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
Hannah thinks Grandpa Will played a trick on her with the door, or perhaps that the wine is making her hallucinate. But when she looks around, she realizes that she’s no longer in the apartment and is in a new room that feels like a movie set in the past. A woman with a heavy accent (Gitl) calls Hannah “Chaya.”
This novel is a time slip story, meaning that time travel occurs without ever being fully explained (i.e., not with a time machine). Although this adds an element of fantasy to the story, the rest of the novel is strongly inspired by real historical events, even though the characters themselves are fictional. The time slip becomes a way for both Hannah and the audience to have a more visceral connection to the past, emphasizing how the past is not as distant from the present as it might seem to Hannah and to contemporary readers.
Themes
Hannah doesn’t understand what’s happening but decides to play along. She helps Gitl set the table. Hannah remembers that Chaya is her Hebrew name, which she received in memory of Aunt Eva’s dead friend. A man that Hannah doesn’t recognize calls himself Uncle Shmuel, and he comes over to hug Hannah. Gitl teases Uncle Shmuel, her brother, about how he doesn’t bathe often enough.
The names of the people Hannah meets suggest that they are Jewish and from a previous era. Although Hannah is in a potentially scary situation, the friendly teasing between Gitl and Shmuel helps to reassure Hannah that they don’t mean her any harm.
Themes
Hannah still remembers her old life, including her mother and father, but somehow, she also feels like Chaya. She realizes that Gitl and Shmuel are actually speaking in Yiddish, but somehow, she can understand them.
Again, the novel deliberately avoids defining the mechanics of how Hannah arrived in the past, showing once again how despite containing elements of fantasy or science fiction (like Hannah’s unexplained, almost magical ability to understand Yiddish), the genre of the book is ultimately closer to historical fiction. Rather than traveling through time, Hannah seems to be traveling through memory to a time and place that is foreign to her—but which might be familiar to her oldest relatives.
Themes
At dinner, Hannah is quiet and tries to understand her new situation. When Hannah goes to bed, she asks Gitl about her mother and father, but Gitl just comforts her, saying that she and Shmuel are taking care of her now.
In the present day, Hannah’s mother was always there to protect her, like when she thought Hannah wasn’t ready to have wine. Now that she’s separated from her parents, Hannah has to learn to make her own decisions.
Themes
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