Hannah is a bored teen, tired of hearing her grandfather's stories about the Holocaust, annoyed that she must attend her family's Passover Seder. She finds, suddenly, that she has been transported back to 1941 Poland, where she is sent to a concentration camp.The details of the travel to the camp as well as her time in the camp are vivid and shocking to Hannah, and, consequently, to us as readers. People die as a result of the conditions, and some are put to death right in front of Hannah. The f...

I wish I could say I liked this book. I thought I would. I know it's critically acclaimed and a well-known story. But it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.The book is meant to educate young people about the Holocaust, but it had a lot of historical inaccuracies. The idyllic shtetl world at the beginning of Chaya's story would have been long gone by 1942 -- by that time, all the Jews left alive in Poland were in ghettos, in concentration camps or in hiding. Lublin, the place Chaya supposedly c...

This was a foundational book for me. I first read it when I was around the age of 12 and it sent me on a research deep-dive about the Holocaust that I've never been able to escape. I related to Hannah at the beginning of the book, tired of always remembering, finding all the pomp and ceremony of Jewish holidays, particularly the Passover Seder, to be boring. This wasn't the first time I'd encountered the Holocaust, but it was the first time it had been so immersive and real. I loved everything f...

I usually read to avoid hearing about depressing subjects but I went ahead and read this one even though it was about a Jewish girl living during WW2.It was a good book, and I got choked up in the end. Then I couldn't get to sleep at night because I was too busy pondering how civilized societies are capable of butchering millions of people. It seems so impossible, and yet it's happened more than once in history. It makes you look at your friends and neighbors and wonder what sort of hearts of da...

This book really showed what it was like to be in a concentration camp to me. It was interesting to see how Hannah changed throughout the book after being transported back in time to when she came back home. I did find the book to be a little slow, but it was overall a good book.

Poignant and disturbing.

Short story ....Hannah begins to revaluate her heritage when she has a supernatural experience that transports her back to a Nazi death camp in 1941.

Anyone and everyone should read this book! It's a very fast read because it was written for children but it tells a beautiful story and has a great twist in the end. The Devil's Arithmetic is about a young Jewish girl who doesn't quite understand her family's past. She finds Jewish holidays and celebrations to be boring and is unappreciative of the hardships Jews have faced. She is mysteriously transported to the past and ends up in a concentration camp. Here she suffers the hardships first hand...

For me, picking up a book about the Holocaust is a bit like plunging into an icy-cold lake, on a warm summer day. Not because the experience is refreshing - far from it! - but because there is this sense, while standing on the edge, poised to take that fateful step, of drawing back. An instinctive recoiling from what I know will be a sudden and shocking submersion in a different world - one that I'm never entirely prepared to enter, that I fear will swallow me whole, as I sink like a stone, down...

Five stars for the plot device used to tell this story. This is aimed at very young readers and so the grisly subject matter must be presented in a way that allows them to read it without ruining their sleep. Having the main character, a modern day, young Jewish girl, living in New Rochelle, transported back in time does this splendidly.My three star review is because I didn't feel the story was written very well after that initial stroke of genius. I must admit that part of this could be that I...

Hannah and her family are celebrating Passover. When Hannah opens the door to look for Elijah, she is transported back in time to 1942 Poland, as the Nazi's are rounding up the Jews for the final solution. Chaya (Hannah) tries to warn her family and friends what is happening, but to no avail as history marches ahead anyway. This book is primarily aimed at younger readers. Yolen's afterword is a highlight.

This semester I am requiring my students to read The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, a novel takes place in Poland during World War II. The good news is that my students love the book; in fact, several of them are reading ahead. The shocking fact, the bad news, is what they don’t know. It is not just knowledge of history that they lack; it is knowledge of basic geography. God bless PowerPoint and blackboard. To be fair, my students do ask intelligent questions, yet the lack of basic knowledge i...

I was 14 when I read my first holocaust book – Leon Uris’ Mila 18 and was in much distress for very long because of the Nazi savagery and Jewish despondency I was exposed to in the book. Although I have since been drawn to literature from that period, I feel that the gory in The Devil’s Arithmetic is too harsh for anyone under 12. The heart rending portrayal of children in Mapping the Bones, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Anne Frank’s Diary, The Book Thief, The girl in the red coat in Schindle...

I wasn't really sure what to make of this book when I first saw it, but after having read it, I would say that I am glad that I did. This is one of those books that really makes you look at things from a different perspective. I can relate to Hannah, because I remember being 13 and having little patience with traditions and customs, and just wanting to hang out with my friends. But given the experience Hannah had, she was able to see things in a new way, and was granted a gift, even though it wa...

Yolen employs a "Magic Tree House" trope to move her main character, Hannah, a bored American thirteen-year-old at her family's Seder dinner, through time, space and language, and it comes off as hokey. Once Hannah becomes Chaya, an orphan living in a Polish village in 1942, though, this tale grabs onto the reader and doesn't let go. Hannah opens the door of her family's apartment to welcome the prophet Elijah and is soon crammed into a crowded cattle car with other Jews on a train destined for

Twelve year old Hannah is sick of spending Passover 'remembering' the past with her relatives. During the Passover Seder, she is transported to 1942 Poland, where she becomes Chaya (her Hebrew name), the girl she was named for. In this time, she is eventually sent to a concentration camp, where the bulk of the story takes place. Throughout the book, she struggles with memory - which memories are real (the future or the now), remembering anything b/c of the trauma of the camp, futilely trying to

My son came home last week and said “mom can you believe my language arts teacher is making us read a book this close to the end of the school year?” Being the book nerd I am I became excited and asked what’s the name of the book and he says “The Devils Arithmetic” well I had never heard of the book and decided to read up on it. After reading the synopsis I immediately put the book on hold to pick up the following day. I read it in one fell swoop! I cried like baby snot cried! I read everything

This is a marvelous book for young adults, although I wouldn’t recommend it as their first introduction to the holocaust because it portrays the atrocities committed in a starkly realistic way. And, unlike some young adult books that I enjoyed as young as nine or ten years old, I wouldn’t give this to kids until they were at least 12.It is a wonderful story and, because the main character, an American Jewish girl who’s 12 years old, is from the present time (even though the book was written twen...

Summary: When Hannah opens the door during Passover Seder to symbolically welcome the profit Elijah, she suddenly finds herself in the unfamiliar world of a Polish village i the 1940's. Hannah had always complained about listening about listening to her relatives tell the same stories of the Holocaust over and over, but now she finds herself in terrifying situation. The Nazi soldiers have come to take the villagers away, and Hannah can guess where they are going. Response: I loved this book. Bei...

The Devil’s Arithmetic is a moving and heartbreaking young adult fantasy/historical fiction novella grounded in the real events that happened during the Holocaust. However, I found the first half of the book to be tortuously slow and boring.