Once

Dodie (whose real name is “Dodek”) is an orphan who befriends Felix Salinger at Mother Minka’s Catholic orphanage and enjoys Felix’s inventive stories. The novel suggests that Dodie may have problematic violent tendencies: he wants to be a “pig-slaughterer” when he grows up, and Felix once witnessed him removing the legs from an insect. Yet Dodie may be violent only because he doesn’t understand the consequences of his actions: after he removed the insect’s legs, he tried to put them back on again. Moreover, Dodie tries to be kind to other children. For example, when bullies at the orphanage target the new boy, Jankiel, Dodie defends Jankiel. Though there’s a long history of violent antisemitism in Poland, Dodie doesn’t really understand what being Jewish means when Felix reveals that he’s Jewish and planning to escape the orphanage—he only tells Felix that he’ll miss him. Dodie’s innocent friendship with Felix implies that antisemitism is a dehumanizing prejudice that children have to be taught—it isn’t something they naturally feel or believe.