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Josef: Berlin, Germany – 1938
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
Eleven-year-old Isabel Fernandez is giving a few beans to a cat she had found under her house. She hasn’t eaten much more than that for lunch, due to the rationing and food shortages. For years the Soviet Union had been buying Cuba’s sugar for 11 times the price, and had sent food and gasoline and medicine to Cuba for free. When the Soviet Union fell in 1989, however, the support went away, and many people lost their jobs. People began to starve and had slaughtered all of their animals.
Like Josef, Gratz introduces Isabel in the midst of a society that is undergoing crisis. The food shortages and political oppression causes has sent the society into a kind of collective sense of hopelessness, but Isabel remains positive and determined to keep her family together. Her desire to help the cat also provides an early example of empathy, even from someone who doesn’t have a lot themselves.
Themes
Isabel’s next door neighbor Iván greets her, bringing over a dead fish he had found for the cat. He says they need to come up with a name for it, but before they decide, Iván’s father, Señor Castillo, calls him to his shed. Iván insists that they are building a doghouse, but Isabel knows they’re really building a boat to travel to the United States (or el norte, as they call it).
Here Gratz introduces the recurring symbol of boats, which appear in all three of the storylines. The boats are immediately associated with hope and opportunity—the one that Iván and his father are building provides the possibility for the Castillos and the Fernandezes to have a better future.
Themes
Isabel worries that the Castillos might get caught, because Fidel Castro, Cuba’s president and prime minister, won’t allow anyone to leave the country, or else they are thrown in jail. She knows this, because her father Geraldo, whom she calls Geraldo, had tried to leave and had been thrown in jail for a year when he was caught.
Isabel’s thoughts hint at the fact that she has already had to take on an immense amount of responsibility, due to the oppression she and her family have faced. She has been forced to worry about her father, rather than the other way around.
Themes
Isabel notices Geraldo and her grandfather, whom she calls Lito, heading down the road to stand in line for food. She retrieves her trumpet so she can go with them and play on the street corner. She loves playing music, and people often stopped to listen to her—though the only people who are able to give her any money are the tourists.
Isabel’s trumpet and music come to represent the connection to her own culture. In a country that is clearly undergoing hardship, playing traditional music on the trumpet is a way for Isabel to retain her Cuban roots.
Themes
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Isabel begins to play a salsa tune. She tries to listen to her own playing, attempting to identify the clave. Clave is “the mysterious hidden beat inside Cuban music that everybody seemed to hear except her.” She tries to hear the rhythm in the music she is playing, but can’t seem to identify it.
The fact that Isabel has not yet been able to hear the clave only exacerbates her fears of leaving Cuba. The fact that the beat seems to come naturally to other Cubans suggests that Isabel struggles to feel connected with her own culture despite her efforts—a struggle that will likely only become more difficult if she and her family leave for the U.S.
Themes
