The Cage

Moishe, Mrs. Avram’s son-in-law, steps into the siblings’ lives in Chapter 8, determined to find Riva a doctor. Help for her condition seems impossible, and Riva begins to call him musheggener Moishe, or crazy Moishe. As she looks at “his angry, burning eyes, his clenched fists,” she thinks of him as “a madman about to fight the world” (39). But she is thankful that he takes her out into the world, because she had not felt “fresh air” or “a breeze” in weeks (40).

When Moishe tells Riva where the doctor’s office is, she panics, worrying that the guard at the ghetto bridge will shoot them, and worrying that Moishe’s strength will give out. He reassures her, though, that “a musheggener can do anything” (41). The pair arrives safely at the doctor’s office, which is a “small room […] crowded with people, most of whom look more like human skeletons than men and women” (41). Riva feels “healthy” in this sickly space.

The doctor, when he inspects Riva, is quiet. Moishe, impatient, presses him for a solution, but the doctor quietly concedes that he cannot help her, for her problem is “malnutrition, vitamin deficiency, loss of calcium in her bones” (42).