The year is 1942, and Chaim and Gittel, Polish twins, are forced from their beautiful home and made to live in the Łódź Ghetto. Their family’s cramped quarters are awful, but when even those dire circumstances become too dangerous, their parents decide to make for the nearby Lagiewniki Forest, where partisan fighters are trying to shepherd Jews to freedom in Russia. The partisans take Chaim and Gittel, with promises that their parents will catch up—but soon, everything goes wrong. Their small band of fighters is caught and killed. Chaim, Gittel, and their two friends are left alive, only to be sent off to Sobanek concentration camp.
Chaim is quiet, a poet, and the twins often communicate through wordless exchanges of shared looks and their own invented sign language. But when they reach Sobanek, with its squalid conditions, rampant disease, and a building with a belching chimney that everyone is scared to so much as look at, the bond between Chaim and Gittel, once a source of strength, becomes a burden. For there is a doctor there looking to experiment on twins, and what he has in store for them is a horror they dare not imagine.
(Summary supplied by goodreads.com)
Review by ANNA WESTWIG
– А это вы можете описать? “And can you describe this?”
И я сказала: And I answered:
– Могу. -Anna Akhmatova “Yes, I can.” Transl. Yevgeny Bonver
These three lines of one of poet Anna Akhmatova’s most famous poems, “Реквием,” or “Requiem,” hold the heart of Mapping the Bones. Author Jane Yolen is concerned, first and foremost, with retelling: with retelling the Holocaust, retelling fairy tales, retelling a retelling. It is literally woven into the narrative, as the main character, Chaim, is largely mute, and restricts himself to using five or fewer words at a time. His twin sister Gittel, however, is restricted to narrating in flashbacks, as she recalls the events Chaim is describing in the present. He is a poet, though he hesitates to call himself such, and vows to “act as a living memory to the events here . . . to witness and then write about them. But because they were allowed no paper, no pencils, he had to remember each piece of writing whole. Not just a line here, a word there, but whole.”
The language is what shines through. It is masterfully crafted, every metaphor slotting into place as if it was meant to be. The characters, who are ardent lovers of language, themselves speak in metaphors, adding more depth to the book. The luscious writing style is a natural product of the characters and not an over-indulgence of the author. It doesn’t feel like purple-prose, no matter how many times a metaphor or a simile is used. There is one recurring comparison of people looking at them like “they were weaving their shrouds in their minds’” that has been hammering around in my head since I read it. And it’s certainly not an exception. Mapping the Bones is altogether phenomenally written.
There is a Hansel and Gretel association in the book that felt overwrought at times. It didn’t feel coherent; it felt like little snatches of something, throwaway lines that sent you back to the premise, but it didn’t feel like it added anything to the plot or the emotional journey. If I wasn’t looking for the references, they would have just seemed jarring and irrelevant. I would have enjoyed the book much better if it didn’t have the Hansel and Gretel element and just stuck with its plot, even if that plot followed the archetype of the story. There was an obvious attempt to link the witch in Hansel and Gretel with the fictional apprentice of Dr. Josef Mengele, but it didn’t quite work. The disparity in monstrousness between the two villains felt too great. Often times, fairy-tale associations can serve to add resonance to something so horrible it’s hard to look straight at. This association seemed only to cheapen in it. Calling the concentration camp a “house of candy” didn’t resonate; it felt fake, even saccharine.
This aspect worked at its best when it wasn’t referenced. At one point, Bruno, the loud-mouthed son of the family Chaim and Gittel took with them, tosses rocks behind a wagon. If thought about, this is a clear reference to Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of pebbles. But it reveals another confusing disparity. While the three major sections of the book follow the three major story segments of Hansel and Gretel, the plot arcs weren’t the same. Chaim and Gittel never follow a trail of stones through the woods to find their way back home. That’s the peak of the story—the part of Hansel and Gretel that is most remembered.
Though this is a book of two characters, it could have done with only one. Chaim’s voice eclipses his sister’s because she speaks only in flashbacks. Though I appreciated what Yolen was attempting, it just didn’t work for me. Gittel often felt like nothing more than a vehicle for backstory, and the way her character in Chaim’s eyes and her own voice clashed was too much for me to handle.
Despite all the criticisms I have of the book, this is an emotional, beautifully-written work that sheds light on the Holocaust without feeling like it indulges in the tragedy of it. Too often, authors use the Holocaust and similar atrocities as vehicles for their emotion, which quickly becomes repulsive. Yolen has not fallen into that trap. She does not use it as a backdrop. And she does not attempt to encapsulate all of the Holocaust but to retell two twins’ part in it. And she succeeds. Chaim and Gittel will stay with me for a long while yet.
Review by ADOWYN ERNSTE
At its core, Mapping the Bones shines a light on the monumental sacrifice and strength of living through the horrific events of ghettos and labor camps. In its greatest moments, the novel portrays a vivid and detailed image of this time in history. Through the voices of twins Chaim and Gittel, the reader experiences the frozen bodies of dead children on the street and the heartbreaking loss of loved ones, as well as the charity and kindness of family and strangers. Although the twins’ parents constantly make sacrifices and reassurance, they cannot entirely mask the inevitable horrors that await the family. As the characters struggle to reach safety and cope with their world falling away around them, the reader, too, struggles to comprehend that these appalling and seemingly-impossible experiences are based off of real history.
Jane Yolen masterfully allows readers to see the raw and uncensored horrors of the Holocaust. However, Mapping the Bones is not without pitfalls. Many of the characters, especially Sophie Norsenburg, sister of Bruno, were somewhat lacking in personality. At times, the characters were simply going through the actions and not so much reacting to events in the novel. To some extent, this could be attributed to living through a year in the Ghetto, where the only way to survive was to put one foot in front of the other. As Gittel later recounted, “To die was easy. To live was harder” (87). Nonetheless, the devastating experiences of the children were rarely reflected with grief, fear, or even later recollection of what had happened. When Mrs. Norsenburg was shot to death by the Nazis in order to save her children, the immediate reaction was reassurance by the other adults that she had been a hero for her sacrifice—that was all. Even later, there were very few tears or even any recollection of this traumatic event. The children’s similarly minimal reactions throughout the book were not only somewhat unrealistic, but they also took away from the overall horror of the events themselves.
On the contrary, Gittel’s journal, written many years after the events in the novel often provides deep insight and occasionally even contrasts the horrific experiences progressing in the novel to memories of a carefree past. Along with Chaim’s poems, these descriptive and prose-like sections of the book allow the characters’ thoughts and reflections to shine through.
However, there are some occasions in which Yolen’s use of prose is misplaced or out of context. For example, Gittel’s line: “Remember, the morning is wiser than the evening” (245) was an unnecessary way of saying, “We’ll decide what to do tomorrow morning.” While this line finds its origins in the Russian fairy tales that inspired the novel’s progression of events and storyline, Gittel’s words still come across as too subtle of a reference to provide a deep connection.
On the other hand, Chaim’s poetic inclinations create his personality and voice as a character. Throughout the novel, his poems stand as touching sentiments and even words of strength to survive through the darkest of times. In many instances, the characters’ intense feelings about the darkness and innocence of humankind and are able to shine through through the words of this insightful and thoughtful character. Despite the problems the book may have, Yolen’s language portrays an intense and haunting feeling that stays with you long after you put the book down.