ESSAY CEMETERY

Everyone in the tavern is amazed by Faith's father, an old man, having written another song. They are used to artistic production coming from the young. Philip, Faith's lover, reads the poem aloud later that night in the kitchen. The poem expresses the misery that her father experienced since her mother's death, as well as a longing for a young girl who waits for him. Faith thinks the young girl is her mother, young and Philip thinks it's a different girl entirely. They argue about old and young people, about Faith's ex-husband, about her writing. Faith gets upset and sad. They talk about poetry and Phil's ex-wife Anita, Faith's friend, and she asks him not to bring her up. Faith, Richard and Anthony (Faith's children) go to visit Faith's father, Mr. Darwin, in an old-age home that also houses infirm young people. He can tell Faith isn't too happy. They talk about Ricardo, Faith's ex-husband. Her father tells them about a volume of s...

Paley used to only write poetry. This was done using her "ear for literature". Sometime in the mid 1950s Paley had an urge to write, but poetry was not the way to express it. The "beginning of big luck" happened: she got sick and her children had to go to all-day daycare for a few weeks. During this time she succeeded in writing several stories. She wrote them using her other "ear", her "home ear"- the faculty in her that let her be in touch with her early experiences. Early on, as a woman who was no longer a boy, Paley realized that she would be writing domestic fiction. Luck number one. A friend of Paley's made her ex-husband read Paley's work. This ex-husband was a publisher, and he published ten short stories by Paley. The "big luck" is the politics that went on around Paley as she was living her domestic life. This meant Paley, every woman writer in fact, was part of the second wave of the feminist movement. Activi...

Summary Men make war, even though it injures them terribly. Paley asks: how do they come to live this way? When Paley was a little girl, she was a boy. She wanted to continue being a boy and to go to war and do other boy things, a notion that changed only experiencing WWII. She lived in Army camps with her husband much of the time, which she liked because of the boys and the action. As she began to live her own life as a writer and otherwise, she stopped wanting to be a boy; in fact, she thought it was the worst thing that she could never identify with. And after she had children she began to notice the women around her, to really live among women, and ascribe importance to them. She began rejecting the notion that men lived exciting compelling lives. She began to be interested in women.  This is how she came to write about women. She began to explore the female terrain with which she was unfamiliar through her stories. Even though she felt what she was writing was triv...

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...

Themes and prominent elements ·        Jewish girl participating in Christian activities ·        Cultural immersion ·        Excessive, childish praising of god ·        Family disagreements over acculturation ·        Spunky little girl Style and devices ·        humor "In that case, don't be silly; I might very well be your teacher someday. Speak up, speak up."           "Yes," I shouted. "More like it," he said. "Now, Shirley, can you put a ribbon in your hair or a bobby pin? It's too messy."   "Yes!" I bawled." People and places ·        Mrs. Abramowitz ·        Mr. Bialik ·        Coney Island ·    ...

Shirley's is a very noisy neighborhood. Of all of the noisy elements there, her voice is the loudest, she says, and proudly. Her father too is loud. Her mother on the other hand is desperate for quiet. One morning, Shirley is called in to Mr. Hilton's classroom. He offers her the part of narrator of the school play, due to her extremely loud voice. Shirley accepts. The children take off thanksgiving decorations and put up Christmas ones. They learn carols. Her mother is indignant at all of the Christmas activities in which her Jewish neighbors are participating and about the immersion of her daughter in Christian culture. Her father disagrees, saying it's better than the tyrannical alternatives of other countries. Some parents brag about their children's parts in the play and some parents forbid their children to participate. In the meantime, Shirley is having a blast at the play. She is Mr. Hilton's assistant, shouting at children when Mr. Hilton is we...

Themes ·        Storytelling ·        Linear traditional stories vs. non-traditional stories ·        Conservative themes vs unorthodox themes ·        Generation gap ·        Metaliterature ·        Story within story Style and devices ·        Humor ·        Story within story ·        Dialogue Keywords ·        Story ·        Tragedy ·        Junkie People and places ·        de Maupassant ·        Chekhov ·        Manhattan ·        Turgenev ·  ...

The narrator's father is sick. He asks his daughter to write him a simple story like Maupassant or Checkhov, with a linear plot. She doesn't like to but tries in order to please him. She writes a story, based in reality, about a young man who becomes a junkie and his mother who becomes a junkie to keep him company. After a while the boy is disgusted and leaves. The story is short and without details. Her father asks for more details. He is not happy with the story. He is upset that the woman in her story has a child out of wedlock. They discuss storytelling technique and what the author does when she has difficulty inventing an end for her stories. The author tries again. She injects more details into the story, more psychology and humor and causal connections. The mother in the story joins her son because she prefers to be with the young generation than her own. She ends her story with the son moving out, sober and the mother alone and unable to overcome the addiction...