49 pages • 1-hour read
Not Nothing
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Chapters 18-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and violence.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Talking Points”
Josey talks to Olka, telling her that her act of bravery helped inspire Alex to do what he does next. He and Maya-Jade decide to sneak into the resident files to find the number of Ginny’s granddaughter Lydia and tell her what’s going on. This becomes the first time in Alex’s life where he realizes that what is legal and what is right may not always coincide. They also prepare evidence using research, and Alex learns the difference between a reputable source and an untrustworthy one. He starts to realize that Maya-Jade really is smart.
Chapter 19 Summary: “The Romeo and Juliet of Shady Glen”
After the phone call, Lydia demands a meeting with both families and Julio insists that Maya-Jade and Alex both be there, too. Dickie’s son also attends.
During the meeting, Alex thinks about how awful it is to lose a loved one, and how those feelings of loss can easily turn to anger or hatred. Alex points out that Dickie and Ginny were not lonely before, and that they deserve to be together since they love each other. Dickie’s son goes to see his father and finds him lying in bed, miserable and lonely, and demands that he be moved back to be near Ginny again. After the meeting, Alex goes to report everything to Josey, beaming with pride. Josey tells Alex how brave he was, and he sees how those words light up Alex from the inside.
Josey continues his story, explaining how the invasion of the Nazis ironically brought his mother and Olka close together. Olka began working to help Jews sell items on the underground market to sustain themselves. She was one of the only ones who saw in advance how awful things were going to get, and as they began segregating the Jewish population, Olka began insisting that Josey and his family leave the country. While Josey’s mother agreed, his father was sure they would never lose their home, and Josey was similarly stubborn and did not want to see the truth. This was all despite the fact that deportations and executions were becoming increasingly common.
The family moved to an area called Kazimierz that was populated by Jews, and those who were able were forced to work “not for payment but for the privilege of staying alive” (167). Josey and Olka saw each other less often during this time, and when they did, she would often use that time to convince Josey to leave. This eventually led to an argument between them, as Josey felt useless, as though he was “nothing” (170). He believed Olka should not want him anymore. She gifted him an old sewing machine, hoping to give him a sense of purpose again.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Nothing”
Josey can see that referring to himself as “nothing” has an impact on Alex, who understands the need to feel useful. Later, Maya-Jade invites Alex over for pizza and a movie, and Alex agrees. He goes home with Maya-Jade and finds out she has two moms (as well as a third biological mother), lives in a large house, and has a fridge full of food.
Alex has a moment in which he has to reconcile what Maya-Jade has with everything he does not. He refuses to let himself be given over to jealousy anymore, and decides to instead be happy for Maya-Jade. When the evening is over, Alex gets a ride home from Maya-Jade’s “Mim,” and Alex invites Maya-Jade to come with him to see Josey tomorrow.
Josey’s stories continue. Josey’s family was moved into an area of the city that was more like a ghetto and forced to share a small unit with four families. However, Josey still looks at this time through a positive lens because he could see Olka more than ever. He got a job sewing uniforms for the German army and Olka began working at the one business in the area, a pharmacy called the Eagle. His friend Adek came to work at the same factory as Josey during this time, despite having no sewing skills, and Josey recalls feeling jealous over the way that Olka and Adek got along so well. Olka continued pressuring Josey to leave, and he continued to refuse. One day, his father was called for deportation.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Operation Rise”
Alex is distraught upon hearing about Josey’s father and demands to know what happened to him. Maya-Jade, whose second mom is Jewish, calmly explains to Alex that the Holocaust was a time during which millions of people were murdered by the Nazi regime. Alex cannot stand to hear more and leaves, and Maya-Jade finds him outside pulling grass.
Together, they come to realize that everyone in Shady Glen probably has a story to tell. They decide to start interviewing residents together for Maya-Jade’s bar mitzvah project. The first person they interview is Maya-Jade’s grandmother, who puts on make-up and a dress before telling the story of the day she proved to the world that she could sing. She was the understudy of the understudy, and both could not perform, leaving the task up to her. It became the start of a successful, life-long opera career. Hearing the story inspires Alex and Maya-Jade to begin Operation Rise, the name for their project which will detail stories of people beating the odds and living their fullest lives.
Josey’s stories continue. When Josey’s father was taken, Olka began demanding he leave and making plans for it to happen. Josey’s mother’s mental health quickly declined and she refused to do anything but wait for her husband to return (though he never did). Rather than making her leave, Josey stayed with her. Death from both executions and disease rapidly increased all around them, and Adek lost his whole family. Still, Josey refused to leave. When the ghettos were finally evacuated, his mother was sent for execution while he and many others were taken to a forced labor camp.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Not Enough”
Alex’s anger is now directed at Josey, as he believes Josey did not do enough to save his mother. It reminds Alex of his own situation, as he feels that he, too, could have done more than he did for his own mother. At dinner that night, Alex asks his aunt and uncle where his mother is, and they admit they don’t know.
Chapters 18-22 Analysis
In this section, the novel reinforces The Impact of Storytelling and Intergenerational Bonding as Josey recounts his experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland. Josey recounts how many Jewish Polish citizens did not realize how bad things could get, explaining, “When you are the frog in the pot, you sometimes congratulate yourself for surviving the heat, failing to notice the temperature increasing. But Olka noticed” (164). Olka’s increasing urgency stands in contrast to Josey’s stubborn refusal to leave, even as his family is forced into a ghetto, living with four families in a single unit. It’s not until his father is called for deportation that Josey begins to grasp the gravity of the situation, and by then, it is too late.
When Josey reaches this part of the story, Alex is overwhelmed with emotion, as Josey notes: “There had been nearly seventy years between my father’s death and his birth, but he felt the loss as if it were his own” (184, emphasis added). Alex’s ability to feel the loss “as if it were his own” shows both Alex’s deepening empathy for others and the importance of intergenerational bonding. While Alex was born many decades after World War II, he is able to experience the severity of the Holocaust’s horrors in a more visceral way due to Josey’s willingness to share his saddest memories with the young boy. In learning about the Holocaust, both through Maya-Jade’s historical information and Josey’s first-hand experiences, Alex becomes more aware of history’s injustices and of the terrible effects hatred, intolerance, and violence have upon the world. Alex thus discovers that the past offers many important lessons for the present.
Alex’s personal growth continues as he learns from Josey’s memories of Olka about The Importance of Fighting for Love. Olka tries repeatedly to get Josey to leave Poland, but Josey’s inability to act leads to tension and an argument. Despite the dangers and hardships, Olka’s love endures: She remains defiant in the face of increasing Nazi oppression and gives Josey a sewing machine to help him reclaim a sense of worth. Their love becomes “a patch of normalcy in the midst of misery, the way a flower can grow in cracked asphalt” (180). In a particularly emotional moment, Olka even says that if Josey’s father must die, she’d rather it be on her hands, out of love, than at the hands of the Nazis, out of hate.
Inspired by Olka’s principled example in defying the Nazis to assist Jewish Polish citizens like Josey, Alex finds the courage to help Ginny and Dickie even though it technically means breaking some rules. When he and Maya-Jade sneak into the records to contact Lydia, Ginny’s granddaughter, it’s the first time Alex truly feels smart and useful: “Tonight he didn’t feel like a problem. He felt like a fixer. A smart kid” (156). His pride and self-confidence grow after Ginny and Dickie’s successful reunion, which shows how Alex is both learning about the importance of love for other people and also experiencing more self-love as a result.
The motif of sewing appears in this section to denote agency and connection. When Olka gives Josey the sewing machine, it is a reminder that even small acts can become something meaningful: “Maybe it’s a small thing, sewing a hem, helping someone with a crossword puzzle. But stitch one small thing to another small thing and another, and eventually you have a tapestry as big as the world” (172). Olga’s words about the sewing machine reflect the importance of the “small thing[s]” she does in the past to help others, which adds up to a very big thing in terms of defying the evils of the Nazi regime. In the present, the small acts of love the characters perform for one another add up to making their community a healthier, happier place for everyone, reinforcing how positive actions always create a chain of meaning that ultimately lifts everyone up.
Despite Alex’s growth in these chapters, he continues to struggle with feelings of guilt and occasional bursts of anger. When Alex learns that Josey did nothing to save his mother during the war, due to her mental illness and his own inaction, Alex becomes angry, projecting his own guilt about his mother’s decline onto Josey. The loss of parental figures becomes a shared pain across decades, but Alex’s initial response is more defensive than empathetic: His outburst shows that there are problems in his own life that he still needs to learn how to confront and work through in a healthy way.
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