Room for One More

Monique Polak, an award-winning author of over twenty novels for young people, has created a new work to educate pre-teens about the horrors of Nazi Germany and the importance of welcoming refugees wholeheartedly. In her dedication, she thanks one of her teachers for introducing her to the real-life Rosetta who told her the story that inspired this work of fiction.

In Room for One More, 12-year-old Rosetta has her comfortable Montreal world disrupted in 1942 when her family welcomes a 16-year-old refugee, Isaac Guttman, into their home. Her parents take him in as a small way of making a difference in dangerous times. Isaac, who escaped to England from Germany via the Kindertransport of Jewish refugee children between 1938 and 1940, and there he was befriended by Rosetta’s English grandmother. Then Britain decided to deport its “enemy aliens” to the overseas dominions, mostly to Canada. The British government did not take into consideration that Jewish refugees from Europe would be opposed to Hitler, and, therefore, not a threat. Instead, they lumped them in with German and Italian internees. By the time Rosetta’s family rescued Isaac, he had been in an internment camp on St. Helen’s Island in the St. Lawrence River for almost a year.

A well-mannered boy with an accent, Isaac is not as forthcoming about his experiences as Rosetta would like. She presses him for information, snoops in his belongings, and learns more about the plight of European Jews and others in Nazi-dominated Europe. Rosetta has a crush on Broderick, her best friend’s elder brother, but when Broderick makes anti-Semitic remarks to Isaac, her crush evaporates. (See Excerpt above) Isaac is a convincing character; Rosetta, the narrator, less so. Though she is 12 (the cover blurb says “fifteen”), her thought processes seem those of a younger child. Possibly the author presented her this way to make the story more accessible to children aged eight to eleven, but, considering the complexity of the subject matter, it might have been better to aim the story at teenagers.

Rosetta and her sisters, Annette and Esther, are strangely unaware of the persecution of their fellow Jews in Nazi Germany, a persecution which began shortly after Hitler was elected in 1933, nine years before the novel opens. Their parents are well-informed, educated professionals; her mother is a poet, her father an engineer and treasurer of the oldest synagogue in the city. It seems odd that Rosetta, as a child growing up in the 1930s, knows nothing about the systematic dismissal of German Jews from public service positions and the professions, and the confiscations of their businesses. Kristallnacht, when Jewish businesses were attacked by Nazi thugs, was in November 1938. Between 1933 and 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews left Germany.

As of the fall of 1941, the Nazis began transporting Jews to extermination camps, news that is brought to Rosetta’s family by Mr. Schwartzberg, a German Jewish refugee who is making it his mission to alert the North American Jewish community. Since Rosetta is eavesdropping when she hears this horrific news, we may conclude that her parents, who have sent their daughters upstairs, wish to shelter them. The girls are aware of some war events, such as the Dieppe Raid (August 19, 1942) because their housemaid’s brother, overseas with the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, was taken prisoner there. Yet, while other young Canadians are collecting scrap metal for the war effort and writing essays about the importance of war bonds to defeat the Nazis, Rosetta and her sisters seem preoccupied with their own little world. Annette, 16, is obsessed with fashion; Rosetta is preparing for a public speaking contest with a speech on breakfasts round the world, and Esther enjoys playing in a piano packing case, which, incredibly, is kept in the front yard of their Westmount home. Possibly the author deliberately presents them as naive in order to emphasize how Isaac broadens their perspective, but their unawareness is unconvincing.

Isaac’s story is complicated and compelling. After his father’s death, his mother, a blue-eyed, blonde “Aryan goddess”, (in his words), was recruited by the Nazis to teach in a girls’ school specializing in domestic skills and Nazi doctrine. His mother gave him to Tante Dora, his father’s sister, to raise. In a heartrending passage, Isaac tells Rosetta how he stood outside the school to see his mother, who noticed him but did not acknowledge him. Near the end of the novel, this seeming rejection appears in a different light after a prominent member of the Canadian Jewish community looks into Isaac’s story at Rosetta’s request.

During the Second World War, Canadian women’s horizons expanded as they filled factory jobs vacated by enlisted men, flew Lancaster bombers across the ocean and joined the armed services. Room for One More, however, doesn’t reflect this wartime change in women’s roles. Rosetta and her sisters aren’t being encouraged to do anything non-traditional. Though their father calls them by male nicknames, with Annette being Andy; Rosetta, Ronnie and Esther, Eddy, and though he claims to be the luckiest man in Montreal to live with “so many talented lovely females”, he takes more interest in Isaac’s education than in theirs, even though Annette, the eldest, is 16, like Isaac. The only indication that times are changing for women, at least in some areas of life, occurs during a conversation about McGill Medical School’s quota system limiting the admissions of Jews and women. Mother says that, if she were in charge of medical school admissions, she would accept “the very best candidates, no matter their race, religion and gender”, and she hopes that “one day, McGill University will graduate more female doctors than male ones!”

An author’s note explaining more about Hitler’s regime and the course of the Second World War would have been an asset to this novel. Though Room for One More is not subtle in conveying its message, it is well-intentioned, worthy, and may influence today’s young readers to be accepting of refugees and other newcomers to Canada.