The Devil's Arithmetic Analysis

The Devil’s Arithmetic is a book about a girl named Hannah Stern who finds herself thrown back to 1942, during the holocaust. She learns what it was like when her aunt and grandfather, as they too were in the camps. If you want to teach children about humanity’s single greatest atrocity, then The Devil’s Arithmetic is the best book for you to teach.

The book The Devil’s Arithmetic, published in 1988 by Jane Yolen, a jewish author, begins when Hannah Stern, a jewish girl and her family are driving to passover to celebrate with their relatives. Hannah speaks to her family that she’s tired of remembering. When they get to her relative’s apartment, her Grandpa Will is shouting angrily at the TV, because it is showing a news broadcast on the holocaust, in which he and his sister, Aunt Eva, were part of. Later, at passover, they read the seder. Then Aaron, Hannah’s younger brother, says that Hannah should open the door for the prophet Elijah. When she opens the door, she finds she is no longer in her

relative’s apartment, she is on a farm. She sees a man working outdoors singing: “Who asked you to be buried alive? You know no one told you to. You took on this madness yourself.” She is called by people around her Chaya, the hebrew name given to her in honor of her Aunt’s dead friend. She also learns that Shmuel and Gitl are her relatives, and Shmuel is getting married the next day. The next day, Hannah meets her future aunt, Fayge, and four girls, Rachel, Shifre, Esther, and Yente. She tells all four of them stories that she has learned. As they approach the synagogue for the wedding, black cars pull up and men in uniforms step out. The men give orders to get in trucks, and then it hits her: these men are Nazis. They take them to the camp, and all of the prisoners have their heads shaved, arms tattooed, and pick their clothes, they learn the rules from a girl named Rivka. Everyday the nazis slaughter the jews. Then an escape is attempted, they fugitives are captured and killed. One day while, Hannah and some of her friends are working, a guard comes and tells them that if they aren’t working, they will die. Hannah takes Rivka’s place to the gas chambers, and as they enter, Hannah wakes up and finds herself home. Aunt Eva tells her about the holocaust.The film The Devil’s Arithmetic(1999) has a summary very similar to the book, except that Hannah is a teenager with her friends, Rivka is her cousin, and the director shows her die with other women in the gas chambers. Grandpa Will is changed to Uncle Abe. They also have a passover celebration in the camps, and the Nazi’s brutality is shown with a scene that they wouldn’t let newborns live.

As I said earlier, the plot of both stories is very similar.

In both genres, Hannah still goes back in time and experiences life in the camps. Aunt Eva is still the same person. The theme in both is about remembering what had happened. Jane Yolen and the director of the film are both jewish. They both want us to remember that the atrocity of the holocaust was real and something that should be studied so we will not make the mistake of prosecuting a person because of their religion again.

The two genres of Devil’s Arithmetic are very different. Several of the characters, such as Gitl, Yitzchak and his children, and Fayge weren’t in the film. Well Fayge was, she just had a different name. Grandpa Will’s name was also changed to Uncle Abe. The angel of death is mentioned in the book, but not in the film. The wedding ceremony occurred in the film, but not the film. In the book, Hannah wakes up as they enter the gas chambers. In the film, it shows them die in the

chambers.

As I said earlier, if you want to teach children about humanity’s single greatest atrocity, then The Devil’s Arithmetic is the best book for you to teach. We want our children to not make a huge mistake and commit this horrific genocide known as the holocaust again. The only way to keep this from happening is to teach the book. I would recommend the book more because the settings and the characters are described with great detail. I liked the book better because books tend to be more descriptive than films are. I would recommend the book to people who think the holocaust was fake. Yes, their are people like this. I would do this to show them that yes, this did happen. As a wise man once said, “If we don’t teach our world’s history, then we are bound to repeat it.”