The Cage

Still at home with Laibele and still confined to her bed, Riva does what she can to stay upbeat. She and Laibele play games and tell stories together, and Riva notes that Laibele works hard to stay alive. They ask one another what each would do first if the war ended tomorrow. Laibele claims that he would buy an entire loaf bread and eat it all. This idea of the war ending soon comes to dominate their conversations, which turn to their absent family members: their mother, their two older sisters, and their older brother.

Riva decides that she will write letters to the missing siblings, even though Laibele protests because there is no mail service into and out of the ghetto to deliver the letters. The sentiment, Riva explains, is that “if the war ends tomorrow and they come home, we will not have to tell them anything. We will just give them their mail, and it will answer all their questions” (44). She writes the letters, but she buries the fear, in her mind, that they will not survive to see their siblings, even if the war ends the following day. She distracts herself with the letters, and then Laibele convinces her to begin teaching her brothers again, so that when their mother returns, she will not be upset that they stopped studying history and Jewish literature. They laugh over the lessons, but Riva cannot ignore the thought that they “need much more than laughter to make [them] well. It does not cure tuberculosis or put calcium back into [her] bones” (45).

At the end of the chapter, Motele and Moishele, without Riva’s permission, sell a week’s bread ration in exchange for a bottle of vitamin drops that might heal her. They explain that they could not ask her first, for she would refuse, but that the vitamins would help her get well. The drops do help her condition improve; the family repeats their selling, and, by the end of the chapter, Riva begins to move around the apartment.

When a social worker from the Child Welfare Department arrives at their door, Riva and her siblings panic. The social worker informs the siblings that they will be separated and adopted by families. Though Riva tries to keep the social worker out of their house, she continues to drop by, bringing food. Riva eventually stops letting her into the house, a response to her internal, maternal voice, which repeats “A mother does not give up her children! A mother does not give up her children!” (48).

Eventually, the siblings receive a summons, and Riva, Motele, and Moishele walk to the department together. They are interviewed in separate rooms. Ms. Wolkowna, director of the department, explains to Riva that she and her two healthy brothers will be adopted by separate families, and that Laibele will be transported to a “home for children,” which she knows means that “he will be with the first new victims for the Nazi transports” (49). Riva protests in an emotional speech, calling upon the “love” that their mother left behind for them and pleading that they “can only be happy together” (49). Ms. Wolkowna cries, but she does not respond verbally.

When the siblings meet again, Motele is angry, and Moishele is terrified. Laibele, though, smiles when he sees his siblings, because he can tell that they have not given up on staying together. The siblings wait anxiously, fearing for their separation, but Ms. Wolkowna calls Riva to the Child Welfare Department one day and informs her that upon “seeing the love and devotion” she and her siblings have for one another, the department has made an exception and allowed her to adopt her siblings (51). In the new arrangement, she sacrifices the rights of a child. Joyfully, the four siblings “breathe freely” that night, “forgetting for a moment” that they are in “the ghetto cage,” and thankful that they can stay together (51).