No Pretty Pictures

Unpack Anita’s fraught relationship with her Jewish identity. How does Anita’s exposure to the Holocaust impact her relationship with Judaism? How does her aversion to Judaism relate to the common need for young people to create an independent identity?

Niania’s words suggest she’s anti-Jewish, but her actions demonstrate her devotion to Jewish people. In modern society, where people are routinely judged by what they say, how might Niania be received? How does the figure of Niania expose the danger of judging a person primarily by the words they use?

Anita says her story contains no pretty pictures and that she was born in a bad place at a bad time, yet Anita’s story has many hopeful, beautiful moments. Identify the moments, and explain how they complicate common ideas about tragedy and suffering.

Lobel says it’s “wearisome as well as dangerous to cloak and sanctify oneself with the pride of victimhood” (xiii). What does Lobel mean by this, and how does it influence the reader’s evaluation of Anita?

Anita’s brother doesn’t have much of a voice in the book. If Anita’s brother did speak up more, what would he say? How might he advance or oppose Anita’s actions and beliefs?

Read another account of the Holocaust and compare it to Anita’s experiences. There’s The Diary of Anne Frank, Night, and lots of other books to choose from.

Lobel holds off on turning her suffering into a moral. Is the moral that there is no grand takeaway from suffering? Is there a subtle lesson in how Anita struggles with her trauma without reducing it to labels and categories?

Put Anita’s survival of the Holocaust in conversation with another person’s survival of a different form of oppression. In They Called Me a Lioness, Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian girl, documents how she fights oppression from Israel (Tamimi, Ahed, They Called Me a Lioness. One World, 2022). In Chains, a novel, Laurie Halse Anderson shows how Isabel survives chattel slavery in the United States (Anderson, Laurie, Halse. Chains. Atheneum, 2010). Discuss the key similarities and the critical difficulties.