The Island on Bird Street

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination, graphic violence, and illness and death.

Alex, the protagonist, lives in an unnamed city in Poland in 1943. In the backstory, the oppressive German Nazis forced Alex, his parents, and all other Jewish civilians to move into a crowded, walled ghetto within the city. Alex’s life in the ghetto is very different from non-Jewish children who still enjoy freedom outside. He does not go to school, food is scarce, and he must spend each day hiding to avoid “selection,” in which German soldiers take weak Jewish civilians for transport elsewhere in their ongoing effort to empty the ghetto. About a week before the start of the story, his mother goes missing, likely taken by the Nazis.

Looking at the novel through the Hero’s Journey archetype lens, these circumstances have become Alex’s “Ordinary World,” though he easily recalls his pre-war freedoms like living in his old home before the ghetto was employed, ice-skating in the park, and going to his grandmother’s house. Alex leaves the “Ordinary World” of the apartment he and his father share with the Gryns when he flees to the ruins at 78 Bird Street; he undertakes a “quest” for survival that relies on his ingenuity, tenacity, and hope. Throughout his quest, Alex’s narrative voice, his relationships, and his resourcefulness work in conjunction to indirectly convey his character’s dynamic development.

Alex tells the story entirely from a first-person viewpoint. He speaks directly to the reader as if telling the story in hindsight at times, weaving in memories and backstory events fluidly and stepping away from the narrative to comment on it as his conflict resolves: “That’s really the end of my story” (160). This first-person perspective offers key characterization details indirectly and helps convey Alex’s character arc and coming of age. Alex’s voice is youthful at first, suiting an 11-year-old and how a boy that age would perceive events. For example, he notes in Chapter 1 that if a Jewish person killed a German soldier, the vengeance would be swift and out of proportion; many Jewish men, women, and children would likely be killed.

At the end of Chapter 1, however, Alex shows that he cannot fully grasp the weight of that threat when he asserts in an interior monologue that he and his father would have saved his mother no matter the reprisal: “If he and I had been with mother when she was caught, they never would have taken her anywhere. That’s for sure. Even if afterward they had killed a whole street full of people” (7). As the novel continues, Alex’s interior monologue shows through more careful consideration of decisions and risks that his mind is maturing; when he grows ill and emotional upon shooting a German soldier, for example, he voices that he is not ready to join the uprising—a choice that, ironically, demonstrates a high degree of emotional maturity.

Alex’s relationships with others map his coming of age as well. Early in the story, his father and Boruch are his caretakers, demonstrating how Alex requires supervision; he must hide because he is a child and listen carefully to their instructions to stay safe. Father and Boruch even argue over who is best suited to help Alex after they are all “selected.” After Alex must survive on his own for months in the ghetto, he shows his deepening maturity when he takes on the caretaker role; he fetches the doctor for Henryk’s surgery and later nurses Henryk to health himself. He also takes on the role of instructor when he teaches Stashya to skate and communicate through code.

Alex also demonstrates his developing maturity and character arc through his Resourcefulness and Ingenuity for Survival. He finds safe passage from house to house along Bird Street through the lofts, he manages to procure food and has the patience to ration it, and he engineers a safer hideout through cleverness and gumption. He reveals his elevated survival expertise when he shows Henryk, Freddy, the doctor, and his father how to use the rope ladder to stay safe.

A dynamic, round character who changes throughout the text, Alex comes to the end of his “quest” successfully when he and his father reunite in the last chapter. Rather than return to the role of supervised child, Alex accepts his father’s pistol as his own and symbolically places the diagonal board in the window himself for their rendezvous with Bolek, signaling the end of his stay in the hideout.