This summer i’m going to be helping out at the local library with the young adult reading group so I thought I should read a bunch of young adult novels so that I knew what to recommend. Who am I kidding? I read a heap of young novels anyway it’s just that I know I have a better excuse for it. I saw Boy in the Striped Pyjamas last year at the movies and have been trying to read John Boyne’s book since but i’ve never quite gotten around to it. Then I found out about Morris Gleitzman’s “Once”, “Then” and “Now” trilogy and decided I wanted to read them first.
“Once” is set in 1942. It is the story of Felix a 9 year old Polish Jew. Felix’s parents were booksellers so he tells the story of his life as if it’s one of the tales he knows. His parents left him at the catholic orphanage with the nuns because they needed him to be safe. He begins the story optimistic after finding a whole carrot in his soup which he decides is a sign from his parents that they are coming for him so he leaves the orphanage to meet them. Outside he is confronted by the real world that includes soldiers who shoot at him, a 6 year old orphan named Zelda who he befriends after rescuing her from a burning building, books that are being burnt and not cherished as his parents would like and that Adolf Hitler is not the “great man” that the nuns taught him he was. Felix and Zelda end up in the Warsaw Ghetto where Felix finds people like him who tell stories of “death camps” and trains that go to them.
“Then” is a year later after Felix and Zelda escape the ghetto and the train to the death camp. They escape to the countryside where they find a sympathetic woman who shelters them on her farm. And “Now” is set in modern Australia about Felix’s granddaughter Zelda and shows how Felix grew up to fulfil his promise of “being the best human being he could be”. He is a retired surgeon and Zelda has come to stay for the summer while her parents are in Africa.
These three books are brilliant. Felix and Zelda (both original and junior versions) are vibrant, believable characters who face problems but keep looking for the best in the world. They grow through bad situations and are completely changed by them but the best of them remains. Even as a grandfather Felix tells stories and the little boy who escapes the orphanage is in him he’s just older and wiser now. Morris Gleitzman has stated that these books are fiction and “came from imagination” but his grandfather was a Polish Jew from Krakow who left Poland safely before the war... his extended family didn’t. So there is realism to his writing and a respect for the history and the characters he has created.
On the other hand “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” is about Bruno. Like Felix he is 9 unlike Felix he is the son of a German officer who works for “The Fury” and has just been sent to “Out-With”. After Felix who grew and learnt and lost his innocence Bruno is hard to take. He acts far younger than 9 and shows no understanding of the world. I get that kids can be sheltered but for a 9 year old German to not know “The Fuhrer” and not understand why Schmuel the young boy from “out-with” who he speaks to through the fence at the back of his new house isn’t allowed out to play with him just seems too much. At one stage the two boys compare the symbols that Schmuel wears on his arm to the one Bruno’s father wears. Schmuel explains he wears the star because he is a Jew which leads Bruno to wonder if he could be Jewish and why his father wears the spidery symbol instead. I see what John Boyne’s is trying to do and when the book ends it ends powerfully and horribly but it just doesn’t work for me. And i’m not sure if that’s because of reading it so soon after Gleitzman’s trilogy or if it would’ve been the same if I had read it first. Although I do remember Bruno bugging me with his ridiculous questions in the movie as well.
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