Milkweed theme blog

     Throughout Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli I learned many new things. Spinelli did a great job of squeezing in details in a fiction book. For example I learned that the Nazis moved the Jewish people into the ghettos before the concentration camps. I also learned that the Jewish people were actually tricked onto going on the trains to the camps. I learned that the Nazis wrote fake letters and sent them to free Jewish people to advertise how amazing the camps were. Spinelli squeezed in these facts in the dialogue of Misha and his Jewish friends. At the end of the book Misha is all grown up. He survives the Holocaust and raises a family, Misha has a job and everything is normal. He names his granddaughter Janinina after the girl he survived with. But the main character does not forget, he only tries to. Spinelli writes about how Misha couldn't return to normal at the same pace society was. This ending tells a lot about the Jewish people and how hard it was to come back. I believe Spinelli included Mishas struggle to rejoin society because it emphasized what other humans can do to each other and how much they can break down each other. The Nazis were really powerful people because they knew hot to take away everything from somebody.

~Rory Charles McNabb