The Cage

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 1986

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Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

The Cage opens with a poem, written by Sender/Riva at Camp Mittelsteine, a labor camp in Germany, on January 19, 1945. It is translated by Ruth Minsky Sender (who is Minska) in New York City in 1980. The poem details the difficulty of speaking from within a cage and the desire to soar like a bird to share ideas with the world outside of “the barbed wire.”

At the opening of Chapter 1, descriptions of smell, sound, and touch contribute to narrator Riva’s deep “calm and happy” (3). The first-person narrator’s references to her nightmares of Nazi torture, in the following paragraphs, disrupt this sense of calm; a full night’s sleep “happens so very, very seldom” (3). Toggling back and forth between the night’s terror and day’s calm, the narrator introduces her reader to the idea that her “yesterdays” can come “back again,” that “they become today” each night (3).

In the first chapter of The Cage, the narrator seeks hope in the vision of her children, who, in her dreams, are Nazi targets, but who, in the present, represent the future generation of Jews, “the new link in an old chain,” that the Nazis sought to erase (4). On such beautiful spring days, the “nightmares seem unreal,” and the narrator’s daughter, Nancy, who plays in the yard, seems to suggest that “new life is growing” all around, “sprouting again from the earth that was cold and frozen all winter” (5). But when Nancy asks her mother why the Nazis killed her grandparents, Riva must explain that dark past in the sunny present. She tells her daughter: “The Nazis were evil. They wanted the world only for themselves” (5).

Nancy’s question echoes in the narrator’s mind as the chapter ends: “Why? Why? Why did they let them do it?” (6). Riva remembers her own mother’s claim that “A world full of people will not be silent. We will not perish in vain,” and then she hears her daughter echo the sentiment, remarking that “it could not happen here. Our neighbors, our friends, they would help” (6). At the end of the chapter, the narrator’s present folds into the past, and “it is 1939 again” (6).

Chapter 1 Analysis

Haunted by the terror of the Nazis, the narrator’s experience of the present is inextricably linked to her memories from the past, as the uncontrollable and recurring nightmares threaten the calm hope of the present. For the narrator, the springtime and her daughter’s innocence are extensions of this hope. But the facts of the past disrupt her hopefulness.

Motherhood and relationships across generations are important for the narrator. As she hears her daughter wonder why her grandparents were killed at the hands of Nazis, the narrator also hears her mother’s decisive belief that the Nazis would be stopped. The trauma of Nazi violence, which Sender experiences anew through her recurrent nightmares, prevents her from projecting hope of solidarity. The confidence that seems inspiring, in her mother’s words, now sounds naive when her daughter repeats it in childish words.

Nightmares are both a vehicle for Sender to insert the past into the present and a means of depicting the aftereffects of trauma. Nancy, Sender’s daughter, appears in the nightmares, which visually imagine the possibility that such traumas could repeat and take the next generation as their victims. As the narrator relives her past experiences, she develops a concern that the past will repeat itself. This image from her nightmares bleeds into a present sadness that darkens the edges of the most hopeful spring day.