Refugee
Alan Gratz (2017)
“Three children. Three crises. Seventy years apart. One devastating truth about what it means to flee everything you know.”
Language Register
Accessible and immediate — present tense, close third-person, age-appropriate vocabulary with moments of precise historical and geographical specificity
Syntax Profile
Gratz writes in a sustained present tense throughout — a deliberate craft choice that eliminates narrative distance and keeps every scene immediate. Sentences are short to medium length. He rarely uses subordinate clauses in action sequences, breaking them into fragments to accelerate pace. Interior monologue is brief and specific. There are no long meditative passages of the kind Fitzgerald or Morrison would use — Gratz distrusts abstracton. When he generalizes, he does it through the specific: a child's decision, not an argument about children.
Figurative Language
Moderate and purposeful — Gratz uses figurative language when it crystallizes something the plain statement can't, and withholds it in moments of greatest emotional intensity. The most devastating moments in the book are rendered in plain, factual prose. This is deliberate: beauty of language at moments of ugliness of fact would be dishonest.
Era-Specific Language
Actual German ocean liner that carried 937 Jewish refugees in 1939; its turning-away is one of WWII's most documented refugee tragedies
US immigration policy 1995-2017: Cuban migrants intercepted at sea were sent back; those who reached US soil could apply for asylum
Spanish for 'rafter' — term for Cuban refugees who fled by makeshift boat during the 1994 crisis
Nazi intelligence service (SD); referenced in Josef's sections through Schiendick's role
'If God wills it' — Arabic phrase used naturally in Mahmoud's family speech
EU rule that asylum seekers must claim refugee status in the first EU country they enter — creates perverse incentives in the Balkan route
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Josef Landau
German-Jewish middle class; educated, formal, aware of status. His father was a doctor. Josef uses precise, considered language even under stress — a reflection of an upbringing that valued restraint.
The Landaus were integrated German citizens before Nazism. Their displacement is also a displacement from identity — they are not 'just' refugees, they are people who were not supposed to be refugees.
Isabel Fernandez
Cuban working class; warm, musical, community-embedded. Her speech (rendered in English) carries the rhythms of Cuban Spanish — contractions, nicknames, physical expressiveness.
Isabel's class position means she has less to lose materially but more to lose communally. What she is leaving is not possessions but a world.
Mahmoud Bishara
Syrian middle class (father was an engineer); educated, deliberate, code-switching between formal and intimate registers. His Arabic family speech is rendered with warmth; his encounters with official systems are reported in neutral, tactical language.
Mahmoud's class background makes his displacement particularly legible to Western readers — he is not an 'other' from a distant world but a recognizable middle-class child from a city not so different from theirs, now destroyed.
Narrator's Voice
Close third-person present tense for all three children — Gratz maintains consistent technical apparatus while differentiating each voice through diction, imagery, and interior emphasis. Josef's sections lean toward moral weight; Isabel's toward sensory and emotional vividness; Mahmoud's toward tactical assessment. The uniform present tense creates the effect of simultaneity — all three children are experiencing their crises now, even though they are separated by decades.
Tone Progression
Opening chapters (Josef 1939, Isabel 1994)
Alert, apprehensive, inhabited
Gratz establishes the texture of normal life under pressure. The world is still recognizable; the danger is real but not yet total.
Crossing chapters
Kinetic, terrified, compressed
The prose strips down to action and reaction. No time for reflection — only movement. Sentence length halves.
Border and aftermath chapters
Grinding, exhausted, quietly dignified
The physical danger has passed but the institutional danger persists. The tone shifts from thriller urgency to the slower, more corrosive dread of bureaucratic limbo.
Convergence and resolution
Grave, tender, historically anchored
Gratz slows to let the connections register. The present tense continues, but the sense of time has expanded — each action resonates across decades.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Sharon Creech — similarly child-centered crisis narrative with emotional directness
- Markus Zusak's The Book Thief — also WWII-adjacent, also weaving historical fact with invented lives, but denser and more experimental
- Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai — Vietnamese refugee experience, different form (verse novel) but comparable emotional directness
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions