132 pages • 4 hours read
The Cage
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 1986
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Introduction
The Cage
- Genre: Nonfiction; young adult autobiography
- Originally Published: 1986
- Reading Level/Interest: Lexile 500L; grades 7-9
- Structure/Length: 48 chapters; approx. 256 pages
- Central Concern: This Holocaust memoir describes how the author, at age 13, cared for her three younger brothers in Lodz, Poland, after their mother was taken by the Nazis. Lodz becomes a ghetto; her youngest brother dies before she and her other two brothers make the desperate decision to turn themselves over to the Nazis and go to a concentration camp.
- Potential Sensitivity Issues: Death of a sibling; horrors of life in a Polish ghetto and in concentration camps; wartime violence; anti-Semitism
Ruth Minsky Sender, Author
- Bio: Born in 1926 in Lodz, Poland; after her liberation by Russian forces from the Grafenort labor camp, she was reunited with her three older siblings; she moved to the United States and settled in Commack, New York, where she and her husband, Morris Sender, also a Holocaust survivor, raised their family
- Other Works: To Life (1988); The Holocaust Lady (1999)
- Awards: ILA Teachers’ Choices; CBC/NCSS Notable Children’s Book in Social Studies
CENTRAL THEMES connected and noted throughout this Teaching Unit:
- Humanity and Community Memory
- Motherhood
- Education, Writing, and Books
- Nature and Life Cycles
STUDY OBJECTIVES: In accomplishing the components of this Unit, students will:
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