By Aliza Billet, Senior Arts and Culture Editor

On Tisha B’Av ten summers ago, my Savta handed me a book that she felt was appropriate for the day: Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. Set in Germany during World War II, it felt like the right book to read on a fast day, especially one that is known as the saddest day on the Jewish calendar. I swallowed all 552 pages of it like they were the water I wasn’t drinking, and unknowingly embarked on a journey that would last a decade. A year later, when The Book Thief was assigned as summer reading for the incoming ninth graders at my school, I once again devoured it, this time over the course of a few weeks at summer camp. I used a pencil as a bookmark, and snatched a few pages any time I had the chance, even at the expense of some camp activities. 

Since then, I’ve made it a point to return to The Book Thief every summer, a tradition I’ve kept up for ten summers. After a decade, though, I’ve decided to finally put down The Book Thief and close this chapter of my life. However, I did not want to let the moment pass without reflecting upon it and upon the book that has been by my side for so long.

The Book Thief follows a young German girl named Liesel Meminger as she witnesses World War II and the Holocaust happening around her. From the depths of Nazi Germany and the home of her foster family, the Hubermanns, she discovers the power of words and learns how they can be used to bring out the best — and worst — in humanity. 

It is a nice enough story, with an interesting enough plot, but the richness of The Book Thief, and the reason I have been drawn to it year after year, is threefold: 

• The narrator, and by extension, the writing

The Book Thief is narrated by the personification of Death. However, Zusak’s version of Death is not morose, macabre or malicious. He is not evil, nor is he bloodthirsty; he is simply tired. He witnesses the destruction around him but does not relish in it. He is stuck in his role of collecting souls, but he is not proud of it. Rather, he looks for distraction from it. Most importantly, he is a poetic being who looks for the beauty in the everyday. His attitude toward his situation and humanity as a whole emerges through a sort of sarcastic, deadpan (no pun intended) tone, which keeps readers engaged and entertained.

The nature of Death-as-narrator also allows Zusak to utilize language in a unique and captivating manner. As he doesn’t view the world the same way human beings do, Death’s narration feels almost wonderous. I often find myself marveling over the way Zusak has him put words together. 

Though the book is written in prose, Zusak applies adjectives to his sentences like he is a poet, describing people, events, feelings and things as if he was the one who invented the English language, and we’ve all just forgotten it along the way. Most notably, he personifies words and language — which are also a theme of the book. He writes about how words can bruise a person, or how difficult conversations can be like words thrown on a table, staring at the occupants of a room until they are addressed. Quoting example after example out of context can come across as cheesy and even inflated, but Zusak peppers them throughout his pages so naturally that they just feel right. 

• The rest of the characters, and the emotional impact their stories convey to the reader

At this point, the characters in The Book Thief almost feel like my friends. Camp friends, you could say — I see them once a summer for an extended period of time, and it’s always a seamless return to our usual rapport. Hans Hubermann, Liesel’s foster father, makes me feel warm, with his kind soul that oozes rightness. Liesel’s relationship with her best friend and neighbor, Rudy Steiner, brings me back to blissful childhood friendship, and seeing the two of them grow up over the course of the book reminds readers of the potential of humanity. Rosa Hubermann, Liesel’s foster mother, is a beautiful display of the depth of mankind; she is initially painted as harsh and mean, but the narrative reveals how she clearly carries so much love within her. Lastly, Max Vandenburg, the young Jewish man Liesel’s family hides in their basement, is a testament to human endurance with his attitude toward life and survival.

So when the reality of war rips apart the world the book has painted, the reader is left truly devastated. Every year, the question is not “will I cry?” but rather, “how much?” and “at which parts?” A few years ago, I started folding down the corners of pages when I spilled tears over them, so now the edge of my book looks like a little minefield of emotional moments. Maybe that’s one reason I reread the book every year: so I can wipe the slate blank for my beloved characters and start afresh, returning them to their pre-story existence, before anything bad has happened to them. The problem is when I reach the end, and the cycle begins all over again.

• The new meaning that leaps out to me as my own years pass by 

Obviously, The Book Thief does not change from year to year. However, I am no longer the same 12-year-old kid I was when I read The Book Thief for the first time ten summers ago. 

First of all, as a student of literature, The Book Thief has been invaluable to me. I have gone from simply being a reader to being an aspiring author, so returning to this book over and over has been educationally eye-opening. I take inspiration from the plethora of ways this single novel has landed with me over the years. The way Zusak uses language and the way he develops his characters are two wells of inspiration I tap from in my own writing, and I can only hope to one day produce a work as impactful to someone as his work has been for me.

More seriously, I have gone from simply being a Jew in America to being a post-October 7th Jew in the world. Along with rising antisemitism, I have also seen a casual uptick in Holocaust denial online. It doesn’t raise flags in any intense way, so people don’t really talk about it, but I find a lot of “whataboutism” used whenever the Holocaust is mentioned. People feel the need to insert things like, “Hitler didn’t only kill Jews,” or wonder openly “what the Jews must have done to deserve what they got.”

While it’s true that Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust, to deny that we were the main group targeted is to ignore history, and to ignore history is to allow it to happen again.

On this final read of The Book Thief, which I completed on the tenth Tisha B’Av after the initial one, the Holocaust leapt out at me. This should be obvious, considering it is literally the historical backdrop of the book, but the setting landed differently for me this year than it has in any other.

The Book Thief is unapologetic about the Holocaust being about the Jews. Zusak, who isn’t even Jewish, does not shy away from saying the word “Jew,” or from making it clear that the Holocaust was fueled by hatred for Jews. It almost felt like a breath of fresh air, reading it written out so straightforwardly. No one was denying that the Holocaust happened to us, which is something I haven’t seen spelled out like that by a non-Jew in a long time. It was a nice contrast to the 2024 film A Real Pain, for example, where the word “Holocaust” was suspiciously absent —  despite the film being literally set on a Poland tour. 

So this is it. I’ve read The Book Thief for ten years in a row, and with this most recent turning of the 552nd page, I’ve made the bittersweet decision to put it down for a while. But I hope I’ve made a case for what makes this novel so enduring, and maybe others will continue reading it, even after I’ve finally put it down.

Photo Caption: The Book Thief

Photo Credit: Shira Kramer