Theme Of Remembering In The Devil's Arithmetic '

“All Jewish holidays are about remembering, Mama. I’m tired of remembering.” (4) In Jane Yolen’s novel, The Devil’s Arithmetic, Hannah says this as her family arrives to Seder and emphasizes the tiredness in her voice and how she feels like there’s no point in remembering, but by the end of the book, you can tell that the main theme is remembering. This impacts the book because it’s setting is in the place of the holocausts and is about Hannah, a girl who doesn’t care about remembering, and how she realizes that it’s important to remember because it can help you in many ways like recalling things that may help you in the future and learn things from the past. As Hannah arrives to the Passover feast, she comes in to find Grandpa Will angry, and shaking his fist at the television. In The Devil’s Arithmetic it states “He was sitting in the big overstuffed chair in front of the TV set, waving his fist and screaming at the screen. Across the screen marched old photos of Nazi concentration camp victims, corpses stacked like cordwood and dead eyed survivors… ” (8). Hannah wonders

The novel states from Hannah’s view; “ I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She’d been shorn of memory as brutally as she’d been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason… Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly… ” (94). Hannah feels like her past is being cut away from her with her hair. As each day passes in the camp, Hannah realizes more and more how important remembering is because she knows her knowledge about the Nazis may be the only thing between her and death. She clutches at the brief flashbacks she has but ends up sometimes starting to say something that was from her home, New Rochelle, but then suddenly feel like an outcast because she feels crazy talking about things that she doesn’t know