Karen Levine Biography

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How does Karen Levine make a private life public? How does she use the structure of the text to achieve her purpose? What elements of social, historical and cultural context does she include to help us understand the character’s life and also how do the writer and character respond to challenges? Karen Levine delivers a faction-based biography about a young girl and how her story brought together three lives- Hana Brady, the Jewish victim of the Holocaust; George Brady, the Jewish brother who never got to bid his sister a proper farewell and Fumiko Ishioka, the Japanese woman whom persistence is the reason this biography could exist. Although this biography is based on three characters, the focus is mainly on Hana Brady and Fumiko Ishioka. These two characters have such different backgrounds and we can see that through the changing of settings in every chapter. In the beginning of every chapter, there is a date and the place where the chapter would be based on. Levine Hana and Fumiko’s story in a way that seems like Hana and Fumiko were connected. When Hana was facing a hardship, Fumiko was also. Levine uses pictures throughout the biography to help the audience understand the characters in this book better. All of the pictures are in black and white; this helps the target audience- children, to understand that the story of Hana Brady happened a long time ago. While Karen Levine is ultimately delivering Hana’s biography to the world, at the same time she is also giving us glimpses of Fumiko’s and George’s life. Karen Levine shows us personal pictures of Hana and George, to help us understand them. She shows us some documents from the war and described them below each picture; this adds sophistication and a ‘real-life’ quality to the story. Levine shows us one main culture in this biography: Jewish. She shows us some Jewish cultures in the chapters of Hana and

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