Refugee

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-11

Chapters 12-21

Chapters 22-32

Chapters 33-43

Chapters 44-53

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Quiz

Themes

The Journey to a Better Life

Content warning: This novel discusses the Holocaust, war, and violent war crimes.

Although Refugee presents each child’s individual story, one general theme cuts across all three storylines. Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud each undertake a journey toward a better life because all three children have suffered disruption in their homelands. Constructing this theme across disparate storylines suggests that the desire for a better life binds humanity together.

In following their separate migrations, Gratz also suggests that the concept of a safe haven isn’t dependent on geography. Places perceived as secure during one historic period become places to avoid during another time. Josef flees Germany for Cuba because Cuba is both stable and safe during the 1930s. Ironically, Isabel flees Josef’s promised land of Cuba to seek refuge in America because Castro’s leadership has made that same country perilous in the 1990s. Mahmoud’s flight from Syria to Germany in 2015 is equally ironic: Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s would have been a hostile place for Arab people.

According to Refugee, the journey to a better life depends less on geographic safe havens than on the universal determination of the people making the trip. All three children exploit every meager resource at their command to accomplish that goal. Josef controls his father’s psychosis long enough to pass a quarantine inspection. Isabel trades her beloved trumpet to buy the necessary gasoline for her family’s boat trip to Miami. Mahmoud breaks through his own fear of scrutiny by leading a freedom march to Germany.

Notably, this determination also extends beyond individual self-interest. In each storyline, the characters wish to see their loved ones secure a better existence as well. It is relatively common for literature and culture at large to emphasize the sacrifices parents will make for their children’s futures, but Refugee shows that this impulse is not simply generational. For instance, both Mahmoud and Josef make difficult choices to ensure their sisters’ safety. Gratz uses their different stories to suggest that all people, however different, will do what they can for a better life for themselves and their families when faced with danger.

Coming of Age in a Humanitarian Crisis

All three protagonists in Refugee are children on the cusp of coming of age. Gratz suggests that humanitarian crises force children to grow up too quickly and face the circumstances in which they find themselves. However, as the protagonists’ political contexts threaten to eclipse their sense of identity as well as physical safety, Gratz also suggests that coming of age during a humanitarian crisis involves realizing that one matters and has the right to exercise agency.

Josef is overtly preoccupied with coming of age. He is 12 when his father is taken away to Dachau. Josef blusters to the Brownshirts that he’ll be a man in six months, though they warn him not to be in such a hurry to grow up. Their prediction proves prophetic because Josef is forced to shoulder adult responsibilities almost immediately after his father is abducted. The family’s reunion aboard the MS St. Louis proves to Josef just how little he can depend on his father for protection or guidance. Landau returns a broken man, hiding in his cabin, forever fearful of being thrown back into a camp. Josef’s bar mitzvah, which officially marks one’s coming of age in Judaism, takes place aboard ship, and his paranoid father refuses to attend. The ceremony changes Josef’s perception of himself and his role within his family. When his former playmates mock his new grown-up attitude, Josef thinks, “[a] bar mitzvah alone didn’t make him an adult. Being responsible did” (79). It soon becomes clear that Josef is the only responsible adult left in his family. Josef’s story illustrates the struggle of a boy trying to be a man because there’s no one left in his family to fill that role. At the end of his journey, Josef becomes the man that Hebrew tradition claims he is when he sacrifices his own life so that his sister, Ruthie, can live.

Mahmoud is initially more reluctant to grow up. Threatened by a volatile political climate in Syria, he fears being seen. He keeps his head down and blends in. Over the course of his journey, Mahmoud frequently expresses a desire to remain invisible even when circumstances don’t allow it. His family is initially able to blend in during an eight-hour walk to the Turkish border among a large group of Syrian refugees. Later, when his family is caught sleeping in a shop doorway, Mahmoud does his best to shrink into the wall to avoid being noticed.

Mahmoud begins to recognize the downside of invisibility during his family’s trip to Greece in a rubber dinghy. As an invisible speck on a black sea, he could be swallowed by the ocean, and no one would know that he was gone. He curses his invisibility because it prevents him from being seen by a rescue boat: “All his life he’d practiced being hidden. Unnoticed. Now, at last, when he most needed to be seen, he was truly invisible” (192). Mahmoud’s coming of age is evident when he sheds his invisibility to solicit help. He deliberately draws the attention of a UN inspector and, in doing so, successfully leads a group of refugees to freedom in Germany. He therefore becomes an active and visible agent in his story.

Isabel also learns to express her identity when the political climate threatens to swallow her. When her family contemplates migrating to Miami, Isabel’s grandfather frets that she will lose what it means to be Cuban. Because Isabel is a musician, the core of her identity as a Cuban is expressed in her ability to count clave. Isabel fears that her inability to feel the hidden rhythm in Cuban music will become permanent once she leaves her native country for good.

Isabel is not only disconnected from the rhythm of Cuba, but she also becomes disconnected from music itself when she trades her precious trumpet for enough gasoline to make the trip. Isabel’s life lesson over the course of her journey is to realize that identity dwells in the heart and that her sense of identity matters. When she plays her new trumpet in Miami, “[h]er foot tapped in time with the hidden cadence, and she realized with a thrill that she was finally hearing it. She was finally counting clave” (308). Isabel expresses the spirit of Havana in a Miami classroom.

Moral Duty to Help Others

In each plotline of Refugee, the protagonists encounter heroic figures who are willing to do the right thing, even at personal cost, and they also encounter people who refuse to help or even purposefully hinder, often for personal gain. The novel suggests that people have a moral duty to help others, and failing to do this can cost one later in life.

Several characters and institutions or nations in the text fail in their moral duty to help, and they are the antagonistic forces in the text. The US surfaces in each plotline as a nation that does not do enough to help refugees: It refuses the passengers on MS St. Louis, it picks up Cuban refugees via the coast guard and detains them, and it intervenes in political affairs in Syria, which perpetuates the violence and confusion of the Civil War. While the political dictators causing the crises in the text are German, Cuban, and Syrian, Gratz suggests that the US has failed in its moral duty to mitigate and help in these crises. Minor characters act as microcosms for this international failure to help, and bullies become a motif in the text. For example, a taxi driver in Mahmoud’s storyline steals from Mahmoud’s family for personal gain. This provides a narrative window into the individualistic mentality that, as the text suggests, leads to nations not helping refugees.

In contrast, some characters help refugees because they have learned from experience the moral imperative to help others. Mahmoud and his family are helped by a former Syrian refugee when he flags down a car in Turkey, suggesting that experiencing hardship teaches people that they must help others in need. Mahmoud’s experience is reflected by Ruth, Josef’s sister, who takes in Mahmoud because she knows how it feels to be a refugee. Isabel’s grandfather experiences this in reverse; while in Josef’s storyline he does not help the Jewish refugees, when he becomes a refugee himself, he realizes that he failed in his moral duty to help. He fears being denied asylum because he himself enacted these policies. This storyline contains the message that if people learn their lesson about moral duty before they experience hardship, they may prevent hardship from befalling others or themselves in the future.

That said, there are several instances in the text of characters helping refugees despite having no personal connection to their plight. In Josef’s plotline, the captain of the ship advocates for his passengers and refuses to send them back to Germany, representing some hope amid evil. In Isabel’s plotline, people in the Bahamas bring food, water, and medicine to the rafters when they briefly stop there. This is similar to Mahmoud’s storyline, in which he and his fellow migrants are welcomed by people in Austria. While these figures are more secondary in the novel than the captain, they paint a broader picture of people who realize that they have a moral duty to help those in need. In these latter two storylines, Gratz suggests that helping need not be a profound act of heroism such as sailing a ship across the Atlantic, but that people should do what they can.