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

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

The narrator's father Enrique is born in 1920 to his parents Sima and Luis. They are peasants and live simply in the woods. His father is secretly Jewish but unlike his mother feels no real connection to Hebrew and Judaism. They pretend to be Catholic but simultaneously partook in Jewish traditions and this didn't draw attention because everyone around them had weird traditions. They avoided being baptized. They were not very religious and practiced it as a sort of default and the narrator feels they were more "secret assimilationists", wanting the easier life that being a Catholic in Cuba allowed. On the other hand, Sima's father Ytzak felt he was super Cuban and wished he could be openly Jewish and in Havana he was. Yitzak grew up in Santiago, a city. It had an international mix and though everyone pretended to be Catholic as in the countryside he saw people practicing other beliefs openly. As Jews had never been officially allowed in the Spanish Coloni

Themes ·        Practicing Judaism in secrecy ·        Pretending to be Christian ·        Peasantry ·        International urban life ·        Fear of persecution ·        Joy in open practice ·        Betrayal of son and kidnapping People and Places ·        Oriente ·        Luis ·        Sima ·        Enrique ·        Moishe Menach ·        Black women ·        Fidel ·        Havana ·        Santiago ·        Haiti Achy Obejas

Themes ·        Aunt gladys's English is botched:           “You’re going to   call her you don’t know her?” ·        Aunt Gladys criticizes everything ·        Preoccupation with the body: plastic surgery, fix the eyes, Brenda is myopic… “Where did you get those fine shoulders? Do you play something?” “No,” I said. “I just grew up and they came with me.” “I like your body. It’s fine.” ·        Language creates reality:       Actually we   did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them—at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. ·        Metafiction, self-reflexivity, awareness of style ·        Imagining the future ·        Senescence ·        Race and skin color People and Places ·        Neil ·        Brenda Patimkin ·        Aunt Gladys ·        Doris the cousin ·        Laura Simpson Stolowich "Simp" ·        Uncle Max ·        Carlota the maid (a Navajo-Negr