Standard English Module B: Briar Rose. Themes

Themes in Briar Rose

1. Love

· Family love: the love between Gemma and her family is clearly established in the early chapters. The family is portrayed as a typical everyday bickering group, however their love is based on real respect and warmth. They are a large extended family and Gemma was a key figure in the lives of the girls, especially Becca.

· The short-lived marriage between Aron and Gemma in the woods resonates with fairytale romance as the princess marries her prince and conceives a child in the forest. However, there is no happy ending as Aron is soon killed.

· Romantic love is also explored through the developing relationship of Stan and Becca. Yolen ends the novel with Stan at the airport kissing Becca when she arrives from Poland. A happy ever after ending for Becca is implied – one that Gemma didn’t achieve in terms of romantic love, even though she did achieve happiness with her loving family in America.

· Josef’s love for Aron, which Josef is unable to voice. Josef ends up alone with his memories, many of them painful.

2. Identity

Our quest for a sense of self, and a knowing and understanding of who we are and how we are, is explored through:

· Becca’s quest for her heritage and Gemma’s past: Becca discovers not only her grandmother’s identity, but also her own – Becca realises that her grandmother chose her to find the truth because she and Becca are so much alike.

· Stan seeking his birth mother: Identity is important about knowing who we are and giving a sense of where we come from.

· Magda’s decision to practise “being Jewish”

3. Remembrance, memory, forgetting, forgiveness

The whole story of Briar Rose is dependent on the remembrance and memory of others to tell the tale/history of Gemma’s unspoken and hidden past. Yolen portrays the events and consequences of the Holocaust through different eyes:

· Gemma has forgotten her past and relives it through a fairytale. “I have no memories in my head but one…a fairytale” (p. 211) The fairytale genre depends on memories that are passed down from one generation to another, becoming embedded in our psyche so that their message becomes part of our social fabric.

· The importance of remembrance: Through its use of metaphor, Gemma’s version of history serves to assert that humankind should never forget the terrible past that the Holocaust represents, but should instead tell and re-tell the story of it down through the generations. “The future is when people talk about the past. So if the prince knows all their past lives and tells all the people who are still to come, then the princes live again and into the future.” (Gemma, p. 111)

· The power of storytelling: the Partisans kept themselves going in the woods by telling stories: “He understood then that the point of their raid was not to blow up anything at all. The point was to die so they, in turn, could become stories for other partisans to tell around the fires that were not fires.” (p.185) “The stories they traded at night had nothing to do with resistance and horror, nothing to do with the many awful ways of dying. They told one another the old stories: the woodcutters recounted the folk tales of their mountains; the Avenger being closest of them all to childhood, the nursery stories his mother had told him; Rebbe, true to his name if not his nature, recalling stories from the Old Testament…” (p. 193)

· The ideals of peace and forgiveness are explored through the character of Father Stashu, the priest in Chelmno who devotes his life to helping the villagers deal with their guilt. “If God forgives them, they will also be forgiven by the souls of the Jews and the Gypsies and the Communists and priests” – Father Stashu, p. 145

· “Time may heal wounds, but it does not erase the scars” – Stan p. 81. Josef and Gemma are forever scarred by their wartime experiences.

4. Survival of the human spirit: resilience, courage and heroism

· The heroic stories of Gemma, Josef and the Partisans show the power of survival and the resilience of the human spirit.

· This theme is mostly evident in Josef’s account of his Holocaust experience, his courage and survival. “This is a story of survivors, not heroes… A man is not a hero if he scrabbles to stay alive, if he struggles for one more crust of bread, one more ragged breath. We were all heroes of the moment.” (Josef, p 163)

· Josef provides the reader with an interesting idea of courage and the human spirit. Initially, Joseph, while he may believe in the ideal of strength and courage, is not able to live up to his ideals: he betrays his lovers under Nazi questioning. But his experiences change his attitude towards survival and courage. He becomes a man who is numb to the horrors he has seen, and therefore is able to act with great courage. “He was not afraid. Having lived a year in Sachenhausen, having managed through four months in the woods, he had no fear left.” (p. 185)

· Courage of the Partisans: “We have not come here to stay alive. It is our sacred duty to fight when we can and to die if we must, but to avenge what they have done to our Germany.” (Henrik, p. 182)

· Aron is the typical brave fairytale hero who jumps into the mass grave to rescue Gemma.

5. Journey/quest for meaning

· Yolen uses the motif of a hero’s physical and emotional quest to explore historical concerns of the Holocaust and WWII

· The typical hero’s journey ends “happily ever after”, but many difficulties and obstacles are experienced during the journey before reaching the end. Despite the fact that their stories ended happily ever after, like many Jews and victims of war, Gemma and Josef’s happy-ever-after was shadowed by the terrible and painful memories of the Holocaust.

· The focus is Becca’s quest for meaning. She is searching for the truth of Gemma’s past in order to give herself and the Berlin family enlightenment as to their family background/history.

· Becca makes a deathbed promise to Gemma to seek the truth and thus give meaning to Gemma’s story and life.

· The reader follows Becca on her journey and shares in the sadness and joy it brings. The reader can learn why uncovering the past can bring freedom and greater meaning to the individual.

6. Man’s inhumanity to man, good vs evil, hope

· The atrocities of the Holocaust are a grim example of mankind’s capacity for evil and inhumanity towards our fellows. The fairytale metaphor portrays the Nazis as the wicked fairy that casts a spell over the princess. Yolen also raises questions of the complicity of ordinary Germans and Poles (the inhabitants of Chelmno, for example) who were witnesses to the killing of the Jews and allowed it to happen.

· In the end good wins over evil in real life, just as it does in the fairytale. The Germans are defeated and Poland is liberated but at a high price in the lives that had already been paid. Gemma is rescued from the “hellish pit” by the partisans. Gemma survives and therefore the whole Berlin family is formed, she creates a new and happy life despite the evil in her past she overcomes it.

· Hope for a more positive future is expressed through the narratives of Josef and Gemma, when, in the final chapter, there is a “happily ever after” (p. 239).