Essay On The Devil's Arithmetic Book Vs Movie

Words: 578
Pages: 3

What do you do when you read a really, really good book? Do you read the next one and hope for a rainy day? Do you run right away to watch the movie on it? Well sometimes the movie is just way too different from the book, and occasionally it is the exact same. Likewise, the differences between the book and the movie of The Devil’s Arithmetic are many, and so too are the similarities. The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen, was published November of 1988. It is a gripping tale of how Hannah Stern, a young teenage girl living in New Rochelle, is somehow transported to another world after having a Passover dinner with her Jewish family. Hannah wakes up in Germany in 1940. She befriends a girl named Rafika, and after the Nazis take her and the whole village to a camp, Hannah is the only person who knows what is going on. Hannah struggles to stay alive, but when Rafika is chosen to be killed in a gas chamber, Hannah takes her place. She then suddenly wakes up out of her “dream” only to discover herself back in New Rochelle and that her friend, Rafika was actually who her Aunt Eva was in real life. From that point on, she has a different outlook on her Jewish faith. There are several similarities in the book and in the movie. One is the obvious fact that it is about a …show more content…
The first of many is that in the book, Hannah is called Chya by the people in Germany, and in the movie, they all call her Hannah. In like manner, the movie tells the story of Hannah with no brother, and Rafika is her cousin. In the book Hannah has a little brother and Rafika is a friend she makes along the way. Also the movie tells tales of a man named Arael, a close friend of Hannah, and the book holds not so much as a mention of his name. Furthermore, the rabbi lives and Gitil dies in the movie, and the book says that the rabbi dies and Gitil is one to live, to carry on and tell stories of the horrors of the