Devil's Arithmetic
The book, Devil's Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen was about the Holocaust. The type of book is historical fiction. The main character is Hannah. Her name is Chaya when she travels back in time, but her original name was Hannah. She is about 13 years old and is average height and weight fir her age. During a normal Seder, Hannah goes to open the door and is all of a sudden taken back into a strange village. The two people call her by the name of Chaya. Gitl claims to be her aunt and that Chaya was brought to her because her entire family was killed back in her homeland, Dublin. As they go to a wedding for her "uncle," Nazis come and take everyone away. They say that they are just relocating them to a safer place, but Hannah knows who they are and where they are taking her. However, no one listens to her and they said that the trauma of losing her family has made her tell strange stories. Everyone is crammed into the back of trucks and taken to trains. On the train, again everyone is crammed into a little storage car. They stay in there for days. The odor that is developed in there was awful. Once the train ride was over, they were at
The setting of the Devil's Arithmetic was mainly in Europe, in a death camp during the Holocaust. The time is past. A sentence proving the setting is "Hannah then realized that she had traveled back in time to the Holocaust and was now in a death camp." I liked this book. It told me a lot about how the death camps were ran and how badly the Jews were treated. Anyone that does not know about the Holocaust would enjoy this book because it tells so much about it. Three new vocabulary words that I learned in this book were Seder, ascetic, and midden. A Seder is a ceremonial dinner celebrated by Jews at Passover, in commemoration of the Exodus. An ascetic is a person who practices extreme self-denial. The definition of a midden is a dunghill or a refuse heap. The message in this book is about the terrible things that happened during the Holocaust. It told of how all the people were treated in the camps and how one little error would result in death. The main conflict is person vs. society. Hannah and Rivka were trying to survive in the camp. They saw their relatives and friends get "processed," or killed, in the gas ovens.
Some common words found in the essay are:
Chaya Gitl, Rivka Hannah, Hannah Rivka, Jews Passover, Devil's Arithmetic, Yolen Holocaust, Seder Hannah, gas ovens, death camp, , hannah gas ovens, holding rivka hannah, holding rivka, rivka hannah, name chaya, hannah gas, devil's arithmetic, aunt uncle,
Approximate Word count = 775
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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