Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Refugee, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Coming of Age
Injustice and Cruelty vs. Empathy and Social Responsibility
Hope vs. Despair
Family, Displacement, and Culture
Invisibility and the Refugee Experience
Summary
Analysis
The day of Josef’s bar mitzvah arrives—the day Josef will “leave his childhood behind and become a man, and he could hardly contain his excitement.” The social hall on the St. Louis has been converted to a synagogue, which will allow him to have his bar mitzvah. Aaron is extremely paranoid about the synagogue, worried that they will be targeted if they attend. He refuses to go.
Gratz continues to display the arc of Josef’s coming of age. With this Jewish ceremony, he becomes a man under religious law. But it is also notable that, as Josef goes on to states, he is becoming less and less reliant upon his father, suggesting that becoming independent from one’s parents is a crucial part of growing up.
Themes
Josef is upset that Aaron will not join for his bar mitzvah, but wonders if becoming a man means not relying on one’s father. At the synagogue, there are over a hundred people there for the service. Josef is amazed—he hasn’t been in a synagogue since Kristallnacht. Memories of the services flood back to him, and he is excited that he and the other passengers are reviving these traditions.
The rabbi asks Gustav Schroeder, the captain, to take down the portrait of Hitler in the social hall. Schroeder agrees, and it is removed. Josef notices a crew member on the balcony storm off as it is taken down. The rabbi then leads the service, and calls Josef up to recite the blessing he’s been practicing. Josef stumbles through the Hebrew words, but he is able to get through the ceremony. Josef is now a man. Many people congratulate him afterward, and Josef feels as though he is in a dream. As long as he can remember, he has wanted to be a man.
Gratz once again reiterates how much Josef has been looking forward to entering adulthood, though this attitude actually demonstrates that he still has a kind of naïveté about the idea of growing up. As Josef learns over the course of the book, being an adult is not simply a quality: it also bears responsibility and the burden of making difficult choices.
Themes
Later that day, Josef is walking the Promenade when Renata and Evelyne find him and tell him to stand guard while they latch all the stalls in the women’s bathroom from the inside and crawl out so no one can use them. Josef is unsure, but stands outside the bathroom and waits for them to return. After they have done so, Josef tells them to unlock the stalls. When they refuse, Josef recognizes that he has to be a responsible adult now, so he looks for a steward whom he can tell about the stalls.
Following Josef’s turning point into manhood, he starts to realize what this step means. Whereas before he was the one instigating pranks with the girls, now he feels that he should be more responsible. This is a small step in Josef’s arc toward adulthood, but the life-or-death nature of his journey thus far suggests that he will face much more serious tests of his manhood as the story progresses.
Themes
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When Josef sees two stewards talking, he approaches them. He overhears them saying that Captain Schroeder is trying to go as fast as possible because there are other ships that are trying to unload refugees in Cuba, and Cuba might then turn the St. Louis away. Josef is startled, wondering where they will go if they can’t get to Cuba.
Gratz starts to hint at the fact that the refugees may have put too much hope in getting to Cuba, as the two stewards imply that Cuba may not want to take as many Jewish refugees as it is receiving. But there is also a kind of injustice in this (as is true of countries mentioned in Isabel’s and Mahmoud’s stories), that a country would decide that some refugees should be allowed to enter while dooming others.
Themes
