Journal 6

Allison Rood
Topics In Literature
6/28/2010

To Simon, Eli represents many different aspects of his mentality. Eli is a dark haired Jewish child from the Ghetto that is used to being inquisitive, and sometimes gets into trouble for doing so. In seeing Eli alive at the gates of the Ghetto, Simon finds this as a reassurance of hope that another generation of Jews will survive.

Eli even survived some of the trickery of the Nazi regime. In the Ghetto, to clear the Jewish youth, the Nazis created a plan to create a school for the children, supported by a Jewish committee. Parents were encouraged to allow their students to gain a quality education, thinking they were fortunate enough to provide them with such a terrific opportunity. However the day the school opened, while the parents were working, the children were whisked away and were never to be seen again. When the parents went to retrieve their children and found an empty schoolhouse they knew they were had. Somehow Eli knew not to go to school and stayed home, perhaps having some sort of intuition that there was no such thing as a great opportunity during the time of the Holocaust. Eli was perhaps wise beyond his years, though it was never known what ever happened to him.

Eli also is the personal representation of every Jewish child to Simon. For example when Karl, the SS soldier, described the scene in which a house was packed full of Jews and set ablaze. A family tried to escape, a man, woman, and child. To Simon, that child was Eli. Eli became almost his go-to face in picturing the innocent faces of the Jewish youth. Simon’s dreams of the terrible tragedy as dictated to him by Karl always contained Eli’s face. It haunted him in his dreams as the death of the future of the Jewish race, in addition to purely being the death of the little Jewish boy that he knew. Eli became more of a symbol than a human being in this reading after learning of the Nazi actions in that house that went up in flames. It is interesting to see the shift between person and idea in terms of Eli’s character.