The Cage

The Cage opens with a poem, written by Sender/Riva at Camp Mittelsteine, a labor camp in Germany, on January 19, 1945. It is translated by Ruth Minsky Sender (who is Minska) in New York City in 1980. The poem details the difficulty of speaking from within a cage and the desire to soar like a bird to share ideas with the world outside of “the barbed wire.”

At the opening of Chapter 1, descriptions of smell, sound, and touch contribute to narrator Riva’s deep “calm and happy” (3). The first-person narrator’s references to her nightmares of Nazi torture, in the following paragraphs, disrupt this sense of calm; a full night’s sleep “happens so very, very seldom” (3). Toggling back and forth between the night’s terror and day’s calm, the narrator introduces her reader to the idea that her “yesterdays” can come “back again,” that “they become today” each night (3).

In the first chapter of The Cage, the narrator seeks hope in the vision of her children, who, in her dreams, are Nazi targets, but who, in the present, represent the future generation of Jews, “the new link in an old chain,” that the Nazis sought to erase (4). On such beautiful spring days, the “nightmares seem unreal,” and the narrator’s daughter,