From: Maia Cheli-Colando <maia>
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 12:20:26 -0700

Actually, I think that The Devil's Arithmetic is brilliant in its use of
"fantasy." Chaya's spirit-traveling not only allows us to see into the camps with a double lens of story and history, but it sits the reader on a path of questions, should s/he wish to pursue them.

Chaya is then and now, and we can look at this as a literary fantasy tool, but we can also ask (a) what does this mean for Chaya, to have been two souls? And (b) in what ways are our souls/selves formed by from where our history draws -- in what ways do we each have many souls? It is the Seder through which comes Chaya's literal embodying of experience -- potent, and mystical. We follow Chaya in her questioning
-- "what does this mean to me now?" is vividly answered.

Other elements in the book that I found most striking:

Chaya [life] lives because Chaya [life] dies. Without Chaya's sacrifice, Rivka would have died. Without Rivka, would Wolfe have survived to lead the life he did, to become Hannah Chaya's grandfather? The sad, tattooing man says to Chaya, live for my Chaya, for all of our Chayas -- live for all of all lives. What gift is this to the young Jewish girl today, who isn't certain how her family history matters to the here and now of games and friends in the New Rochelle?

The numbers. 4N for 4 in the family, N for the New Rochelle. This isn't just playing with numbers -- what does it mean to Chaya-Hannah that her family is, could live in, numbers again?

The swallows at the smokestacks. Chaya-Hannah can see the irony; "There were brilliant sunsets and soft breezes. Around the commandant's house, bright flowers were teased by the wind. Once she'd seen a fox cross the meadow to disappear into the forest. If this had been in a book, she thought, the skies would be weeping, the swallows mourning at the smokestack."

Jane returns to this in the afterward. She writes, "There is no way that fiction can come close to touching how truly inhuman, alien, even satanic, was the efficient machinery of death at the camps. Nor how heroism had to be counted: not in resistance, which was worse than useless because it meant involving the deaths of even more innocents.... That heroism -- to resist being dehumanized, to simply outlive one's tormentors, to practice the quiet, everyday caring for one's equally tormented neighbors. To witness. To remember. These were the only victories of the camps.

Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks."

Maia

Ruth I. Gordon wrote:

>CCBC's current topic has turned my brain inside out and has brought
>many of my long held thoughts to he fore. One of my constant
>questions has been is there a need for fiction when there is so much
>excellent and understandable nonfiction in the first and third
>persons. For years, I have been concerned with Yolen's "Devil's
>Arithmetic". When I first read it, on its publication, I was
>indignant that she had made a fantasy of what was anything but. At
>the end of the novel, the girl wakes up from a long dream, one
>supposes, and is alive to return to her family at the Seder table.
>
>
Received on Tue 25 Apr 2006 02:20:26 PM CDT