Lola

Lola Character Analysis

Quick Facts

• Role: Sephardic Jewish teenager-turned-Partisan; witness and protector in the Sarajevo Haggadah’s chain of custody
• First appearance: “An Insect’s Wing: Sarajevo, 1940”
• Setting: Sarajevo during WWII; later Israel (Yad Vashem)
• Key relationships: Serif Kamal; Stela Kamal; her parents Lujo and Rashela; her sister Dora; Isak and Ina; Branko
• Affiliations: Hashomer Haza’ir (Young Guardians); Partisans; later, a janitor at Yad Vashem

Who They Are

Bold, frightened, practical, and tender by turns, Lola is the novel’s most intimate portrait of survival. She begins as a shy laundry worker and Zionist youth-group wallflower, but war makes her both witness and actor: a teenage girl who slips through a synagogue window and into history. Her path intersects with Muslim scholar Serif Kamal, resistance cells in the hills, and finally the haggadah itself—first hidden in Sarajevo, then rediscovered decades later in Jerusalem—so that the artifacts of culture and the grit of daily endurance become the same story.

Physical Description

The novel withholds glamour and gives us work-worn details: “red and scaly” hands from the laundry; later, after months as a partisanka, she is “gaunt and sinewy,” hair cropped to a boyish length. When the Kamals find her, she is “a dripping, wraithlike figure”—a body that records labor, hunger, and fear.

Personality & Traits

Lola’s defining quality is usefulness under pressure. The girl who once danced at youth meetings learns to make survival practical—boiling clothes, reading terrain, shielding the vulnerable. Her compassion does not soften her resolve; it directs it.

• Initially timid and insecure: At Hashomer meetings she hangs back from debate, more comfortable dancing than arguing. Her reticence underscores how far she travels toward decisiveness.
• Dutiful and hardworking: The “red and scaly” hands testify to miles walked with heavy laundry baskets beside her mother, Rashela. Work prepares her for Partisan hardship.
• Brave and resourceful: She escapes the synagogue, claims responsibility for little Ina, and earns a place with the Partisans by solving lice and typhus risks. Courage arrives as action, not proclamation.
• Resilient: Orphaned and repeatedly betrayed, she lives by her mother’s imperative—“Stay alive”—finding ways to endure when protection fails.
• Compassionate: Her tenderness toward Dora and fierce guardianship of Ina drive choices that put her at risk, and later open her to the Kamals’ care.

Why it matters: The book suggests that survival is not merely luck or heroism but a craft—an ethics of care applied to the body and the group. Lola’s practicality becomes moral intelligence.

Character Journey

Lola’s arc is a compression chamber. A shy Sarajevo teenager with a crush and curfews is thrust into a synagogue roundup, commanded by her mother to flee. The Partisans teach her suspicion and skill; abandonment by her leaders and the death of Isak and Ina teach her what movements cannot guarantee. In the Kamal household she relearns domestic quiet, witnessing Serif’s risky guardianship of the haggadah and discovering that safety can be communal and cross-cultural. After the war she marries Branko, her former commander—an abusive coda that proves survival is not the same as peace. Emigrating to Israel, she builds a sparse, solitary life, and, as an elderly janitor, she recognizes the haggadah on a shelf and completes a circle—validating her past and stitching personal memory to public record. Her odyssey embodies Identity and Belonging: a girl dislodged from home who must assemble a self from labor, loyalty, and the fragile continuities of culture.

Key Relationships

• Her family (Lujo, Rashela, Dora): The family’s intimacy—embodied in shared work and Dora’s dependence—forms Lola’s moral compass. Rashela’s command to flee reverberates as both blessing and burden: Lola obeys and survives, but lives with a survivor’s grief that fuels her later acts of protection.

• Isak and Ina: Fellow youth member Isak becomes a comrade in flight; Ina becomes Lola’s charge. The siblings’ drowned bodies under broken ice mark the end of Lola’s faith in leadership and the start of her bracing realism. Their loss sharpens her protective instincts and her mistrust of grand promises.

• Serif and Stela Kamal: The Kamals risk everything to shelter Lola, embodying Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict. Serif’s learned courage and Stela’s domestic gentleness give Lola a sanctuary that is quietly radical: a Muslim household sheltering a Jewish girl while protecting a Jewish book. With them, she experiences care without condition.

• Branko: As Partisan commander, he respects utility, not people. Their postwar marriage turns ideological zeal into private cruelty, showing how wartime hierarchies can calcify into domestic abuse. For Lola, leaving or outlasting Branko becomes another chapter of survival, not its epilogue.

Defining Moments

Even in a life of attrition, several flashes set the course of everything that follows.

• Escaping the synagogue: Obeying her mother, Lola climbs through a broken window and abandons safety for life. Why it matters: It reframes obedience as courage and makes survival an inherited command, not a selfish act.
• Joining the Partisans and stopping typhus: She insists on boiling clothes to kill lice, winning over Branko through competence. Why it matters: Knowledge from civilian life becomes wartime strategy; a girl’s “domestic” skill becomes collective salvation.
• Watching Isak and Ina drown: After being deserted by commanders, Lola sees Isak carry Ina onto the ice and vanish beneath it. Why it matters: The image freezes her faith in movements and replaces it with fidelity to individuals—the living, the near, the vulnerable.
• Witness to hiding the haggadah: Present in Serif Kamal’s study when the book is brought home, she becomes a living link in its provenance. Why it matters: Culture survives not by institutions alone but by ordinary people who risk secrecy and care.
• Rediscovering the haggadah at Yad Vashem: As an elderly janitor, she recognizes it on a shelf. Why it matters: The past answers back. Private memory corrects the public record, and Lola’s life acquires formal acknowledgment.

Symbolism & Significance

Lola is the book’s argument that culture survives through small, stubborn acts. She is one of the “people of the book” because she carries the ethics that keep the book alive: discretion, courage, and care. Her choices dramatize Courage and Moral Choice: escape instead of surrender, protection instead of self-preservation, testimony instead of silence. Her final recognition of the haggadah performs The Relationship Between Past and Present: memory becomes archive; a girl’s trauma becomes a nation’s artifact.

Essential Quotes

"I know you do. All those nights at Hashomer, I should hope they taught you something." Lola stared at her mother. "Did you really think I was asleep? No. I wanted you to go... But now I want you to go away from this place... I am your mother, and in this you must obey me. You go. My place is here with Dora and my sister."

Analysis: Rashela transforms obedience into an ethical mandate to survive, recoding flight as filial duty. The moment frees Lola to act without the guilt of abandonment while binding her to a lifelong charge: to make that sacrifice mean something.

"You can't get rid of lice by picking at them." Lola spoke in a rush. "They hide in the seams where you can't find them. If I boil your clothes, it will kill them all. You'll see."

Analysis: The line elevates domestic knowledge to strategic wisdom. In a world where ideology often fails, practical care saves lives and earns Lola authority in spaces that dismiss her.

She gave a shy smile. "In my family, I was the mule."

Analysis: The self-deprecating image reframes drudgery as training. What once felt like low status becomes the very endurance—carrying, cleaning, persisting—that equips her for resistance and survival.

I came into the library that day, and I found the section of shelves I'd cleaned the week before, and started taking down the books on the next section... And then I had it in my hand. I looked at it. I opened it. And I was back in Sarajevo, in Effendi Kamal's study, with Stela trembling beside me...

Analysis: The past returns through touch. The sensory shock collapses decades, proving that memory is not only narrative but physical recognition. Lola’s personal history authenticates the artifact, closing the loop her younger self helped create.