Incantation

“[Catalina and I] thought about our futures, how they twined around each other, as if we were two strands of a single braid of fate.”

The imagery of the twisting futures represents the friends’ core conflict. Both girls wish for the same future: a life with Andres and all the comfort, wealth, belonging that entails. However, this competition will separate them; they will be close, but never the same strand.

“His coat had caught on fire, but he no longer cried. I think he may have looked at me. I think I may have looked back.”

After his surrender, the rabbi and Estrella share this moment of connection, much as they share the same Jewish identity (although Estrella doesn’t know it). Her unwillingness to know this truth is evident in her hesitancy and unsureness; she uses words like “think” or “may” to avoid taking a side. This moment begins the book’s conversation around The Dangers of Silence and Bystanders.

“I’m not smart enough to learn anything, I had admitted.

You don’t learn such things, my mother had said. You feel them.”

In this book about truth, Estrella’s mother insists that people come to important realizations through emotion and intuition. This remark ultimately leads Estrella to learn the truth about her family and trust her intuition with Andres, as Abra’s confidence in her pushes Estrella to find her own identity.

“I often heard my grandfather say a prayer for my brother when he thought no one could hear, not like the ones we said in church; something special, for Luis alone.”

Estrella’s grandfather’s secret prayer shows his unwillingness to compromise his identity, foreshadowing his death after refusing to cooperate with the Inquisition. The passage also highlights the favoritism he shows Luis as opposed to Estrella—partly because Luis is a boy, but also because (unbeknownst to Estrella) Luis has a role to play in safeguarding their community.

“Stay away, my grandfather told our friends. You don’t fight a monster with sticks and stones.”

Although Estrella’s grandfather dismisses violence as the response to the persecution of Jewish people, he cannot offer a better one other than isolation. By advising everyone to “stay away,” he encourages them to simply avoid the problem; this highlights the temptation to stand by passively in instances of injustice.

“That’s the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.”

This idea of love as painful is important in a novel that tackles grief and memory. Abra argues that it is no better to ignore those things than it is to ignore love, but the use of a simile comparing love to something dangerous (a knife) matches the dark and ominous tone of the book and foreshadows later betrayals and losses.

“My grand-mother’s love was cold because she was afraid of things; that was why everything had to be perfect.”

This moment of empathy reveals why Estrella’s grandmother has kept her at a distance. Her grandmother equates safety with the appearance of perfection due to the stress of living in hiding. Estrella is able to recognize that her grandmother does love her but that circumstances have made that love “cold.” This contributes to the novel’s ultimate embrace of honesty, even in the face of danger.

“She and my mother looked at each other as though they knew each other well. Certainly, they both knew we lived in a time when anyone could become an outcast, suddenly and without notice.”

The author foreshadows Estrella’s discovery of her family’s secret by drawing this parallel between Abra and the Muslim doctor’s wife. Both women live under the same kinds of scrutiny and therefore feel seen in one another’s presence. Instead of responding to danger with fear, they share a look of recognition.

“Some Christians didn’t believe in the medicines [the Muslim doctor] used; all the same, when they were ill they often came to him for help.”

This shows that while Estrella’s family is not different for turning to the Muslim doctor, they are different in not hiding their support. The hypocrisy of the Christian neighbors foreshadows the way they will quickly turn on each other for their own advancement. The passage also establishes the doctor as a kind person who helps others no matter what they believe or how they may have wronged him in the past, foreshadowing the assistance he will later provide to Estrella.

“There was one beautiful plant we avoided; it had a red flower, similar to the one in the doctor’s wife’s garden, but if you touched this flower, blisters would form on your skin as though you were burning.”

Looks are very important in this novel, as appearances mean the difference between safety and danger. However, appearances can also be deceptive, as this flower looks beautiful but contains poison, prefiguring Catalina’s betrayal. Estrella recognizes what her mother is trying to teach her and is later able to avoid the literal burning of the Inquisition.

“Abra says Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.”

By balancing her grandfather’s dismissal of women with Abra’s assertion that women also have secrets and value, Estrella is able to find her own identity within tradition. While Estrella’s grandfather prepares her for her escape, it is her mother’s lesson that helps Estrella endure emotionally after the death of her family.

“When I narrowed my eyes and tried to see into my own future, all I could see was the white hot brightness of the sun.”

In this moment, leaving Andres after making him laugh, Estrella is unable to see her future. The imagery of the bright future is loaded with dangerous connotations around heat and fire. This foreshadows how her future relationship with Andres will figuratively blind her to the dangers Catalina poses to them and to Estrella’s family.

“It was Catalina. She was the reason my stomach hurt. I wasn’t quite as certain that I knew her down to her soul.

When it came right down to it, I wasn’t so sure she knew me either.”

The short, direct sentences that blame Catalina for Estrella’s unease are a mark of character development. Estrella has previously tended to question her own feelings. Placing the blame directly on Catalina shows how Estrella has grown. This growth parallels Estrella growing uncertainty of her own identity, which affects how honest she can be with Catalina.

“I wondered if Luis would always be leaving us, if even when he was walking beside me he would be somewhere else, divided between place and time, between the now and the soon to be.”

Estrella sees both Luis and their mother as people who look to the future. These two people are also the ones who take care of Estrella and assume responsibility for her, so Estrella worries that Luis’s forward-looking focus will come at her expense. The divide between Estrella and Luis also symbolizes the gap that has formed because of the family secret. Luis has been burdened with the responsibility of caring for his community going forward while Estrella only needs to live in the present.

“You can’t tame something that doesn’t wish to be tamed, any more than you can make someone love you. All you can do is wait and see what will happen.”

This exploration of free will applies to both love and obedience. While Estrella is fighting for independence from her friend Catalina in order to secure a future with Andres, she is also rebuking the secrecy that kept her from understanding her true identity: Her family counted on her passive acceptance of this state of affairs, which proves unsustainable.

“People will tell you it’s not there; you’re imagining things. But a book is a book. Pages are pages. Hawks are hawks. Doves are doves.

Hatred is always hatred.”

The repetition in this quote renders hatred a material thing, just as apparent and visible as the hawks, doves, and burning books that haunt Estrella’s memory. The hawk—a symbol of Catalina—poses a danger to doves, and this is now a danger that Estrella cannot be naive enough to ignore.

“It might have seemed like carnival except for the screaming, and the rising smoke, and the bitterness in the air.”

The lyricism of this line juxtaposes the brutality of what it describes. The long phrases linked together keep the reader in that extended moment. The author refers to multiple senses, employing auditory, visual, and olfactory imagery in order to fully capture the visceral experience.

“I tried to think about water in a bowl, about a river that is always moving and changing, about a garden that had ten gates, but all I could think of was him.”

The images Estrella calls upon are ones her mother has taught her to associate with the future; water in a bowl is a means of seeing things, a moving river can take one to new places, and the garden represents enlightenment. However, the only future Estrella can currently picture is Andres. This demonstrates that she places her devotion to him above what her family taught her.

“This will be different. It will start with one sorrow and then build into a thousand. There will be so many sorrows, they will be like stars in the sky.”

As Abra searches the future, she sees a fate that is already set. By metaphorically connecting sorrow to the stars, which are seemingly both infinite in number and eternal in duration, the author portrays the coming sadness to be both inevitable and enormous.

“She told them so easily, she might have been telling him the names of the pigs in her yard.”

When Catalina goes to the Inquisition, her disgust and apathy for Estrella’s family is evident not only in her “easy” lies but in the comparison: This monumental betrayal becomes something as casual as a list of animal names. The reference to pigs specifically recalls the dehumanizing slurs leveled at Jewish people. By pushing her to this point, the author demonstrates the destructive powers of Jealousy and the Appearance of Wealth.

“When I said I needed to see the Doctor, the boy shouted at me. We didn’t speak the same language; all we could do was shout at each other.”

As tensions rise in the village, this confrontation symbolizes the larger conflict. When people are presented with something they don’t understand, this impulse toward anger comes out. However, the lack of information cannot be overcome by brute force; it requires the intervention of the doctor, someone who can understand both sides, to resolve things.

“Other people were writhing and melting, but my brother stopped his flight long enough to look at me. An instant that would have to last forever. And then the flames rose higher and my brother was gone.”

Luis is able to pause in death and create a moment that will stay with Estrella, which Alice Hoffman illustrates through the motif of flight. Estrella’s determination to live is evident in her remark that this would “have” to last. Despite comparing death to something beautiful like flight, Estrella is determined not to join her brother and must therefore content herself with this last memory.

“Knowledge was the way of our people, and knowledge was dangerous.”

Here, the text demonstrates the logic of the Inquisition. Since Judaism is associated with knowledge, and knowledge is dangerous, the unspoken conclusion is that Jewish people are dangerous. Estrella clearly understands those oppressing her and their motivations for targeting her family.