City of Orphans

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2000

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Chapters 9-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 9-13 Summary

Willa follows Maks into the dark and smelly building. Each tenement has four small flats per floor, and the rent is cheaper the closer to the top. They pass children playing, neighbors cooking, and a Polish family, the Vershinskis, who make brooms to earn a living. They are passed by a uniformed police officer exiting the building. Emma has been arrested and taken to the jail by City Hall, ominously called “The Tombs,” accused of stealing a watch from the hotel where she works. Mama, in her anguish, speaks in both Danish and English and explains their father is not yet home from work. All seem paralyzed without him there to handle the situation. Maks impulsively declares he will go get her, but the jail is closed until morning. Plus, Mama points out, she will need a lawyer. Willa is hiding in the corner. Mama makes unkind comments about her appearance. Maks declares, “Dirt ain’t people” (40). He explains how she saved him from harm but also from losing his hard-earned money. His mother apologizes to Willa for her indiscretion, stands, and gathers herself, and they wait for Maks’s father to come home.

Papa and Agnes return home from work, both tired and exhausted. Maks delivers the bad news to his father, and he is stunned into shock. Their lack of money and status plus their lack of understanding of the American judicial system will make the case more difficult. Papa is still trying to decide if Emma did indeed take the watch or if it was an accident. Maks has had enough and is ready to act. Papa delivers more bad news: The shoe factory is closing, and he and Agnes will be out of work. Maks says he will go to Emma with food, and Papa is pleased. Papa is upset with Maks getting into a fight but is proud of his son’s hard work selling papers. Willa wants to leave, insisting she is not comfortable being there under the circumstances. Maks wants to tell her earnestly to stay for his comfort but struggles to find the words. Bruno is waiting across the street.

Chapters 9-13 Analysis

Maks describes his decrepit tenement in hopeful tones though its layout is cramped and claustrophobic, meant to stuff as many people into a square block as possible. These tenements are monuments to the ills of unchecked capitalism and rapid industrialization. Booming factories employed large workforces to churn out a steady flow of products, finding this workforce in the large influx of immigrants to Ellis Island. These buildings were often filthy with industrial waste and stripped of individuality. Yet Maks finds hope and joy in the diversity and community the building houses. Beyond the physicality of the building are the families that reside within. Time spent around a dinner table is a chance to reconnect with each other and their shared culture and to remember a time when life was simpler.

Maks’s family is like many of this era, having left their homeland in search of a better life. The promise of freedom, prosperity, safety, and a better life for their children compelled many families to leave all they knew and begin again in a foreign land. What they found was not the utopia promised. Laborious and long days spent in factories in an overcrowded, filthy city were compounded by deep hatred from Americans. Immigrants were seen not just as second-class citizens, but as subhuman. Maks’s family is already living on thin margins financially, and the arrest of his sister for theft will only be made worse by her immigrant status.

Maks maintains his unrelenting sense of hope, even in the face of a family crisis. His optimism will be tested, though, as he takes on the darker forces of systemic corruption and xenophobia in the fight for justice. His optimism is set against the naturalistic themes of oppression and determinism. He is held in bondage to systems from which he cannot escape. This naturalistic aspect is seen most notably in Willa. Naturalist theory states that humans are shaped by their environment, and Willa has adapted to an almost animal-like creature in her attempt to survive life on the streets. She struggles to even understand Maks and his stable family life. Her deteriorated humanity points to another theory of human development, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. His theory states that humans are unable to ascend to higher levels of existence and self-actualization if their basic physiological needs are not met. Willa cannot comprehend the idea of a loving family as she is struggling just to find regular food and is in constant fear for her safety. In her friendship with Maks, she will finally gain the human connection she is missing and will learn to open herself up to love, but her belly must first be filled before her heart can follow.