Yellow Star

YELLOW STAR
By Jennifer Roy
Marshall Cavendish, 2006

Category: Middle-grade novel

This has been a week for reading heartbreaking novels.

YELLOW STAR is written in verse, a fact which, I am sad to admit, would normally have kept me from reading it. I am, quite simply, a chicken when it comes to poetry. (I must get over this.) Luckily I hang out with cool book people who are not chickens, and they insisted I read this book. I am glad they did. (Thank you Jane and Beverly!)

YELLOW STAR is a Holocaust story. The narrator, four year-old Syvia Perlmutter, is forced into the Lodz ghetto with her parents and her older sister when the German Nazis invade Poland in 1939. There is very little food, no school and a fence that keeps the Jews in the ghetto not only separated from the rest of the world but at the mercy of their Nazi captors. As children all over the ghetto are taken from their families and loaded onto trains bound for Heaven-knows-where, Syvia’s family manages to hide her and keep her with them in the ghetto.

The book is based on the experiences of author Jennifer Roy’s aunt, the real Syvia Perlmutter. She was one of a quarter million Jews forced into the Lodz ghetto in 1939, and one of only twelve ghetto children to leave it alive when Poland was liberated in 1945. Her story, told through the eyes of the fictional Syvia, is startling and harrowing and important.

As for the verse format, don’t let it scare you. This book reads like narrative fiction and is accessible to even a chicken like me.