Tunes for Bears to Dance To

Mr. Levine, whose first name is Jacob, is an elderly Jewish man of European descent who survived the Holocaust by building gas chambers in his former village, which the Nazis turned into a concentration camp. His entire family perished in the Holocaust. He is still deeply traumatized, spending his days at a craft center carving a toy wooden village that replicates his former home down to “the bully everybody hated” (38). People who don’t know him well believe him to be mentally ill because he tips his hat frequently to nobody—a habit carried over from his days in the concentration camp, when he had to show his subservience to German officers.

Mr. Levine is fragile in some ways, haunted by his memories and nearly fainting after Henry accidentally cuts himself while trying to carve wood. However, as the story shows, he is a true survivor who understands The Inescapability of the Past but perseveres in spite of it. He takes great pride in carving his wooden village, but after its partial destruction, he goes right on rebuilding it. He is caught up in Mr. Hairston’s evil schemes, much as he was helpless to defy his Nazi captors. Yet, as the director of the craft center says of him, “Nothing can defeat him” (99). With his unwavering devotion to Henry, he is also one of the forces that helps Henry redeem himself at the end of the story.

Mr. Hairston, the novella’s antagonist, personifies The Everyday Nature of Evil. He is a scowling, angry racist with a sneering smile. He uses offensive racial slurs, he subjects his wife and daughter to verbal and physical abuse, and he involves Henry in a blackmail plot purely to show that the boy is corruptible like everyone else. By doing this, he facilitates Henry’s transition from innocence to a new understanding of the evil in the world.

The novel suggests that the evil Mr. Hairston represents is part of a continuum, the same in spirit if not scale as that perpetrated by the Nazis in the Holocaust. He compares himself to a dictator because he enjoyed the days of rationing, when he could make his customers line up and wait for their food. He also masterminds the destruction of Mr. Levine’s toy village, just as Nazis destroyed Mr. Levine’s real village and turned it into a concentration camp. Nevertheless, Henry finds it in his heart to pray for Mr. Hairston’s forgiveness; ultimately, he recognizes that Mr. Hairston is simply a human, which is precisely why he has the capacity for such harm.

Doris is a minor character whom Henry only encounters three times, but she is important in developing the arc of Henry’s emotional growth. She is a “whisper of a girl” with deep-set eyes (14), long black curls, and a bow in her hair. Nearly everything she does is done quietly: She comes and goes “like a ghost” and whispers her first word to Henry (15). Her near invisibility attests to the abuse she has experienced at her father’s hands, which has caused her to retreat into herself. However, she has a spark of defiance, which Henry sees when she tells him about her father’s behavior, and she arouses Henry’s sympathy in the same way that Mr. Levine does (underscoring the parallels between Mr. Hairston and the Nazis). Henry encourages her to stand up to her father as he stood up to Mr. Hairston in the end. He also realizes he must try to help her, even though it will mean coming back to a place that holds painful memories; in this way, she also contributes to Henry’s evolving attitude toward past trauma.