mean the absence of suffering. In New York, Hannah experiences pain and upset. She’s annoyed she has to go to the Seder, and the behavior of Grandpa Will unsettles her and reminds her of when he grabbed and yelled at her. Hannah expresses her suffering when she says aloud: “It isn’t fair!” (21). While Hannah’s suffering doesn’t involve starvation, homelessness, or life or death, it’s still present. Her suffering does not erase the suffering of others. She’s aware some of her family members experienced deadly hardship, but Hannah can’t account for that level of suffering.
Soon, Hannah acquires a different idea of suffering—the kind of anguish that doesn’t develop in a privileged environment. Hannah learns to appreciate the presence of substantial food. The watery soup and hard bread make her dream of the Seder food she thought was “so disgusting” (21). In the camps, the zombies aren’t on TV but in real life: They’re “musselmen” like Wolfe—people alive on the outside but dead on the inside. Before the camp, Hannah calls Gitl’s dress a rag, but in the camp, she’s grateful for any kind of decent clothes. Other items, too, take on incredible significance. About the importance of bowls, Rivka says: “I call them Every Bowls because they are everything to us. Without the bowl, you cannot have food, you cannot wash, you cannot drink” (104).
In the camps, Hannah comes to appreciate what she presumably took for granted in New York. She discovers another kind of suffering, and the life-or-death hardship seems to humble her. She stops thinking about herself so much, and starts to look after others—Tzipporah, Reuven, and Leye’s baby. The life-or-death stakes teach her about community and sacrifice. In the end, Hannah suffers the gas chamber and death as Chaya so Rivka/Aunt Eva can live. The life-or-death ordeal of the camps gives Hannah an intense lesson about the relationship between privilege and suffering. When she returns from the camps, her snarky attitude about memories vanishes. Having suffered what her family suffered, she declares, without attitude: “I remember. Oh, I remember” (156).
The Preservation of Identity
Creation and preservation of identity manifest differently throughout the novel. At the start in New York, Hannah doesn’t understand why Grandpa Will continues to identify with his former experiences. She tells her mom: “It’s all in the past. There aren’t any concentration camps now. Why bring it up? It’s embarrassing” (17). Hannah thinks identity is about the present, a reflection of a person’s immediate environment. The Holocaust is over: Grandpa Will is safe now, and she doesn’t understand why the Holocaust continues to impact his identity. Sometimes, people can’t control their identities and what they become. Aunt Eva tells Hannah: “We all changed our names. To forget. Remembering was too painful. But to forget was impossible” (156). The Holocaust survivors don’t want to preserve their identities as survivors, but they have no choice—the memories are too keen. They’re a part of identity.
In the camp, the Nazis try to obliterate the human, individual identities of Jewish individuals. They cut their hair, take away their clothes, and give them a numerical tattoo. Looks and style—elements that play a part in human identity—disappear. The Nazis want Jewish individuals to think of themselves as barcodes—an object that the Nazis will use and eventually, discard. As Rivka tells Hannah: “A person is not killed here but chosen. They are not cremated in the ovens, they are processed. There are no corpses, only pieces of drek, only shmattes, rags” (123). In the camps, Nazis transform the identity of Jewish individuals into disposable, worthless objects. It’s like they’re items in a deadly assembly line.
To counter dehumanization, Jewish individuals create ways to preserve their pre-camp identities. Like Rivka, Hannah gives the numbers on her arm meaning, which connects her to memories. Hannah makes the “4” stand for her family of four in New Rochelle. She remembers she’s not a thing but a person with a family that loves her. The Jewish individuals in the camp also try to remember things that comprised their identities before the Holocaust. The girls ask each other about their favorite foods. Hannah says pizza, but her memory of pizza fades. The extreme suffering of the camp is replacing her pleasant memories and compromising her identity. As Hannah remembers what the future will be like, she manages to preserve her sense of self and the humanity of Jewish people. Jewish individuals have a bright future: Their humanity will continue, and they will have success and their own country.
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