Names in a Jar
Names in a Jar
“A new name,” I whispered. I sank my teeth into my cheek in an effort not to cry. “A name in a jar.”
“So, you can find her later,” said Masha. She put a hesitant hand on my shoulder, and I started at her touch. Masha never touched us.
“She won’t be the same,” I said. “She’ll be someone else.”
Masha’s eyes met mine, and I saw a flicker of sadness there, behind the look of steel. “None of us are the same as we were.”
“And she’ll be safe.” It was a half statement, half question. I wanted reassurance.
“She will be safe,” she answered firmly. “She will live.”
I watched as Anna tried Tateh’s wine, making a face. She will live, I told myself. She will live, and I will find her.
I will find her name in the jar.
Names in a Jar is an historical fiction young adult novel. The story of Anna and Lina is told in dual first-person perspective, with each chapter flipping between Anna’s story and Lina’s story. The two sisters are dynamic characters and are bound by the love of their family and their desire to survive the war. The novel starts with a prologue from the perspective of an aged Anna in 1986 and then shifts back in time to 1939 for chapter 1. Both Anna and Lina become quickly realized characters through their responses to the different traumas of war.
Anna and Lina are Jewish sisters living in Poland at the start of World War II. Anna, 12-years-old and driven by curiosity to understand the world around her, loves reading the books in her Tateh’s (father’s) bookshop. Her mother died days after her birth, and Anna relies heavily on her older sister, Lina, to help navigate the world around her. Lina, 19-years-old and fiercely protective of Anna, helps support her family through odd jobs as a seamstress and by helping around the bookshop. Their comfortable life is thrown into chaos when they are transported to the Warsaw Ghetto after watching their neighbourhood deteriorate into death and destruction as the war begins. Forced into a grimy, tiny apartment with two other families, having little to no food, and no signs of hope, Anna and Lina adapt to their new reality by taking on different jobs to support the families in their building.
After a new baby is born in their apartment and both parents die, things become dire. Lina makes the decision that both the new baby and Anna must be smuggled out of the ghetto so that they can survive. Anna is ushered away to a farm to live with a Catholic family and is renamed Maria in an attempt to evade Nazi questioning. Lina is captured and taken to Treblinka, a Nazi extermination camp.
The sisters’ stories are dramatically different, but readers are left desperate to know each of the two characters’ fates. The writing is lyrical in nature and gently guides readers through the grief and pockets of joy experienced by Anna and Lina. The dual perspective of the sisters, trapped in very different realities of war, adds an engaging element to this Holocaust story. Lina’s steady and focused chapters juxtapose Anna’s take-charge, headstrong pages, thereby helping the plot move forward with balance. Readers are not skipping chapters to learn more about one character while ignoring the other. To do so would collapse the beauty of the sisters’ love for one another.
It should be noted that Names in a Jar does talk about sensitive topics, such as death and rape, that may be upsetting for some readers. However, these are important scenes that represent the horrors of living through World War II and are not gratuitous in nature or implemented for sheer shock value.
Lindsey Baird is a high school English teacher in Lethbridge, Alberta.