The Cage

After Riva’s home becomes the library, it also “becomes a very active meeting place,” where visitors share news of deportations as they exchange books (83). The “burning issue” in the ghetto is “how to keep hiding if one’s name is on the list” for deportation, everyone’s greatest fear (83). Riva, Motele, and Moishele accept visitors who hide in their cellar, hoping that the Jewish police will not enter their home and search for hidden friends. They commit to this labor because, they decide, “we would want others to help us” (83).

Riva now works in the cutting shop of a sewing factory. The shop manager, Mr. Berkenwald, was an old friend of her parents, and after Riva faints from a gall bladder attack in front of her sewing machine, he moves her to the more delicate cutting shop. Riva is the youngest laborer in the room, and she senses that the other laborers around her are “truly kind,” admiring her and her siblings’ “courage to hide a library in [their] home” (85).

One day, Riva enters the cutting room and senses that something has gone wrong; she notices dark looks sent in her direction. When she asks a coworker, Miriam, Miriam tells her that Riva had been on a list of teenagers slated for deportation, but that Mr. Berkenwald replaced Riva’s name with that of another teenager. Riva does not know what to feel: “My thoughts race one after the other. Should I laugh? I am not being deported. Should I cry? Someone else is going in my place. Should I feel happy? Should I feel guilty?” (86). Mr. Berkenwald finds her crying and comforts her in her confusion, but Riva notes that he has become “so much older in one day” as he “had to play God” (87). He explains to Riva that he knew that her brothers would volunteer to go with her to the labor camp, that he could not remove a young woman who was legally the mother of two boys from their home. Both Riva and Mr. Berkenwald cry as they attempt to comfort one another.

After Mr. Berkenwald saves Riva, she struggles, with her brothers, to make sense of the way that “life does go on” even after a person, even after their mother, is gone (88). Motele and Moishele encourage her to have hope, despite her frustrating and confusing feelings. Yulek, too, comforts Riva, and she recognizes some complex, perhaps romantic, feelings between them, though they never speak of the nature of relationship. It is “so peaceful just to be together” in a private space outside the world of the ghetto, “a world of poetry, beauty, and hope,” that she does not want to broach the issue (88).

Another spring comes, “again covering the cold earth with a blanket of new blossoms. Nature is awakening, sparkling with new life,” and Motele and Moishele decide to surprise Riva (89). Riva reflects on the holiday itself: the narrative of enslavement experienced by the ancient Israelites “brings only the sad reality that we [Jews] are still slaves” in Poland (89). The holiday’s promise of freedom feels far away. But Motele and Moishele decide to resurrect that sense that Pesach is a holiday for new beginnings, particularly new clothing, and they take their uncle Baruch’s old coat to a local tailor so that he can make a new suit for Riva, who sacrificed her right to new clothes when she sacrificed her status as a child to take care of her brothers.

Knowing that she would be angry with them, the brothers wait to tell Riva of the gift until they have paid the previous week’s bread in exchange for the suit-making service; they tell her: “we outsmarted you” (92). Riva mourns the loss of Uncle Baruch, who was “talented. Handsome. Bright” (91). But when she asks: “What right do we have to make use of a coat that is not ours to use?”, the boys insist that their mother, who saved the coat for Baruch’s return, would have recognized her daughter’s need for new clothing (92). This argument settles the matter, and Riva cannot “stay angry […] The beautiful gray tweed coat becomes a beautiful gray tweed suit,” and the tailor affirms the presence and approval of their mother, who, he says, “has raised very special kids” (93).

Yulek tells Riva that he is on the list for deportation, and that his sister, Faygele, will go with him. Though Riva exclaims that she will hide them, Yulek explains that he must go, out of the chance that maybe the labor camps will give him, and fragile Faygele, “a better chance to survive this hell” (94). Riva demands to know “what has happened to his determination to live” (94), but Yulek calls upon her role as protector of her brothers to explain that he must protect Faygele, who doesn’t have the “strong nerves” necessary for hiding (95). He asks that she not forget him, and she says that she will wait until he returns to read again.

When Riva asks what she can do to help him, he asks her to come to his apartment and help him pack. There, Riva embraces Faygele, who is “pale and forlorn” like the picture of her mother on the wall (96). Faygele asks Riva to confirm that she and Yulek will be back.

After they pack the suitcases, Riva must return home in time for curfew, and so Yulek ushers her to the door, where they kiss for the first time. Riva does not want to cry while they kiss, and in her mixed emotions, she wants to ask, “Why, Why” (97). As she runs down the stairs, away from Yulek, he calls after her that he will be back.