The Island on Bird Street

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination, graphic violence, and illness and death.

Alex, the protagonist, lives in an unnamed city in Poland in 1943. In the backstory, the oppressive German Nazis forced Alex, his parents, and all other Jewish civilians to move into a crowded, walled ghetto within the city. Alex’s life in the ghetto is very different from non-Jewish children who still enjoy freedom outside. He does not go to school, food is scarce, and he must spend each day hiding to avoid “selection,” in which German soldiers take weak Jewish civilians for transport elsewhere in their ongoing effort to empty the ghetto. About a week before the start of the story, his mother goes missing, likely taken by the Nazis.

Looking at the novel through the Hero’s Journey archetype lens, these circumstances have become Alex’s “Ordinary World,” though he easily recalls his pre-war freedoms like living in his old home before the ghetto was employed, ice-skating in the park, and going to his grandmother’s house. Alex leaves the “Ordinary World” of the apartment he and his father share with the Gryns when he flees to the ruins at 78 Bird Street; he undertakes a “quest” for survival that relies on his ingenuity, tenacity, and hope.