ESSAY CEMETERY

Rosa lives in Miami, Florida in a decrepit hotel for which Stella pays rent. She is retired after having axed her own junk shop vusiness. She writes letters to Stella to remain on good terms with her, and to Magda. She imagines Magda is alive. She writes her in Polish which she considers far superior to either English or Yiddish. She finally leaves her room to do some laundry at a Laundromat, where she meets Simon Persky, a Jew who left Poland before the War. She feels she is superior to him because he speaks Polish and English. He insists on courting her even though she behaves nastily towards him. She gets a package that she assumes is Magda's shawl, sent her by the reluctant Stella who has been taking psychology classes and regards Rosa's attachment to the shawl as unhealthy. Instead, it is a book sent her by Dr. Tree, a psychologist doing research on Holocaust survivors. Rosa resents being treated as a clinical subject rather than a human being. Rosa thinks Persky has taken...

  1492     Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate, // The I nquisition Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,  The children of the prophets of the Lord,  Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate. // hatred of Jews Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,  The West refused them, and the East abhorred.  No anchorage the known world could afford,  Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.  Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,  A virgin world where doors of sunset part, //  People died and were exiled but at least Columbus discovered America Saying, "Ho, all who weary, enter here!  There falls each ancient barrier that the art  Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear  Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!" // In America the barriers of race creed and rank that make people hate one another fall.

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...

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...

A Spoon Full of Fiction: Imagination as Mitigator in The History(s) of Love Nicole Krauss's novel The History of Love is filled with grave themes of societal and personal trauma. Its protagonists have experienced varieties of losses: Leopold Gursky is a holocaust survivor who has lost his mother and siblings, the love of his life, and his child to the Holocaust; Alma and Bird Singer have lost their father to cancer and their mother to grief. Despite these sober subjects, The History of Love is written with whimsy, wonder, and imagination. Through the original Alma, Gursky's lover, Nicole Krauss proposes her own literary aesthetic. Her ideas of literature are reflected both in the History of Love as well as the book-within-a-book of the same title. Writing is central to Leo's life. Alma, his beloved, is central in shaping his literary style. His first attempt at a novel results in a heavily realistic work, too realistic for Alma's taste. When he showed it to he...