Summary
At night, Isabel and her family and neighbors carry their boat to the shore. While carrying the boat, a Spanish-speaking CNN reporter shines a light and points a camera at their faces, asking why they’re leaving. They ignore the reporter. Around them are many other homemade boats and rickety rafts. A group of police observe the people leaving until two run toward them on the shore. It is Luis and his girlfriend, who is also a cop. As they scramble to join them in the boat, Luis and his girlfriend are shot at by the police force they are deserting. Señor Castillo gets the boat running and revs away. Geraldo scolds him for letting the two cops join, as it put them all in danger. Water pours in from the gunshot in the hull.
While driving out of Aleppo, Mahmoud’s father stops for gas at a station. Worried about the threat of Daesh—ISIS—punishing them for not adhering to their more-strict Muslim codes, Mahmoud’s mother dons a hijab to hide her hair and face. An hour later, men with guns stop them. They ask which side Mahmoud’s father supports. It is unclear who the men are fighting for. He says they are against whoever is dropping the bombs; the soldier laughs and says they are also against “that dog Assad.” The men get in the car and explain the complicated territorial skirmishes currently ongoing in various areas, all of which stand in Mahmoud’s family’s way out of the country. The soldiers tell him to drive south and to take them along to drop them off. After driving for a while, gunshots blow out the car’s tires and break the windows. A soldier takes a bullet to the head and falls against Mahmoud. Mahmoud’s father drives off the road. The soldiers run out and begin returning fire while the family hides on the other side of a ridge. Mahmoud’s father risks his life running back to the car to get his iPhone and charger, joking that he needs it to play Angry Birds. Mahmoud knows that in reality they need their phone maps to help them get to Turkey.
Eight days after having left home, Josef plans to have his bar mitzvah in a makeshift synagogue—converted from the first-class social hall—on board the ship. Josef is excited to finally “become a man,” but his father can’t believe it isn’t a trap on their “Nazi ship,” and his paranoia prevents him from attending. Prior to the ceremonial readings from the Torah, the rabbi asks the captain if it would be okay to take down the large portrait of Hitler that hangs over the room. The Captain obliges. Later that evening, Josef walks the decks proudly. He overhears two stewards discussing how the captain has the ship moving fast to beat the other two refugee ships. They say Cuba might decide they are full up if they don’t get there first and unload their passengers. Josef wonders if Cuba could really turn them away, even when they’d applied and paid for visas.
The Cubans are in the Straits of Florida, north of Cuba. Castillo is in charge of the boat, having built it. They patched the bullet hole with a sock and the boat is traveling fine. The group on board laugh at the fact that a propaganda sign featuring Castro’s portrait has been used to build the bottom of the boat. They talk of the things they look forward to in the States, like shelves full of food, free elections, and television. They encourage Isabel to sing a song now that she doesn’t have her trumpet. Her mother claps, counting the clave, which Isabel still can’t hear. She closes her eyes and focuses on finding the beat when the engine sputters out.
Avoiding cities held by Daesh, the Syrian army, the rebels, and the Kurds, Mahmoud and his family walk eight hours to the Turkish border, where they join hundreds of people seeking refuge. Mahmoud thinks his family looks so wretched that they won’t be admitted, but the guard staples temporary visas to their passports and lets them through. At the refugee camp, Mahmoud’s father learns of a smuggler who can take them to Greece, which is in the European Union. He uses WhatsApp to talk to the smuggler, who they have to meet in Izmir, a 12-hour drive away. While Mahmoud is checking out toy-selling stands near the camp, his father finds him and says he found a ride, but they have to leave right away.
On the ship’s bridge, Josef and other children listen eagerly to Captain Schroeder, who shows them what the ship’s gauges and dials mean. Josef mentions they are racing two other ships. The captain says they’re not in any kind of race. Below deck, Josef’s skin crawls when he hears a crew member whistling “The Horst Wessel Song,” which is the anthem of the Nazi party. Josef sees cutting from the Nazi publications in the staff areas of the ship, and a crew member sneers at the children, calling them Jewish rats. Josef thinks about how the hatred has followed them to the middle of the ocean. He realizes he and the other Jews live in a magic bubble on the deck of the ship, but the real world goes on below the decks.
Isabel and her fellow refugees have been drifting in the Gulf Stream for an hour; the overheated engine still isn’t starting. Isabel’s grandfather, Lito, talks about how he could have left Cuba when Batista was in charge, but Cuba was his home. He thumps the side of the “sinking coffin” and expresses regret for having left. He says they should have waited. He says Isabel’s father is a fool with no plan for what to do in the US. He says the US has no soul, and she’ll never learn the clave there. He calls clave the “hidden heartbeat of the people, beneath whatever song Batista or Castro is playing.” Isabel’s mother tells him to hush, saying Miami is just north of Cuba. Lito wants to turn back; Isabel says they can’t, because the police will arrest her father again. Then Isabel sees an enormous tanker ship head right for them.
In Izmir, Mahmoud and his family stand in the rain in a parking lot. A man working for the smuggler says the boat won’t be there until tomorrow. He says they can try the hotel that takes Syrians, or sleep in a park if they are trying to save money. At the hotel, they learn the rooms are already housing three families each. In the park, Mahmoud spots a thin Syrian boy selling tissues to refugees. The boy says he knows a place they can stay for two thousand Syrian pounds—equal to ten American dollars. He leads them to an abandoned mall full of squatters, bringing them to what used to be a yogurt shop. The boy insists they’ll need to buy life vests in case the boat sinks.
Josef helps his mother restrain Josef’s father, who insists he can feel the ship slowing down. They explain that an old man died, so the ship is slowing for a funeral on board. His father worries the man was killed by Nazis, but Josef explains that the died of cancer. Aaron says he wants to attend the funeral after having seen too many men in Dachau die without funerals. That night, Josef and his father attend the funeral. They rip at pieces of their clothes until they tear—a tradition at Jewish funerals. Schiendick, the Nazi from below deck, interrupts the ceremony to say that it is a German law for bodies buried at sea to be wrapped in the national flag. He unfurls a swastika-bearing Nazi flag. The passengers gasp. Josef spits at the man’s feet at calls it a sacrilege. The Captain intervenes, telling Schiendick to take the flag and leave, threatening to confine the man to his quarters. Josef notices, when the body is pushed over the railing, that the Captain touches his cap rather than give the Nazi salute.
As the tanker bears toward the refugee boat, the Cubans on board panic and discuss what to do. Lito wants to light a fire so they are seen; Señor Castillo says if they are seen, they’ll be picked up and returned to Cuba according to maritime law. At the last second, Luis gets the engine started and they dart out of the way of the tanker’s prow. The boat stops again. Iván’s father has fallen overboard. Isabel spots Señor Castillo and dives in after him.
Analysis
The theme of visibility arises in the scene where Isabel’s family and the Castillos put their homemade watercraft into the ocean, scrambling among countless other Cubans. In a surreal interruption, a CNN reporter attempts to interview Isabel’s mother as they flee. Although the intrusion may appear tone-deaf and rude on the reporter’s part, Gratz establishes the importance of media attention in the novel. For each of the three protagonists, making their struggle visible to the rest of the world will prove key to their survival.
Gratz develops the theme of support with the chapter detailing Josef’s bar mitzvah on board the MS St. Louis. Compared to what life has been like for Jewish children since Germans elected Hitler chancellor of Germany in 1933, life on the ship for Josef and Ruthie is dream-like. As instructed by the German captain Gustav Schroeder, who is based on a real-life historical figure, the crew of the ship treat the Jewish refugees with the respect they were denied back home. The captain’s support for his passengers extends to him turning the social hall into a synagogue where Josef can celebrate his passage from childhood to manhood. Gratz also touches on the theme of trauma in this scene, as Josef’s father is too paranoid to leave his cabin and take part in the ceremony, which he assumes must be a Nazi trap. Having spent six months under torturous conditions at the Dachau concentration camp, Josef’s PTSD had warped his sense of reality, and he cannot believe he is free.
Schroeder continues to show support for his nine hundred Jewish passengers by taking down an imposing portrait of Hitler during the bar mitzvah, politely granting the rabbi’s request because he understands how so many of his guests have been traumatized by the Nazi leader and his followers. However, not everyone in the captain’s crew is prepared to honor his wishes. The theme of prejudice soon comes up again when Josef sees Officer Schiendick give a small angry outburst when the portrait of Hitler comes down. With this scene fragment, Gratz foreshadows Schiendick’s increasing hostility toward the Jews on the ship.
In subsequent chapters, Schiendick—based on a historical figure who was on board the MS St. Louis as a Nazi Party spy—makes his Nazi allegiance known by whistling an anti-Semitic song within earshot of Josef. Simultaneously, Josef sees anti-Semitic propaganda material in the crew quarters, confirming that there are card-carrying Nazi Party members working on the ship, meaning his family is not safe from prejudice. Schiendick soon grows bolder, interrupting the funeral of an elderly man who has died on board to insist that he be wrapped in the swastika-bearing flag of Nazi Germany. When the Jewish mourners protest against what is clearly a provocation, Schroeder disciplines the Nazi crewman in another display of solidarity with the Jewish passengers he hopes to bring to safety.
Meanwhile, in Mahmoud’s storyline, his family encounters a near-complete lack of support as they make their way to Germany. Although the country has agreed to accept proportionally high numbers of Syrian refugees, there are several less-hospitable countries the Bisharas must travel through to get there. To survive, Mahmoud’s father Youssef works quickly and shows cunning as he plans for the family to be taken by boat into Greece by a smuggler. In Turkey, the Bisharas see they are one of many refugee families, and the only help they can find is from an opportunistic, entrepreneurial impoverished boy. In a moment of foreshadowing, the boy casually speaks of the threats of their planned crossing so that he can make a bit more money selling life jackets. With no state or international governing body or NGO there to help the migrants, they have no choice but to accept the child’s offer.
