The Cage

What role do books and education play in Riva’s life?

Food, in The Cage, is both necessary and limited. Across the novel, how does access to food shape Riva’s experience? When is it useful, and when is it insufficient?

Riva and Yulek share a mutual adoration for “beauty.” What is the role of beauty in the conflicted, death-riddled world of The Cage?

As Sender tells her story of Holocaust survival, why do you think she focuses on her nightmares? What does she hope to communicate to her daughter and to future generations?

Throughout the text, Riva relies on her mother’s words to push through the conflict. How does the phrase “As long as there is life, there is hope” shape Riva’s actions and relationships?

Riva becomes the symbolic mother of her younger siblings when she is sixteen years old. What does it mean to be a mother, to her? Who else, in The Cage, is a mother?

Riva’s hand injury brings her close to death, both because it is infected and because it could render her “useless” to the Nazis’ purposes. What role does it play in the lessons she passes on to her daughter and audience? What could the injury symbolize?

Traditional values and stories are important to Riva, from the beginning to the end of her life. How do Jewish holidays and narratives shape communities and create space for survival in the hopeless, dark, chaotic world of the labor camps?