The Cage

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

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Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary

Chapter 5 begins a month later, when the Jewish section is officially called a “ghetto” and the gates are “shut tight” (25). With machinery and other resources removed, the people of the ghetto begin to suffer, and Riva and her family march to the Judenrat, the Jewish government appointed by the Nazis, to demand change. Though “kitchens to supply soup and bread, hospitals, schools, factories” come as a result of this protest, they do not last long (26).

Riva’s little brother, Laibele, contracts tuberculosis and must stay in bed all day. The doctor’s prescriptions for fresh air and good nutrition are impossible, and his isolation further diminishes his hope. Riva tries to encourage him and sits by his bed to “tell him what is happening in our barbed-wire cage, what life is like outside his room, at the shop, at our secret study groups” (28). She tries to believe in her own encouraging words: “This day will come, my darling brother. You’ll see, you’ll see. We’ll walk out of this cage, free to build a new life, a new world. No more hunger. Freedom, happiness. A world of brotherhood. A world of love and peace” (29).However, at work, where she and her mother sew coats for German soldiers, she seems less certain.

Working at the shop fills Riva with rage, and, while her mother cries quietly, thinking of Laibele’s impending death, Riva feels “a small voice trying to get out and shout to all those tired souls around me, Look at us, look at us. Look at what we are sewing: coats for Germans to wear at the front, to keep them warm so they stay healthy and kill, kill, kill!” (27). In the room around her, she sees “human skeletons bending over their machines” (29) and hears “the shrieking and crying of the sewing machines” (30). Descriptions of death surround her, until, one day, a young man dies on the floor, coughing up blood from his deteriorating lungs. The body is taken away, but the stain that his blood leaves behind speaks to Riva, saying “This is what is waiting for you. For your mother. For your brothers” (30). She runs to her mother for comfort, but the moment ends quickly, as the machines and their cries start up again.

Chapter 6 Summary

Laibele’s deterioration continues for years, and Sender picks up the story in September 1942, when Nazis enter into the ghetto to remove “the sick, the old, and the children” (31). Sender/Riva calls them “messengers of death” as they enter homes and quickly force families to flee into the street (31). Sensing their imminent arrival, Riva’s mother asks the children to move Laibele down into the cellar, with blankets and pillows. Once he is safely hidden, Riva asks her mother to go into hiding with Laibele, because her exhaustion and sadness is visible; as she asks, though, the Germans show up and order the family out of the apartment.

On the street, where the Nazis separate the families into different groups, removing the weak and sick from everyone else, a Nazi questions Riva’s mother. Preoccupied with Laibele (Riva notices her mother looking up at the apartment), her mother hands the inspecting Nazi her labor card. She is visibly weak, and her “lovely, gentle face has lost all trace of liveliness. Her pretty blue eyes are red and swollen from sleepless nights and endless tears; her dark hair is woven with gray now” (32). Her mother’s pain makes Riva “want to scream, scream, scream” (32). The Nazi pushes her into the other line, saying, “You can’t work; you are sick. Left!” (33). Riva’s mother is loaded onto a wagon. Riva’s older brother, Motele, tries to persuade her to jump into his arms, but soldiers pull her down, and the wagon drives away. Though the siblings are shocked, Riva’s younger brother, Moishele, reminds them both that Laibele lingers in the apartment, and they return to the space to find that he remains undiscovered.

Though they try to comfort Laibele, they must tell him that his mother is gone. As he cries in Riva’s arms, she sees that she is “no longer a sixteen-year-old girl” but “a mother now” (34). The siblings stay inside, together, for days, though the weather outside is beautiful, and, as she sees it through the window, Riva asks herself, “How can the sun still shine?” (34).

Chapter 7 Summary

After they lose their mother, Riva, Motele, and Moishele rearrange their lives to better care for Laibele. Riva gets a job that she can do from home, making braids from fabric scraps that will later become rugs for the Germans. But Laibele’s health continues to deteriorate. At the same time, Riva’s gallstones, the pain of which she could manage when her mother was at home, worsen, though she tries to hide the pain and the swelling in her legs. One day, she falls when she attempts to stand up out of bed.

Mrs. Avner and her son-in-law, Moishe, both try to stop in to help, but the family mostly still subsides on their love for one another and the two soup rations that Motele and Moishele bring home from their work in factories. Riva grows weaker, and Laibele tries to convince her to eat some of his portion of their food, but her maternal instinct persists, and she refuses.

One day, Motele and Moishele surprise Riva with a tangerine that they buy, using their bread, on the black market. The move is impractical, and Riva feels that she should be mad, yet she sees them as her “miracle. Their devotion is the greatest wonder in this cage” (37). Knowing that she needs fruit and healthy food to heal, they try to convince her to eat the whole tangerine, but she insists that the entire family share. As they split the fruit, Riva reflects that her heart is “bursting with love for those three beautiful kids, my kids,” and this pulse of love solidifies her will to survive (38). The chapter ends with her incantation: “I must get well. I must get well” (38).

Chapters 5-7 Analysis

The motif of the cage builds in these chapters, as the walls of the ghetto squeeze more and more tightly around Riva’s family. Repeatedly, Riva expresses a desire to scream, to resist, or to make noise in response to the outrage of the killing, overwork, family separation, and sickness that surrounds her. Yet in the cage, she is consistently unable to put up this fight. Sender fills these moments (when the young man dies in the sewing shop, when Riva’s mother is taken away) with little dialogue, a silence that contrasts with Riva’s intense internal noise. Riva thus occupies a cage, in the ghetto, but she also is a cage, a vessel full of ideas and spirit that cannot be free.

The contrasting, paradoxical beauty of the weather outside highlights the idea of the cage. After their mother is taken, when all four siblings remain at home, Riva notices the beautiful blue skies outside, and she wonders how the sun can continue to shine outside of their home. The nature that, in the early springtime of the text, seemed to raise spirits and inspire excitement, now seems to mock those who try to survive in the ghetto. The circumstance of the Jews in the Lodz ghetto is unnatural and disconnected to the natural cycles of weather and emotion; the walls of their cage separate them from the world as it should be.

By assuming the maternal role in in these chapters, Riva works as much as she can to regain a sense of natural order and normalcy. Riva calls constantly upon the inspiration of her mother’s courage and fairness, even though her “motherhood” is adoptive and she is still a child herself. Many of their family disagreements and conversations surround the sharing of food, which is an important link between people throughout the text. Part of Mrs. Gruber’s initial intimacy with Riva’s mother was the older woman’s insistence that Riva’s mother have enough matzos for the Passover; food, in an ordered world, is part of community. Riva and her siblings sustain a desire to share their food, even when it is insufficient, and they make sacrifices for one another (or, at least, they try to) out of a sense of loyalty.