Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Milkweed, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Relationships
War, Dehumanization, and Innocence
Ingenuity, Resilience, and Survival
Family
Summary
Analysis
Misha is uncomfortable with Janina coming along on his smuggling run, but he can’t stop her from following him. He heads off through the city, which is alive with bright colors and cheerful sounds, in contrast to the grayness of the ghetto. He does his best to act invisible, as Uri taught him. He goes to his favorite place, a Jackboot hotel. Around back, Misha pushes open one of the windows and squeezes through headfirst. Janina tumbles down behind him.
Misha is used to straddling different worlds—his family of orphans and the Milgrom family, for example, and the ghetto and the city. Now, Janina inserts himself into the midst of his smuggling life outside the ghetto, forcing Misha to consider her safety as well as his own.
Themes
Misha starts making his usual rounds of the hotel’s food cellar, filling a sack with things like vegetables, bread, and dried fish, and finishing by treating himself to a canned peach. When he refuses to share with Janina, she starts screaming, so he hastily shoves a peach in her mouth. However, her screams were enough to alert someone upstairs—the cellar door opens, and someone calls, “Hello?” At last, the person leaves, and Misha and Janina squeeze back through the window.
Janina’s presence makes Misha’s smuggling routine much more difficult—she doesn’t have a sense of the risks involved and isn’t used to having to act invisible. Misha has to summon all his resourcefulness to keep the two of them safe.
Themes
Back in the ghetto, Misha heads to Doctor Korczak’s orphanage as usual—he always dumps half the food through an open window. Janina protests that Misha is supposed to feed her family, but Misha tells her that he feeds who he wants to feed. Then, he heads home.
Janina has only seen Misha as a provider for her family and feels possessive of him in this regard. Misha resents her intrusion in his work, perhaps because it causes different worlds to collide even more.
Themes
