48 pages • 1-hour read
The Island on Bird Street
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Introduction-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination, graphic violence, and death.
In a brief introduction, Uri Orlev speaks directly to the reader, asking them to imagine a wall that divides the parts of a city and imprisons everyone forced to live there. He describes the terrible poverty and starvation inside this “walled-off quarter” and how, when he was young, he lived in a place just like that: the Warsaw ghetto in Poland during World War II. He tells the reader to imagine no radios, no supplies, very little food, and the unexplained disappearances of neighbors and family members. As families disappear, looters raid their abandoned homes for clothing, food stashes, and anything of value. The author informs the reader that he looted such houses himself in the ghetto; though he was searching for coal to keep his family members warm, he was happy to find toys and books like Robinson Crusoe.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Father’s Secret”
Alex lives with his father in a small apartment in a ghetto in Poland during wartime. They are Jewish, and they share this space with another Jewish family, the Gryns. The German army, under Hitler, occupied Poland and established ghettos as places to confine the city’s Jewish residents. Alex’s mother went a week ago from this ghetto, Ghetto C, to visit a friend in another ghetto and did not come back. A simple map shows a factory in the southeast corner of the walled-off section. Alex’s apartment house is connected to the factory by passageways in the buildings in between. His father works in the factory, which makes rope for the German army. There are rumors of Jewish people being killed in camps, but his father says no one knows if they are true. Some days, Alex’s father takes him to the rope factory where Alex spends the day with the storeroom manager, Boruch. Boruch insists those rumors about the camps are true.
One night, Alex sees his father cleaning a pistol. His father says it is to kill Germans if the need arises. He teaches Alex how to clean and load the gun. Alex practices aiming and pretends to fire it. He knows that killing Germans is not a simple act because if a Jewish person kills a German, the German soldiers will react by killing many Jewish people.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Snow, and Are People Like Trees?”
Alex has a white mouse named Snow; Alex trains him to look for crumbs of food when Alex whistles. Some days, Alex hides in a bunker beneath the apartment or a small secret enclosure within the apartment while he goes to work; those days, it is too dangerous for Alex to come along. Alex is glad to have Snow’s company each time he hides.
Alex cooks dinners of potatoes and eggs when eggs are available. He recalls one time Boruch came to dinner and discussed politics with his father. Alex also recalls that his mother and father used to argue about Zionism and her desire to go to Palestine; she felt that “Polish society denied her roots” (14). Alex’s father insisted in these arguments that it should not matter where or into what culture one is born. His mother wished this were true.
Chapter 3 Summary: “We’re Caught, Old Boruch Has a Plan”
One day, German soldiers, Polish police, and Jewish police surround the factory. They want all the factory workers for a “selection,” in which the soldiers decide who stays to work in the ghetto and who gets transported away. Boruch, Alex, and Alex’s father try to hide, but they are caught. Boruch insists that he will walk with Alex, knowing that they both will be selected for transport; he can then help Alex get away before they arrive at the train. Alex’s father resists but finally agrees to this plan; however, he is selected for transport too. Alex’s father is placed in a second group while Alex and Boruch are in the first.
When Alex and Boruch near Number 78 Bird Street, Boruch gives Alex his father’s knapsack and tells him to run. This abandoned house is one Alex knows from exploring with friends. It abuts the ghetto wall. A narrow hole leads to the cellar. He slips down into the dark, and the soldiers cannot follow him. In the knapsack, he finds water, bread, a flashlight, and his father’s pistol. He thinks about Boruch’s instructions to stay safe and wait in Number 78 even if it takes up to a year for his father to return. Alex sleeps; when he wakes, “the only signs of life came from the rear of the building, over on the Polish side” (25).
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Ruined House”
The house is in ruins from German bombs. Alex and his friends were never allowed in it, but they played in it anyway. The middle of the house is an open space. Unsupported stairs go up to a second floor, which has a window that looks out beyond the ghetto wall. Flooring for the third and fourth floors sticks out toward the center of the space with no way to get up to them. Birds flock to the fourth floor, making Alex think of crumbs. He knows from his mother and grandmother that Bird Street used to have beautiful trees in which hundreds of birds roosted. Both the third and fourth floors held kitchens; Alex recalls scaling the opposite side and peering over to see a kitchen sink still dripping.
Alex recalls his father saying not to trust anyone while his mother coached him to act on love and respect for others (though this did not extend to Hitler). Alex’s father told him, “You can be the master of your fate, Alex” (32), but Boruch told him that fate predetermines one’s path. He wonders if he is destined to go rescue Snow. He knows he is lucky sometimes and wonders if his mother’s spirit sends good luck.
Chapter 5 Summary: “My First Venture Out, and the Gryns”
Alex fixes his father’s shoulder holster as a belt to hold the pistol under his coat, and he rips through the coat pocket so that he can grab the pistol easily. He leaves the cellar to fetch Snow from his apartment. Ghetto C is now empty except for those hiding and the factory workers. The walk is terrifying. Arriving through a window since the gate is locked, he places Snow in his pocket and then realizes he should gather supplies and food. The food stashes he and his father stored, though, are gone. Alex bangs on the trap door in the bathroom that leads to the bunker. The Gryns angrily let him in and tell him to be quiet. Alex knows they took all the food his father stored, but they do not admit it. They tell him to go and not come back or stay without leaving. Alex chooses to go; Boruch was clear in saying he must wait at Number 78. Pani Gryn gives him only three cans of milk, crackers, and jam. He has doubts upon returning to Number 78. He sleeps on the blanket he took from the apartment.
Introduction-Chapter 5 Analysis
Alex’s manner of storytelling befits a boy his age of 11; he weaves recollections and information into the narrative of real-time events as they come to him spontaneously. Thus, his first-person point of view has an element of stream-of-conscious style, which contributes to his conversational character voice—a voice so laid back it juxtaposes the serious given circumstances. Alex’s interior monologue frequently steers toward recalled discussions with or between his parents; though Alex admits that he does not fully understand his parents’ views (which demonstrates his honesty and humility), their strong opinions broach important overarching ideas inherent to the novel about humanity, prejudice, dictatorship, and genocide. This tangential method of storytelling demonstrates that he is a pensive, intelligent boy whose mind is constantly making connections between present observations and past memories.
Alex’s remembered conversations and subtle mentions of past events also provide structure and sequence. Through them, the author subtly portrays an important backstory that Alex does not directly narrate: German forces bombed Alex’s city at some point, damaging the house at Number 78 Bird Street. The German army designated three sections of ghettos where the Jewish residents were forced to live, cut off from the rest of the city, as part of Nazi goals in occupying Poland. To avoid “selection,” Alex’s father created a hiding place in the shared apartment and a bunker below it. Ironically, “selection” occurs from the factory on a day when Alex and his father are both there—despite the many days Alex stayed home hiding when rumors of selection scared his father. This inciting incident (selection at the rope factory) brings on the novel’s unspoken overarching conflict: This round of selections took most of those living in the ghetto, and only a very few remaining factory workers and those in hiding like him remain.
This conflict creates a host of challenges for Alex that go far beyond his brave choice to collect his pet mouse. Alone now, his father’s warning to trust no one else proves prophetic when he sees that the Gryns stole the food he and his father stored. To avoid starvation, Alex will have to take risks and think creatively; thus, the Gryns’s theft introduces the theme of Resourcefulness and Ingenuity for Survival. Though Alex is in a desperate situation, he thinks, ironically, of himself as fortunate. Specifically, he recalls his father’s words that he is lucky and wonders if his mother is sending good luck to him. At the same time, Alex experiences a high degree of immediate fear, especially in leaving the relative safety of the cellar to walk the ruined streets, and settling in of a longer, deeper anxiety and doubt regarding his father’s return: “Mother had said she would be right back too” (16). His polar ideas about his good fortune and his terror result from his new circumstances and his solitude, introducing the theme of The Opposing Forces of Fear and Luck, which the author will continue to develop throughout the novel.
Once alone, beyond the external conflicts of starvation and being caught, Alex experiences internal conflicts of loneliness and anxiety. These internal conflicts manifest in thoughts of his missing mother and introduce the theme of Longing for Connection. Additionally, this indirectly characterizes her and demonstrates her impact on Alex. This occurs as he filters his experiences through the lens of her thoughts, such as when he sees the waste piles that represent transported families and recalls a similar sight that included discarded pictures: “They were photographs, she explained, of people who had once been happy. Pictures of a wedding, for instance. Or of someone’s old parents. Or of a new baby. They were, mother said, like tracks left behind by the dead” (43). Alex’s focus on her words and reactions demonstrates his mother’s lasting influence on him, particularly in his newfound isolation. It also helps to create a profile of his mother, a character the author never features in the novel’s real-time narrative. Through Alex’s eyes, however, his mother presents as a woman with complex feelings about the treatment of Jewish people: Though she clings to a dreamy goal of rehoming her family in Palestine, a place she views as more culturally comfortable for them, she also is a realist when she sees no truth in Alex’s father’s idealistic talk about equality between ethnicities, religions, and cultures.
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