A Boy Without a Name

By JUDY CHERNAK

 

MILKWEED
By Jerry Spinelli
224 pages. Knopf. $15.95.
Ages 10 and up.

The milkweed pods burst, spewing fluffy angels into the air. Angels are something the boy can believe in—he saw a stone statue of one in the cemetery. Everyone has an angel; it drifts up out of your body when you die, just like the milkweed fluff. And mothers—everyone has one of those, too, even though he can’t remember his own. He can’t remember if he has a name, either.

In Newbery medalist Jerry Spinelli’s new book, we are introduced to the horrors of the World War II German occupation of Warsaw as Jews and other “enemies” are hounded from their homes and schools, herded into a walled ghetto, forced into starvation and slavery, and finally rounded up into trains for extermination.

Who is the protagonist, this child of the streets? Whatever he is called by others: Jew, Gypsy, filthy son of Abraham, runt, and most commonly, Stopthief. He’s small and very fast and has never been caught. Which is good because he’s usually running away with bread he’s just stolen out of the white-gloved hands of a fox-furred rich lady, or maybe with chocolates from a store shelf—sometimes he can find his favorite hazelnut cream in the box. He’s always alone, until the day he snatches a loaf a split second before a red-haired boy, who drags him away and teaches him about Jackboots, bombs, guns, and being invisible. Uri introduces him to the other boys at their hideaway, warns him to stay away from the Nazis even though their hats have silver ornaments, their boots shine like the stars, and they are never hungry. Uri constructs a name and a Gypsy history for the boy, who lives only to steal food and run for survival. Until he meets Janina, who is smaller than he and lives in a house and wears a red bow in her hair and has shiny shoes like the Jackboots. Janina has birthday parties and is never hungry, although she’s not a Jackboot. And she’s not dirty, although she is a Jew. She leaves him presents on the back steps in exchange for the contraband he leaves as gifts for her. She, too, becomes his family, like the red-haired boy and his friends. And Dr. Korczak’s orphans are family, too: The boy leaves half his day’s loot for them, even in the lean days when it’s only a few lumps of coal—“black pearls,” they’re called.

This book is quite different than most young adult books, framed as it is in a setting where there has been no chance for moral socialization by a family for its child. In that the boy knows no different life and accepts whatever he sees—the dying and the dead, the ragged and the naked—Spinelli has woven a tale so chilling in its ordinariness, as seen by the waif, that it is physically painful to read. A child who doesn’t know who he is, who has nothing but a yellow stone he thinks his father must have tied around his neck, who doesn’t know there are things like grass and toys and books and love (“What’s happy?” he asks Janina’s father) is truly wrenching to live with throughout these pages. And that makes this a must-read for Spinelli’s legions of fans and everyone else.

Although Milkweed is a far cry from Maniac McGee (the author’s first book that garnered him the Newbery honor), it also features a placeless orphan who runs to live and scratches out an existence no human should ever endure. While Maniac’s territory is an East End vs.West End/black vs. white divided town and his exploits lean to snatching footballs from the meanest guy around and living on both sides of the invisible race line, Milkweed immerses us in a ghetto vs. city-of-plenty/Nazi vs. Jew-outcast divide where death is ever-present, ordinary, remarked only by fewer or more numerous bodies lying under newspaper on the street waiting to be carted off or devoured by crows. While Spinelli's Jason and Marceline treats the agonies of an adolescent tiptoeing his way through the pitfalls of stealing kisses and plotting his “moves” on the girl he likes, Milkweed drags us through the slime of stealing rotten, moldy scraps from trash bins and plotting alternate routes to get back from smuggling trips through the two-brick opening in the ghetto wall in order to survive another day.

Jerry Spinelli tells us in his Foreword that he wrote this book—though he wondered, being “neither Jew nor survivor nor survivor’s relative,” about having the “credentials” to do so—because he cared. You, too, will care. Don’t miss this one.