Author: lucialopezfdc

The American Dream according to Sara, Reb and Mashah Smolinsky

Briefly define the American Dream for Sara, her father, and one of her sisters.

In the novel Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska, a young girl named Sara shares her experiences living in America as a Russian-Jewish immigrant. Her family is of very low economic status in America, which is the basis of her American Dream. Because of the poverty she and her family experience, working is of high value in the family. Although she is only 10 years old, Sara feels the responsibility of having to find work and make money somehow. When she starts peddling herring and making profit off of it, she realized that she enjoys the feeling of independence that making her own money brings. For Sara, the American Dream is taking what you have and working your way up to the point where you are the source of your own income and happiness. She doesn’t like having to depend on her sisters getting jobs or store owners letting them take goods to pay them back later; holding the 25 cents of profit she made the first time she peddled herring made her realize that that’s what she wants- to be independent.

Her family members have quite different ideas of what the American Dream is. After leaving Russia because of a Tzar that wanted to persecute Jews, Sara’s father, Reb Smolinsky, sought religious freedom. He does not work; he reads the Torah and prays. To him, the rewards he believes await him in heaven outweigh any suffering he may do on the Earth. His wife says at one point, “You’re so busy working for Heaven that I have to suffer here such bitter hell.” For Reb, the ability to practice his religion in peace in order to get to Heaven is part of the American Dream.

Mashah, Sara’s sister, seems to have the opposite view as her father on the American Dream. She is shown as quite selfish right from the beginning, buying only herself a towel and toothbrush and getting only herself food, not thinking about the hunger her family is experiencing. It seems that she believes that the American Dream is about enjoying the freedom of consumerism. The part that is most opposite to her father’s point of view is that she seems to believe that one must enjoy every possible thing while on Earth; if one day without a meal means new flowers for her hat, she is okay with giving it up. She sees the world through a sense of superficial beauty and material things. Her American Dream is to have enough money, to buy what she needs and wants to enjoy her life on Earth as much as possible.

Lucia Lopez

Peter Quinn

Lucia Lopez

 

Quinn makes a comparison between the slave trade and the Holocaust and the famine emigration early in the essay only to reject it later. Why?

In “In Search of Banished Children,” Peter Quinn discusses the hardships of Irish immigrants during and after the Famine and the effects on the succeeding generations of Irish-Americans. When he describes the volume of migration of Irish people into the United States, he uses an quote by a historian named Robert James Scally, in which he says that the amount of Irish immigrants bared “more resemblance to the slave trade or the boxcars of the Holocaust than to the routine crossings of a later age.” Soon after, Quinn dispels the idea that the Famine can be compared to the Holocaust or the slave trade, saying that these events should not be “confused or equated”.

One may wonder why he chooses to include this comparison, only to reject it later. When he first mentions the Holocaust and the slave trade, it is merely to describe the immense migration that occurred after the Famine. This event pushed out so many people that could not live in Ireland anymore that the numbers seemed to match up with those of events in which people were forced to move. The comparison, in these terms, serves to show how intense the effects of the Famine were on the Irish people. When he says that the events themselves cannot be equated, he gives many reasons for why this is so. When discussing the Holocaust, he says, “The Holocaust was a death sentence leveled against every Jewish man, woman, and child under German rule. No exceptions.” He makes sure to point out that although the Famine had horrible consequences, it was not an organized institution whose purpose was to exterminate a people as the Holocaust was. When discussing the slave trade, he mentions that the experiences of Irish immigrants are similar in that they provided the labor that built America. However, the Irish maintained most of their civil rights, and they were not stripped of their identities as the slaves or the Holocaust victims were. An interesting point he speaks about as well is that as generations passed, the children and grandchildren of the Famine generation gradually had less memories and stories of the struggles of older generations. Because of the impact the slave trade had on the history of not only America but the world, it is much harder to forget the atrocities that slaves and their successors faced.

 

Gangs of New York

Lucia Lopez

One scene that caught my attention was when Bill the Butcher, or William Cutting, is teaching Amsterdam how to kill, using a pig in place of a person. He tells Amsterdam that he loves butchering pigs, saying, “The nearest thing in nature to the flesh of a man is the flesh of a pig.” Before letting Amsterdam try for himself, he shows him where the correct places to strike are. He points out the liver, the kidneys, the heart, and the main artery. As he points out each part, he puts a hand on the same part on Amsterdam’s body.

The music in the background of this scene is very calm and there are people seen walking around nonchalantly, which contrasts with the brutal skills Bill is teaching Amsterdam. When Bill passes Amsterdam the knife, the people in the background are more interested in what is happening. The music gets slower and sadder, but it also gets louder. Amsterdam glances up and sees what seems to be a newspaper drawing from the day the natives fought the Dead Rabbits, a gang that consisted of Irish immigrants. The drawing depicts Bill standing over Amsterdam’s father’s dead body, surrounded by his fellow nativists. The headline reads, “Battle of the Five Points: Great Native Victory Over the Foreign Invader”.

From this scene, the film quickly transitions to a flashback. It is the scene in the very beginning of the movie, when Amsterdam’s father hands him a blade and Amsterdam wipes some of the blood off of it. This scene is kept very dark, which alludes to the sadness and darkness of this day and, now, memory. In the flashback, the father’s face is not shown, nor is he heard telling Amsterdam not to wipe the blood off of the blade. These small changes in the same scene serve to show that Amsterdam has learned much since he was a child, and possibly means to show that he does not need the guidance of his father. Although this may be the case, he still is very much interested in getting revenge, which is obvious by the way he stabs the pig.

After the flashback, the scene sharply cuts back to the present, where Amsterdam pauses to look and the knife and tighten his grip. He then stabs the pig in the areas that were told to him by Bill so violently that it’s as if he were picturing Bill in the pig’s place. Right at his first stab, the music becomes much quieter and each stab is accompanied by the sound of a large drum being hit. Bill praises him on his skill, and while Amsterdam doesn’t seem to be really listening to him, he takes a final stab at the pig’s stomach.

Before Bill taught Amsterdam where the correct places to stab a person to kill them were, he told him that stabbing someone in the stomach would only make them bleed to death; it wouldn’t kill them right away. The fact that he stabbed the pig in its fatal places and then proceeded to stab it in the stomach shows that he doesn’t want Bill to just die quickly; he wants him to suffer and possibly feel the same pain his father did as well as the pain Amsterdam felt after he died.

 

A Summary of The History of White People, Chapter Nine: “The First Alien Wave”

Lucia Lopez

In today’s world, the concept of racism is normally directly paired with the topic of skin color. What most people fail to recognize, however, is that American hatred towards other white people has also been a horrible problem in the nation’s history. Not all white people were privileged in American society, and this is seen when looking at the experiences of Irish Catholics in the Unites States in the 19th century.

Before 1820, Irish immigrants had easily fit into American society due to their Protestant religion. They had begun to call themselves “Scotch Irish” in order to distinguish themselves from the Catholic-Irish population. Catholics had been discriminated against for years in the British colonies as well as in the United States. Up until 1821, Catholics were denied citizenship in New York unless they declared faithlessness to the Pope. In Massachusetts, all people were expected to pay taxes to fund Protestant churches until 1833.

During the Irish potato famine in the 1830s and 1840s, intellectuals began to discuss the roots of the problems the  Irish were facing. Although many, like essayist Thomas Carlyle, believed the Irish to be a genetically inferior race, some such as Gustave de Beaumont believed that the essence of their suffering was British policy. Since the seventeenth century, Catholics had been deprived of land ownership by Protestant English settlers. Still, most at the time believed that the Irish, like African Americans, lacked the desire to add any value to society.

Also immigrating to the United States were Germans. German Americans had more easily blended in due to their wealth and Protestantism. Meanwhile, things were getting much worse for the Irish; they had received the reputation as drunk, violent, lazy people- this archetype became known as “the Paddy”. This figure was enforced by cartoons, depicting the Irish as ape-like and contrasting their facial features to those of Anglo-Saxons.  

Although color did not play a main role in race relations as the Irish were first discriminated against, it became of importance when the Irish began to be compared to the black population of America. Although both groups were seen as inferior, poor, and lazy, the Irish used their skin color to draw a distinction between themselves and African Americans and put themselves above them. They even went as far as supporting the proslavery Democratic Party. the draft riots followed, in which the Irish clearly rejected the concept of black-Irish commonality.

Soon a group arose in the political sphere that claimed they knew nothing when it came to choosing a party to associate with, dubbing themselves the “Know-Nothings”. Their distaste targeted alcohol and Catholicism mainly, and while they made efforts to enforce laws according to their views they usually did not succeed. Soon, as issues such as slavery became more pressing, members of the party began to take sides and the party slowly disappeared after losing so much of their following. Despite their disappearance, hatred towards the Catholic Irish continued for years. Nativism continued and Celts and Africans were still seen as subordinate members of society; the Irish, however, held on to their whiteness for value.