The Forest of Vanishing Stars

Yona’s struggle to understand who she truly is remains a dominant theme in The Forest of Vanishing Stars. These questions are present from the story’s beginning as Jerusza kidnapping Yona unroots her, causing her to wonder about her identity, family ties, and faith. In response to her questions, Jerusza answers her “You are what you were born to be” (28), emphasizing the role of destiny in one’s identity. While Jerusza believes in a divine sort of destiny, Yona’s destiny manifests when she trusts her instincts and makes choices based on what she thinks is right. As such, identity is the sum of one’s choices rather than something preordained.

As Yona grows to adulthood, her questions persist and are only partially answered by Jerusza’s deathbed admission that she stole Yona from her German parents to save her for a greater destiny. When she meets Aleksander, he asks who she is, and she answers, “I wish I knew” (71), indicating a struggle to understand herself in her isolation. Nonetheless, her identity has been shaped by the survival skills that Jerusza, her surrogate mother figure, taught her, and she perpetuates this identity in the choices she makes. She could survive more easily on her own, but she chooses to help Aleksander’s group, seeing a greater purpose in helping others. When Aleksander struggles to reconcile her skills with her femininity, she does not shrink herself or pretend to know less than she does. She honors her identity by continuing to help others and lead, even though it means losing her lover. At the same time, her self-assuredness attracts Zus, who ends up being her life partner. With this, the book asserts that the choice to stay true to one’s self will ultimately attract the right community.

Throughout her stay with the group, Yona struggles to understand her connection to Judaism. She knows Jewish rituals and prepares a menorah for Hanukkah, but she still feels like an outsider in the group. Religion is as much a cultural identity as a faith, and raised in isolation, Yona doesn’t share the same experiences as this community. Nonetheless, she aligns herself with these Jewish refugees when confronted by her father, who uses her German name instead of her given Hebrew name and insists that she dress and act like a German woman in his house. While family can be an important source of identity for some, Yona rejects everything her father stands for, choosing to be Yona from the forest and not Inge from Berlin, whose real family is the survivors’ group. Not only is personal identity a product of one’s choices, but one can also choose the family and community that aligns with their principles.

While emphasizing Yona’s choices in shaping her identity, the novel hints that something greater is at play with the reveal that Yona’s mother was part Jewish. Combined with Jerusza’s premonitions about Yona’s destiny and Yona’s own spiritual attunement, this indicates that Yona’s destiny is to save these refugees and become part of their community. She realizes her destiny by killing her father, ending his campaign of antisemitic violence. The story’s final chapter reveals that Yona has made peace with herself, building a life in her beloved forest with Zus—“a proud Jewish hero who had discovered herself in the darkness” (356). In that way, she embodies Jerusza’s belief that she is exactly who she was born to be.