The Cage

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 1986

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Themes

Humanity and Community Memory

Throughout her text, Sender brings up the idea that inhumane treatment at the hands of the Nazis discounts the humanity that Jews cultivate through community traditions, close family structures, and fundamental wisdom. Riva’s memories begin during the Passover, or Pesach, season, and the feeling of rebirth that it brings recurs throughout the text as a marker in time; Hanukkah, too, reminds Riva and her fellow prisoners at Mittelsteine of the narrative of freedom that brings the Jewish community together in that season (89). Even when treated like “animals,” by connecting to others they can use stories, music, and poetry to assert collective humanity (122). Across the two parts of her text, Sender uses the communities around Riva to hold up her hope and courage when she has none; Riva, then, also holds up those around her. These common bonds, furthered by the sharing of stories that Riva models with Laibele in their apartments in Lodz, help characters to persist.

Motherhood

The most important person in Riva’s life, she realizes as early as Chapter 4, is her mother, who is “the bravest person” she has ever known (18). Though Riva’s mother is taken early in the story, she seems able to look after Riva, even when her body is missing and she herself may be dead. When, at sixteen, Riva suddenly learns that she is “no longer a sixteen-year-old girl” but “a mother now,” she takes on a role that powerfully influenced her young life (34). By standing up for Harry in Chapter 2, Riva’s mother sets the example, for her children, of loyalty and passion for others, showing them that their community must be protected but is not defined by blood. Riva carries this model with her throughout her life.

Across her time in three labor camps, Riva acts as and relies upon many different mother figures, from the camp doctor to Katia. She and her friends remind one another of their mothers’ good words, just as Motele and Moishele do for Riva in Lodz. Wherever she goes, Riva pays particular attention to mothers and daughters who are ripped away from one another, and the pain that this example surfaces in her later inspires some of the poetry that saves her life. In light of the mother-daughter relationship that Sender develops throughout the story, the relationship in the framing narrative, between Sender and Nancy, seems even more poignant. Not only is Nancy and Riva’s relationship of vital importance to her, but it is also one that could disappear at any moment.

Education, Writing, and Books

Riva, whose voice “writes” the book, has a passion for letters from a young age. They connect her to her brothers, who demand that she continue to educate them after their mother disappears. They connect her to Yulek, her first love, and they connect her, eventually, to the prisoners who thirst for her words. In Lodz, learning becomes nourishment, and books lead to hope. Her brothers encourage her to write, to tell their family’s story, and so do Rosa and other women in the camps. Even the commandant at Mittelsteine recognizes that Riva’s gift for writing has the power to make others feel when they lose the capacity to.

The conclusion of Sender’s text, which highlights the library of books that Riva, Motele, and Moishele leave behind, points out that literacy is not only valuable to Riva’s family. When others, whose identities Riva never discovers, recover and take the texts that she found so valuable, they show that texts did not only “[nourish her family’s] minds even while our bodies were withering,” but did the same for the others around her (104). The Cage is a testament to the importance of education while being a document for education in and of itself. Through it, Riva escapes the “cage” that she describes in the poem in the Prologue, rising above to share her voice not only with her family, as her mother did, but with the entire world, under the name Ruth Minsky Sender.

Nature and Life Cycles

Sender uses the cycles of nature to accompany the cycle of the Jewish calendar in marking time. The “new green grass” of the springtime sets the mood for the book from its first pages, calling a reader’s attention to the earth’s pattern of warming “the earth that was cold and frozen all winter” to invite “new life” that can reach “toward the sun” (5). The spring brings Pesach, and its reminder of new life, to the Lodz ghetto each year; though recognition of time passing makes Riva sad, it also helps her develop the ability to move on when she loses her mother and, later, her brother, Laibele.

Nature’s harsh winters seem to hurt Riva and her family, no matter where they go. The cold causes pain, injury, and death in the ghetto and in the labor camps. No matter the season, and no matter where Riva is, the sun seems to shine down, as if unaware of the suffering that those below it feel. Nature, then, can seem indifferent to human suffering. The redemptive springtime, across Sender’s story, begins to feel less like a message that promises hope and more like a symbol that characters like Riva must interpret as hopeful: they must make the sound of the birds and the smell of the grass into symbols for their hope, and inspiration for their courage.