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Josef: Berlin, Germany – 1939, 1 day
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Refugee, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Coming of Age
Injustice and Cruelty vs. Empathy and Social Responsibility
Hope vs. Despair
Family, Displacement, and Culture
Invisibility and the Refugee Experience
Summary
Analysis
As Isabel is playing her trumpet, she hears riots start to break out in the street, and people chanting against Castro. Isabel goes to search for Geraldo and Lito. She knows that if her father is caught by the police, he’d be sent back to prison. Isabel climbs onto a car in order to search for him, and spots him throwing a bottle at a line of policemen. She climbs down as she sees a policeman approach Geraldo, and throws herself in front of her father to prevent the policeman from beating him.
Gratz establishes the way in which Isabel has started to take on the responsibility of an adult. She seeks out danger in order to protect her father, rather than the other way around. This is the first primary example of how being a child in a time of trauma and political upheaval can cause a person to grow up much faster.
Themes
Just as the policeman rears back to hit Isabel, another policeman—Luis Castillo, Iván’s older brother—stops him. The policemen are then called away by a whistle, but the first policeman turns back to threaten Isabel. He tells Isabel that he will find Geraldo and make sure he is arrested and sent away “for good.” As Isabel watches the policemen leave, she understands that her father must leave Cuba—tonight.
Like Josef’s family, who recognize that staying together is more important than remaining in Germany, so too does Isabel come to the realization that remaining connected with her father outweighs her desire to stay in Cuba.
Themes
