132 pages • 4 hours read
Ruth Minsky SenderThe Cage
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Introduction
The Cage
- Genre: Nonfiction; young adult autobiography
- Originally Published: 1986
- Reading Level/Interest: Lexile 500L; grades 7-9
- Structure/Length: 48 chapters; approx. 256 pages
- Central Concern: This Holocaust memoir describes how the author, at age 13, cared for her three younger brothers in Lodz, Poland, after their mother was taken by the Nazis. Lodz becomes a ghetto; her youngest brother dies before she and her other two brothers make the desperate decision to turn themselves over to the Nazis and go to a concentration camp.
- Potential Sensitivity Issues: Death of a sibling; horrors of life in a Polish ghetto and in concentration camps; wartime violence; anti-Semitism
Ruth Minsky Sender, Author
- Bio: Born in 1926 in Lodz, Poland; after her liberation by Russian forces from the Grafenort labor camp, she was reunited with her three older siblings; she moved to the United States and settled in Commack, New York, where she and her husband, Morris Sender, also a Holocaust survivor, raised their family
- Other Works: To Life (1988); The Holocaust Lady (1999)
- Awards: ILA Teachers’ Choices; CBC/NCSS Notable Children’s Book in Social Studies
CENTRAL THEMES connected and noted throughout this Teaching Unit:
- Humanity and Community Memory
- Motherhood
- Education, Writing, and Books
- Nature and Life Cycles
STUDY OBJECTIVES: In accomplishing the components of this Unit, students will:
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