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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Mordecai determine to teach Ernie while Ernie is still young?

2. What is "Berlin Madness"?

3. How does Ernie reflexively defend himself against the bullying of the Pimpfe?

4. When Benjamin's hand bleeds, what do his fellow workers think about their cruelty?

5. What had a professor from Berlin found under the moss of the rock?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why does Yankel, the Galician, advise Benjamin to get out of Berlin?

2. What causes Ernie to feel hatred for the first time?

3. Why does Ilse Bruckner have to end her relationship with her friend Ernie?

4. Why is Jacob not consoled when Ernie promises to "spring" at the Hitler Youth if they bother the little boy?

5. What "mysterious" change takes place in Benjamin after Mordecai and Judith join him in Stillenstadt?

6. How does Mordecai answer the question of why the Just Man dies in bed, rather than in martyrdom?

7. What does Ernie do to ease the emptiness in his heart after the beating?

8. What solution does Moritz think would relieve the Jews of the danger involved in going to the synagogue.

9. How does Benjamin successfully market himself as a tailor?

10. How does the child Ernie come to feel that he is in charge of those around him?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Schwarz-Bart includes a number of characters who represent wide segments of society in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. In your essay, select two or three characters such as the nurse in the infirmary, the farmer's wife, the young Galician, or Herr Geek and explain what purpose they serve in presenting the reader with a panoramic viewpoint of the culture at that time.

Essay Topic 2

This author dedicates many pages of his story to dream sequences. For your essay, select one of the major dreams that Ernie has and interpret the dream, its relation to his waking life, and the author's possible purpose for including the dream in the story.

Essay Topic 3

The setting of this story is very specific, yet nothing is mentioned in this story of the rationale for hatred and mistreatment of the Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. What reasoning enabled Germans and others to believe that Jews should properly be exported or exterminated? Using Internet research for your essay, explain the societal elements that allowed such an idea as the Final Solution to come into existence in an educated, civilized society.

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