But how many guys did she go to looking for her Sugar Daddy before she locked onto Hitler? There was pretty of time in between for her to be hitting on a hundred different guys. Maybe she nudged him to that restaurant knowing they wouldn't let her in. She was playing him the whole time.
I'm assuming this is intended sarcastically, as I'm sure that most attractive, fun 19 year olds looking for Sugar Daddies latch on to old, untalented poverty-stricken foreign painters, as soon as they run out of their first choice -- unemployed-30-something-D&D-players-still-living-in-their-parents'-basement.
In a story full of characters, it became clear very early that she was not there to grow and develop, but only to move the plot along.
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"Why don't you take it off?" he asked her.
"I don't know," she said, standing on the doorstep of a run-down hotel. "Maybe because I'm only a plot device, and if I remove the patch, I won't be able to get raped, which is what I need to do to move the story forward."
Because she was a Jew the better guys were out of reach.
As far as why she didn't take off the patch (or was it armband), why didn't they take off the yellow star or the pink triangle in our Germany?
In general, I'm thinking its putting too many rabbits into too many hats to think that she is plotting that an unemployed painter will (a) take care of her? . . . (b) join the cause for Jewish freedom? She is not "playing him." We don't really have any facts about her to know what her internal motivations are. You might as well say that she planned her own rape when she knew he'd be walking by.
In our Germany, there was enforced pressure to wear the Jew-symbols because it was an integrated society, where everyone knew who the Jews were anyway. If I'm not wearing my armband, the Gentile down the street will know it because we grew up together and he knows I'm Jewish.
The same logic is not applicable to new immigrants from Poland, especially ones who don't appear to have Jewish names (Tesia?) and don't "look Jewish." It is certainly reasonable to assume she is wearing the armband because its the law, and she isn't expecting to get rounded up and raped because of it.
But this is an example of free-floating time line problems, more than gender problems. We don't know how people will act because we don't know how the time lines diverge. Did Jews have to wear armbands in Poland, too? Jews were generally protected from the government in the Soviet Union (based on their ethnic Jewishness -- the were often persecuted for other reasons, of course). Is there something more anti-Jewish about this time line's Russian revolution? Without knowing what is consistent and what is not, we can only speculate.
Putting everything else aside, though, there is certainly nothing in the text that would lead us to believe that Tesia feels like she's settling based on a lack of better options.