SuitabookTattered Prayerbook
Ellen Bari
- Reading
- Consider reading together and pausing after the historical events or family revelations, so there is room to talk about what feels important or unclear.
- Themes
- Family memory and healing: Ruthie learns about her father’s childhood and the family’s flight from Nazi Germany; he had tried to put the prayer book and painful past behind him. The story presents sharing the family history with Ruthie as helping her father heal and allowing Ruthie to grow.
- Jewish history and persecution: The father’s story includes a burnt prayer book taken secretly from a destroyed synagogue after Kristallnacht and the family’s escape from Nazi Germany. Historical events provide context for the family’s story; how much wider historical explanation the book gives is not clear.
- Worth knowing
- The story addresses the Holocaust, persecution of Jews, a destroyed synagogue and a father’s painful past. How these events are depicted, and how much detail they receive, is unclear.