Milkweed

Angel imagery is repeated throughout Milkweed. Misha sees his first angel in the form of a statue above a gravestone. The angel takes many forms throughout the novel but continues to represent the human soul and the possibility of continued existence after death. Initially, Uri tells Misha that angels are simply “something that Jackboots believe” (41). While it begins as a foreign object and is specifically Christian-facing, the boys slowly begin to impress their own hopes and beliefs on the image of the angel. Misha tells Uri, “I want to believe in angels. I think” (42). This small hope, this faith in something greater than himself, is magical to Misha. While Uri and Enos are unable to find it within themselves to believe, Misha continues to find the concept of angels interesting, and important. This is reinforced by Uri, who says to Misha, “When you’re nothing, you’re free to believe anything”(42). Misha’s search for something greater than himself, for something to believe in, is embodied by his belief in the angels. Misha finds miracles in the most mundane. For example, when Misha begins to realize that bodies in the ghetto regularly disappear off of the street, Misha’s first thought is simply “Angels” (69).

The boys are Misha’s primary sources on angels. The boys come to believe that an angel lives inside every person, and is freed upon death: “I believed I saw angels lurking behind the eyes of the living, waiting,” (130). The boys are constantly on the edge of survival and some of them hold onto the hope that there is something greater after death, some part of them that continues to survive. Thus, the angels represent a different kind of hope. They give shape to Misha’s faith and desperate wish for something better that exists beyond death, that a part of each person he has lost continues to live on. 

The cow is another embodiment of hope and survival in Spinelli’s Milkweed. The creature is also a physical manifestation of people’s hunger. When there is so little to be hopeful in, Misha has to find strength and joy in certain ideas and images. The cow starts as a rumor and slowly becomes a myth:

“[t]he cow had become something to believe in or not to believe in. Like angels. Mothers. Oranges. How could something as large as a cow live in the ghetto and not be seen? How could it survive? What would it eat? Rubble dust?” (90).

In the ghetto, the ordinary has become the impossible. Food is so scarce that Misha describes how the cow “seemed to materialize from the very hunger of the people, until one could almost see the animal loping down the street” (91). Even Doctor Korczak tells Misha to “find the cow” in a desperate bid to feed the orphans he cares for (90).

The cow is then set aflame by a Jackboot:

There it was, galloping across a balcony, a flaming, fiery cow, screaming while a Jackboot behind it laughed and the flame thrower retched more fire until the cow plunged through the railing and sailed through the air, flames flapping like wings to the ground (123).

The Jackboot sets the cow aflame in a grotesque attempt to further break the spirit of the people in the ghetto. By destroying the hopes of the people, there is a lesser chance of a revolt or rebellion. The starving people rush the burning cow, less desperate for hope than for sustenance, and “then [the cow] was mobbed” (179). The frantic grab for the cow turns Jew against Jew, and by setting a symbol of hope aflame and turning it loose, the Jackboots actualize a myth that provides optimism for those in the ghetto and then kill that myth.