The Cage

Riva’s initial poem, the Prologue of The Cage, establishes the idea that she is in a “cage,” surrounded by “barbed wire,” from which she hopes to escape to rise “like a free bird.” Though she writes this poem from Mittelsteine, Riva inhabits many cages throughout the text: the walls of her apartment, the Lodz ghetto, and the labor camp all serve as cages that try to prevent her from speaking out.

In Lodz, Riva describes the ghetto as a “cage” whose walls continue to close in on her and her brothers. She keeps Laibele’s hope alive by describing a time that she imagines, in the future, when they will “walk out of this cage, free to build a new life, a new world” (29). The Jewish police are “in the same cage,” seeking the same “tomorrow,” though they act differently because of their role in the community (61). The walls change the abilities of those within them, and they also change their capacities for love, loyalty, and friendship.

Riva moves from cage to cage within the text, and even the wagons and cattle cars that transport her are cages, always barred with doors and covers. When she walks to the train station to be treated at the hospital in Glatz, she feels strange left open in space with just a guard trailing behind her; later, when the guards abandon her with her fellow prisoners just before the woods, they return to “the open gates of the cage,” because the cage is the only space that seems safe or familiar (208).