Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Devil’s Arithmetic, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory
Sacrifice
Jewish Culture and Identity
Hope
Summary
Analysis
A Nazi soldier comes into the sleeping barracks and orders everyone to go get food immediately. As Hannah is getting ready to go out, she notices Tzipporah, one of Yitzchak’s young children, lying still with a fly on her face. Hannah reaches out to rouse Tzipporah, but Gitl warns Hannah not to touch her, and Hannah realizes Tzipporah is dead.
Tzipporah is perhaps the first corpse that Hannah has seen up close, which explains her confusion at first. Flies are a common symbol of death, showing how after death, a person’s body belongs to nature. This passage shows how the most vulnerable, like the very young or old, were the first to die under the Nazis.
Themes
Hannah and Gitl are some of the last ones in the food line. A girl named Rivka gives them bowls and tells them they must always know where their bowl is, because they’ll need it for food, water, and washing, and there are no replacements.
The extreme importance of bowls shows just how few possessions the Jewish people had in the camps—and why they had to guard these possessions with careful, almost ritualistic diligence.
Themes
After the meal, the blokova lines up all the Jewish prisoners in a seemingly arbitrary order and slaps many of them. Hannah dodges her slap, but it hits Shifre. A Nazi officer named Mr. Unsward comes over to address the group. He tells them they will work hard and have discipline. As he talks, Hannah sees smoke in the distance coming out of a chimney. Hannah looks at Gitl, and Gitl gently touches her hand.
Hannah learns a hard truth of life in the concentration camp—that if she tries to avoid suffering herself, someone else will just suffer in her place. Moreover, the blokova doesn’t even seem to care that she missed with her slap, showing once again how anti-Semitism caused some to see the Jewish prisoners as interchangeable and disposable.
Themes
