Award Winning By Edwidge Danticat Analysis

Using his primary expressive purpose, Danticat talks about his memories from his time living in Westbury Court. Much if not all of these happen to be rather violent memories, such as whenever his father's camera being stolen, or when a cabdriver was shot in front of the apartments. However the only memory he remembers most fondly

Born in Poland, Henia Weit was the youngest of nine children in her family. She lived in a town by the name of Sambor. Unfortunately, the town was bombarded by German soldiers shortly after Hitler started his reign of terror on the Jews. Henia’s family was forced to do laborious work in a ghetto until they were all deported to a concentration camp. Fortunately for Henia, she was able to escape and never went to the concentration camp herself. Instead, she had to survive for several years alone, with only her sister to turn to.

Tenement life was tough in New York City at the turn of the nineteenth century, as portrayed in the historical novel, City of Orphans. This portrayal depicted an immigrant family that was living hand to mouth in a tenement. This depiction is very accurate to the harsh reality that many families had to come to face. It was tough from the conditions, lifestyles, and space. Maks ' family was barely living off their earnings and was susceptible to disease and fraud. The immigrants were easy targets for poverty and sickness, and all too often fell through cracks in the floor. Their lives, as bad as they were, were not as bad as the ones they led in the countries they fled from to escape prosecution and to seek a better life.

A good story is always structured with details that are easy to follow while intriguing readers with reality and emotions. Edwidge Danticat’s memoir has proven her ability to use descriptions that allows the text and the readers to connect. Through her writing, she is able to get the reader involved in her situation, so that it is as if they are experiencing it too. Adding on, Danticat cleverly writes each type of description in a way that makes them distinct from each other. This connects the two which adds to her message. Descriptions bring life to her story and stresses the real events that happened to her and her family which displays her message effectively. That being said, without objective and subjective descriptions, any piece

That was illegal, so from time to time she would get in trouble with the government authorities and, as a result, I would go live with my grandparents. Things changed when I turned 14, 15 years old. My mother finally accepted partial help from my grandparents. She officially opened her business with my grandparents’ investments. From that time on we became a solid representation of the middle class. Thus, answering the question about how the information in this book relates to me and my life, I can certainly state that I have crossed the bridges from Upper Class to Poverty and from Poverty to Middle Class, where, I believe, I presently belong.

To begin, in the book Night, the Jews were being judged because of the way they looked, the religion they followed, and their ethnicity. Moishe the Beadle was deported because he was a foreign Jew. Rumors were spreading about Nazis coming into towns and taking over. After some Jews were deported, life became normal again. Everyone was doing everyday activities. “The deportees were quickly forgotten. A few days after they left, it was rumored that they were in Galicia, working, and even that they were content with their fate. Days went by. Then weeks and months. Life was normal again. A calm, reassuring wind blew through our homes. The shopkeepers were doing good business, the students lived among their books, and the children played in the streets. One day, as I was about to enter the synagogue, I saw Moishe the Beadle sitting

The schools were overcrowded, students were malnourished, and “the federal government neglected to provide Native children with even the most basic necessities in the schools where they resided.” (32) This chapter also discussed the assimilation process. “Government schools taught students to be ashamed of their names, their tribal languages, and even family surnames derived from tribal language.” (29) The next chapters speak of the homesickness many students felt because of the assimilation policies keeping children from returning home on breaks and of the diseases that spread rapidly throughout the schools such as tuberculosis and trachoma. Through the use of letters between students and parents, Child paints a portrait of the emotional hardships families faced from being separated with little

I think S. E. Hinton, uses adolescence very well to make a very poignant point about social class in America. Most the time when you hear people talk about social class you think of the English aristocrats and how they treated the peasants like they were better than them like the peasants had be beholden to them simply because they had money. I think in the book the outsiders the author specifically uses the term greaser an socs to point out the great social divide there is in America between certain economic groups, much in the way that throughout the entire book everyone looks at greasers as hoodlums and criminals due to the fact that they drank or they smoke as well as the way they dress, whereas the socks are viewed as a better class of

The novel was written in first person and touched on questions that dealt with racial, linguistic, and gender identity. In the novel, “Breath, Eyes, Memory”, Danticat’s ways of expression of what it was like as a Haitian woman alongside with what was encountered, goes back to similarities in her epilogue, “Women Like Us”. The University of Minnesota, journalism called Vintage Books also support that most of Danticat’s stories were not dramatized but a clear way for Danticat to tell a story without stating the obvious. “Danticat does a marvelous job of implying our protagonist’s apprehensions with a scene at the airport involving her first encounter with her mother’s car. The account serves as an analogy to the broadness of the more general situation of Sophie (the character’s name in the novel) making the transition from Haiti to America, just like Danticat did. What leaves readers believing that Danticat’s stories were very much relatable to her is the dedication statement she makes in her book “Breath, Eyes, Memory” she says “To the brave women of Haiti, grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, daughters, and friends, on this shore and other shores. We have stumbled but we will not fall.

These teens have similar and different traits. Each of them lived together and became closer. They also had a different thing to study and learn about. The teens were good friends, Jews, lived in the Annex, and are all dead. Their differences were there genders, age, and parent’s favorite. These similarities and differences helps people understand more about the

After moving back home, she was fortunate enough to move to Canada, where she found a Sierra Leonean family that looked after her and made her feel like she was back in Magborou.

These “newcomers” did not deserve to come here and steal their jobs. Mike Trudic’s account from his childhood referred to his father’s hunt in America to desperately find work, “At the end of a week he was taken ill and died. It said he died of a broken heart”(Mike, 188). There were just too many workers and not enough jobs to be filled. Another first hand source provided by Rose Cohen, called Out of the Shadow, depicts the story of a jewish girl in New York and the experiences her family goes through in order to reach a sustainable lifestyle. The struggles included descriptions of harsh working conditions and anti-semitism, which created difficulty for immigrants who were trying to assimilate into the American culture.

As a kid growing up in Paterson you see a lot of things you’re not supposed to see at a young age. But with my type of parents and the culture that we have there was no way i was going to get caught up with any of that. I can still remember at age 10 while walking to school seeing a dead body on the sidewalk. From the start my mom wanted us to leave paterson and to live somewhere better than where we were. So from there my mother and father would work extra hours just for us to leave the area we lived in and to find a house up near haledon. There would be some days i wouldn’t get to see mom at all and i would be the one having to care of my sisters and attempt to cook. My mom would teach me so much like how to iron the uniform in the morning if she wasn’t home or to prepare breakfast. We eventually left that area of paterson and came to a little town called haledon. After that it was smooth sailing from there. That was also when i finally found my passion for sports. I played soccer, basketball, baseball but what really caught my attention was

She writes that in the early 1960's, her father worked as a diplomat in Peru. Therefore, her family had to leave the United States and return to Peru to live. During that time, her brother who was born in the United States had to attend school in Peru. Interestingly, even though the school where he attended was taught in English, he still spoke English with an accent.

Mrs. Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1969, at the age of four she moved to Bel Air with her uncle and aunt. Growing up in Bel Air an improvised area in Haiti, she was a witness to corruption, senseless deaths, and an unstable government. During this time, she developed her storytelling skills. She would listen to her aunts Grandmother tell stories of their history or her personal experiences. These rare occasions were special to her, because children were rarely allowed to partake in adult conversations (Charters, Mallay, "Edwidge Danticat: A Bitter Legacy Revisited.").