70 pages • 2 hours read
Morris GleitzmanOnce
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
Felix Salinger
Narrator and protagonist of Once, Felix is a ten-year-old Jewish boy who runs away from a mountain orphanage in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942. He has been there for three years and eight months by the time the novel starts. Felix wears glasses, he but gives little other description of himself. He has a vivid imagination and uses it to come up with stories to entertain and even protect others. Felix habitually carries his notebook, in which he writes stories and keeps cherished letters from his parents. Because his parents were booksellers, Felix grew up believing more in the importance of books than anything else. Consequently (and innocently), he believes that the Nazi’s book burning is the greatest crime they commit for a time.
Felix’s character arc is marked by a shift from naivety/innocence, to denial, to despair, and finally to acceptance of what is happening in Poland because of the Nazis. With each horror he is exposed to, he is forced to redefine his view of the world. However, throughout the novel, Felix hangs on to his altruistic ways, first exhibited by trying to get Dodie to the front of the bathing line, and finally by ripping up his notebook for the other Jewish captives on the Nazi train to use as toilet paper. Felix cares deeply for Zelda, even after he discovers that her parents were Polish Nazi sympathizers, not Jews. He develops a strong bond with Barney, who helps Felix understand the true situation they face, caring for him all the while. Through Barney, Felix reaches a more adult understanding of life and selflessness.
Zelda
Felix finds Zelda unconscious next to her dead parents and burning home. Zelda is a precocious six-year-old whose catchphrase is “Don’t you know anything?” She travels with Felix through the countryside to the city, where she hides in Barney’s cellar. For most of the novel, she remains unaware that her parents are dead. Felix placates her with promises of finding them and stories that distract her.
Zelda represents a certain survivalism in naiveté. She has a casual and limited understanding of events, yet can put others around her to shame in their comprehension, reinforced by her admonishment, “Don’t you know anything?” Her innocence lets the reader believe she may survive through the end of the war, yet that remains to be seen.
Barney
Based on a real Jewish man, Janusz Korczak, who risked his life and died taking care of and protecting Jewish orphans, Barney is a Jewish dentist living in a Polish ghetto. Barney is described as a big, bearded man who frequently wears a leather jacket with a bullet hole in the back and carries a big leather bag. He saves Felix and Zelda when they reach the city after marching for hours along with a caravan of other Jewish prisoners. Barney uses his skills as a dentist to help his fellow Jews in the ghetto as well as to curry favor with the Nazis to get food. He hides Zelda, Felix, and a number of other boys and girls in the cellar of a defunct Jewish printshop. He knows that Jewish children are sent straight to the death camps, so he does all he can to protect them.
Barney comes to rely on Felix as his right-hand man. He enlists his help on his dental visits: He respects Felix’s prowess as a storyteller and has Felix tell stories to distract the patients from the pain of dental work without anesthetics. Unfortunately, Barney’s efforts to protect the children are in vain.
Mother Minka
A severe yet caring Catholic nun, Mother Minka is the head sister of the mountain orphanage where Felix’s parents left him. Mother Minka is Polish, but she cares for the plight of the Jewish people of Poland under Nazi rule. She was a frequent customer of Felix’s parent’s shop. Knowing how the political climate was changing, his parents arranged for Felix to be taken into Mother Minka’s care at the orphanage. Felix stays there for three years; all the while Mother Minka shields him from the truth of the fate of Poland’s Jewish people. She takes in another Jewish child, Jankiel, whom she makes swear not to tell Felix what is happening. Despite her precautions, Felix runs away when he finds out that Nazis are burning books.
