Playing with the Past in Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic

Abstract

In its trope of playing with the past as a kind of game, The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen wavers between conviction in young readers’ ability to confront the traumatic past and anxiety about the uncensored model of exposure that the novel is often thought to epitomize. Role-play emerges as this Holocaust text’s central modality of concomitantly pretending to know and not know, expose and conceal, hide and seek the truth without real danger or risk.