ESSAY CEMETERY

Preface (signed A.G Pym) Pym meets some people who urge him to write his tale. He is reluctant to publish it for fear he would not be believed because its contents are so marvelous. Also he is a poor writer. Mr. Poe, he says, took great interest in the tale and wrote it up and published it as fiction. Chapter I Pym comes from a respectable family in Nantucket. He goes out to sea on a small sailboat with his friend Augustus. Augustus takes the boat far out and Pym realizes that he is drunk. Pym can't sail well and a storm is approaching. He hears a terrible scream and passes out and wakes up on the deck of a whaling ship. He realizes that the two ships had collided and that they had been rescued, first Pym and Augustus after half an hour. They had both been near death. Chapter II 1.5 years after the Ariel disaster, he deceives his family who is opposed to his seafaring aspirations by telling them he is off to spend several weeks with Mr. Ross to whom he is relate

Mary Rowlandson. Image source Devices and Style ·          Some deviations from the subject In her younger years she lay under much trouble upon spiritual accounts, till it pleased God to make that precious scripture take hold of her heart, "And he said unto me, my Grace is sufficient for thee" (2 Corinthians 12.9). More than twenty years after, I have heard her tell how sweet and comfortable that place was to her. ·          Philosophizing When we are in prosperity, Oh the little that we think of such dreadful sights, and to see our dear friends, and relations lie bleeding out their heart-blood upon the ground. ·          Chapters titled "Removes"- "The First Remove" etc. ·          Quoting Scripture I may say, as it is in Psalm 38.5-6 "My wounds stink and are corrupt, I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly, I go mourning all the day long." Themes ·         Faith in the Lord The fact that the dogs do not h

Mary Rowlandson.  Image source In February 1675 the first attack by the Indians of Lancaster occurred. They set fire to the dwellings of Lancaster and kill its inhabitants. They set fire to Mary's house, and when Mary and her children try to leave her house they are shot at. They finally have to, upon which her brother-in-law die from a previous wound. She herself is shot as is Sarah, the six-year old child in her arms, and a child of her sister's murdered by a blow to the head. Hearing of this, her sister prays to go with them and is promptly shot too. The Indians take the children one way, and Mary another, promising that they would not hurt her if she came with them. Of the 37 of them in her house, only one evaded both death and captivity. 24 are taken alive as captives.  The First Remove The first night in captivity is miserable. She is denied sleep in an English-made dwelling. Still in the ravaged town, the Indians celebrate all night, singing and dancing a

Throughout the twentieth century, the assimilation of Jews in America underwent a transformation. Mary Antin's The Promised Land , written in 1912, shows a young immigrant's desperate struggle to learn English and prove herself worthy of the country, its people, and its language, while repressing every relic of the Old World, its language, and its customs. Lamed Shapiro's New Yorkish shows the beginning of a shift of power relations between non-Jewish American society, but to another, equally unhealthy extreme: the story's protagonist has powerful conflicting feelings toward gentiles, betraying the gap that still exists between Jews and non-Jews. Finally, Grace Paley's The Loudest Voice relates the experiences of a second-generation Jewish American child, in a loving mockery of both gentile and Jewish America that shows that self-aware assimilation in America is entirely possible; the intense emotions and conflicts that surrounded Jew-Gentile interactions are gon

Leopold Gursky is old. He lives in New York but he is originally from Poland/Russia. In the third person we learn that the woman he loved left for America before the war, had his child and married another man when he didn't return her letters because of the war. The child grew up not knowing the protagonist and to be a writer. In America he had a locksmith business with his cousin which he inherited when the cousin died. He goes to nude model for a drawing class. Some time later, a man calls him in the middle of the night to unlock his door. My Mother's Sadness Alma is the narrator (speaker?) here. It changes abruptly. This section is organized in brief chapters. Her younger brother Bird is a very unique individual, prone to fantasizing and depressed and practices his own unique brand of Jewish mysticism. Her father is dead and Israeli and her English mother met him at a kibbutz. He gave Alma's mother a book called The History of Love . Alma is fifteen. She