Yellow Bird Sings (Rosner)

The Yellow Bird Sings 
Jennifer Rosner, 2020
Flatiron Books
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250179760


Summary
In Poland, as World War II rages, a mother hides with her young daughter, a musical prodigy whose slightest sound may cost them their lives.

As Nazi soldiers round up the Jews in their town, Roza and her 5-year-old daughter, Shira, flee, seeking shelter in a neighbor’s barn.

Hidden in the hayloft day and night, Shira struggles to stay still and quiet, as music pulses through her and the farmyard outside beckons. To soothe her daughter and pass the time, Roza tells her a story about a girl in an enchanted garden:

The girl is forbidden from making a sound, so the yellow bird sings. He sings whatever the girl composes in her head: high-pitched trills of piccolo; low-throated growls of contrabassoon. Music helps the flowers bloom.

In this make-believe world, Roza can shield Shira from the horrors that surround them. But the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Roza must make an impossible choice: whether to keep Shira by her side or give her the chance to survive apart.

Inspired by the true stories of Jewish children hidden during World War II, Jennifer Rosner’s debut is a breathtaking novel about the unbreakable bond between a mother and a daughter.

Beautiful and riveting, The Yellow Bird Sings is a testament to the triumph of hope—a whispered story, a bird’s song—in even the darkest of times. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Jennifer Rosner is the author of If A Tree Falls: A Family's Quest to Hear and Be Heard (2010), a memoir about raising her deaf daughters in a hearing, speaking world. Her children's book, The Mitten String (2014), is a Sydney Taylor Book Award Notable.

Jennifer's writing has appeared in the New York Times, Massachusetts Review, Forward, Good Housekeeping, and elsewhere. She lives in western Massachusetts with her family. The Yellow Bird Sings (2020) is her debut novel and is being published around the world. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Satisfying and sweet…. Love, empathy and fear―as well as a yellow songbird―wind through this tale of an unbreakable bond between mother and child. The novel demonstrates Ms. Rosner’s deep understanding of the terrors of the Holocaust.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Jennifer Rosner hooks readers from the onset…. Readers will have empathy for Roza and Shira, and admire Roza’s courage and persistence as she faces life without her daughter, releasing her to save her, like a bird freed from a cage.
Missourian


A study of music, imagination and the power of a mother’s love.
Parade


[M]oving if unsurprising…. Rosner switches between points of view to craft a wrenching chronicle of their separate journeys, though the conclusion suffers from schmaltz. This will offer few surprises to avid readers of Holocaust fiction.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Memoirist and award-winning children's author Rosner challenges the Holocaust with a touch of magic (the yellow bird appears throughout), clarifying a dangerous time and place even as she offers a vibrant, affecting portrait of the mother-daughter relationship.
Library Journal


This stunning debut novel sings with the power of a mother’s love and the heartbreaking risks she’ll endure.
Booklist


[A] Room-like twist, one that also deftly examines the ways in which art and imagination can sustain us…. [This] is impressive. A mother and her child-prodigy daughter struggle to survive the Holocaust by telling stories and remembering the power of music.
Kirkus Review


(Starred review) This stunning debut novel sings with the power of a mother’s love and the heartbreaking risks she’ll endure.
BookPage

Discussion Questions
1. What is the significance of Shira’s bird? How does it aid her? Do you think its original color, yellow, is important or telling? In what ways does the bird’s evolution mirror or not mirror Shira’s?

2. In the barn, Roza has to keep Shira—five years old and a musical prodigy—silent and still. What are her most effective strategies? Do you think she would have an easier time if Shira was younger or older?

3. When Roza asks Krystyna outright why she is helping them, Krystyna responds, "In God’s eyes your child is no different than mine. She deserves every chance to live. "What are Krystyna’s motivations for harboring Roza and Shira and, later, for arranging Shira’s transport to the convent? Do you think Krystyna knows of Henryk’s advances on Roza? If so, why doesn’t she send Roza and Shira away sooner?

4. How would you describe the relationship between Henryk and Roza? Does it change over time? From our twenty-first-century perspective, would we call it rape? Would Roza? Do you think she has any agency in their relationship? Is it still possible to think of Henryk’s decision to protect Roza and Shira, despite the risk, as heroic?

5. Judaism is fairly absent from the novel, despite it being the reason Roza’s and Shira’s lives are in danger. Why do you think that is the case? Why does Roza rarely reference her religion?

6. In the barn, Shira eats her own portion of food and whatever her mother saves for her. She also eats the special foods Krystyna gives her on outings. How does hunger, satiety, and the storing of food play out later, specifically with regard to her feelings of guilt?

7. In the convent, Zosia is permitted to speak but stays largely silent. As she grows more comfortable playing the violin, she comes to think of the sound as "safer even than silence." What does the author mean by that phrase? Discuss the importance of music in the novel. What can music express that words (or silence) can’t?

8. Although the nuns dye Zosia’s hair and teach her Catholicism, she still feels like an outsider. Discuss the various ways in which the girls, the nuns, and Pan Skrzypczak treat her otherness, and the forms of prejudice and kindness she encounters. Do you think they suspect that she is Jewish?

9. Discuss Roza’s relationship with the sisters, Miri and Chana, and Zosia’s relationship with Kasia at the convent. How is female friendship portrayed in this novel? How is it different from the relationship between mother and daughter?

10. At the camp in the woods, Roza is heartbroken to realize that other families remained intact: "Here are mothers, in the woods, in winter, who did not part from their children.They kept them with them and their children survived." Do you think she still made the right decision in sending Shira away? What would you have done in her place?

11. Roza cannot bear to hold Issi, a young child at the camp. Issi’s mother doesn’t understand, and the narrator explains, "What is whole does not comprehend what is torn until it, too, is in shreds." Do you agree that there is an inevitable limit to our empathy? Can novels like The Yellow Bird Sings expand our capacity to empathize? If so, how?

12. Over the course of the novel, Shira becomes Zosia and then Tzofia. What does she lose with each name change? In her author’s note, Jennifer Rosner rites of the hidden children who inspired her novel:

If you remember me, if there is anyone out there who recognizes me and can tell me about my family, my name, then I might discover my history, my roots: my self. For refugees of current wars and violence, children displaced and torn from their families, this question echoes on.

—Do you agree that Shira’s experiences continue to resonate today, with the global refugee crisis?

13. Why do you think Roza decides not to try to have more children once she moves to America? Do you think that was a selfish decision? Was it fair to Aron to keep it from him, or does she have the right to make that choice for herself?

14. What did you think of the novel’s ending? Do you believe that Shira and Roza will have a future together?
(Question issued by the publisher.)

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