Literary Analysis Of A Backpack, A Bear And Eight Crates Of Vodka

The main character Lev is illustrated as a character that conforms to the traditional gender roles and subverts against them as well in that time period. Lev is 17 years old with little to no experience with life and all it has to offer. Further, Lev has never experienced the devastation and tragedy of war. Consequently, Lev is very afraid but he is also brave. In this book, Lev is portrayed as a young boy withholding “male socialization” and the development of boy to man. In the beginning of the book, Lev frequently expresses his desire to stick to the traditional male social norms. Lev says, “I was seventeen, flooded with a belief in my own heroic destiny… I would not flee the enemy; I would not miss out on the triumph” (Benioff 9). This quote displays Lev’s interest and bravery in wanting to fend for his home, Leningrad. Furthermore, Lev portrays his masculinity due to his fearlessness in staying home without his family and no experience with the war. It also displays how society told the people of Leningrad that being a man and gaining respect comes with staying back and fighting against the Germans. In reality, there was little to no chance of surviving what the Germans had in store for Leningrad. Hence, Lev’s reason in staying home to gain respect and conquer his masculinity. In contrast, Lev’s actions and feelings tell the readers otherwise. In chapter six Lev says, “I was betraying Kolya,

Leona Tamarkin’s Dear Lizzie: Memoir of a Jewish Immigrant Woman showcases the experiences of Leona when she was a young girl and woman, growing up in World War I and the later on the Great Depression. Leona wrote this piece for her family, as a testament of the story that was so hard for her to describe verbally without being visibly shaken, as well as the young girl that she once was, and had to grow up too fast. This can be said for any child or young person at that time, but Leona’s experience is unique in respect to her being female. Her experience will be vastly different than that of a young man in Eastern Europe, who is more than likely fighting on the front lines. Or that of a young boy or older man, trying to hold their homes together while the soldiers are away.

Intro: This book is about a Jewish boy named Yanek. This gives an inside look of what happened to Jewish people in the 1940s. He had a very hard life in the 6 year time duration he spent in the ghetto and concentration camps.

Nechama Tec’s autobiography Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood tells the narrative of her experiences as a young Jewish girl in Nazi occupied Poland during the second World War. Nechama was able to survive, and protect her family, through the Holocaust by hiding her true identity and pretending to be Polish. She was able to do this because of her blond hair, light skin, blue eyes, and ability to speak unaccented Polish, which made her physically indistinguishable from an “Aryan” child. Nechama Tec’s story emphasizes the themes of identity, cultural assimilation, and passing, both socially and physically, as something that you are not, while also attempting to convey the entirely contradictory, hypocritical,

Soviet officials prioritised the establishment of Communist Hegemony in the GDR (Bruce 2003, p. 6) and therefore allocated vast resources to controlling threats (Bruce 2003, p. 14). The end of World War II saw eleven internment camps established, intended for Nazis and those against communism (Bruce 2003, p. 6), and from 1945 to 1954, Erica Riemann found herself interned in a number of them (Molloy 2009, p. 65). We may be aware of GDR paranoia resulting in prosecution of imagined crimes (Bessel 2011, p. 154), but it is through individual stories that the reality of this comes across. The fact that a schoolgirl was interrogated, assaulted and sleep deprived for hours in a dungeon for taking lipstick to a picture of Stalin (Molloy 2009, p. 66) reveals the absurdity and extent of the cruelty that the SED went to. The details of long nightly interrogations and starvation help us understand how a normal teenager ended up confessing to being part of Nazi resistance (Molloy 2009, p. 66). It is through examples of people being mocked, raped, starved, assaulted, threatened and killed that we can begin to imagine the experiences of prisoners. Recounts of Erica’s attempted suicide and the inability to hold relationships (Molloy 2009, p. 73) create a deeper understanding of the

The most exciting chapters of his work were his “Early Years”, “Refugee Years”, and “Alerting the World to Genocide”. Lemkin uses imagery to tell his story of running away from his town Wolkowysk, Poland after it was invaded by the German Nazis. Lemkin states, “ My entire Jewish population and family was exterminated” (Lemkin 15). His family wanted him to be the one who tells the world what the Nazis did to his people.

The cultural background mentioned in the book of A Backpack, A Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka were based on the ethnic group of the Russian Jews living in the USSR. My cultural background of being an American descendant of the Mexican culture, has a completely different up bringing compared to the Russian Jews. One of the holidays that plays an important role within the Mexican culture is Christmas. The reason being why Christmas is celebrated on December the 25th, is to honor the birth of Jesus Christ the son of God. The U.S. has the privilege of having the First Amendment because it grants the freedom to practice any religion the American citizens they wish to follow.

“They walked and talked of the strange light on the sea… talked of how sultry it was after a hot day” and discussed employment and birthplaces (897). After departing from Yalta, Chekhov details Gurov’s dreary life of “children [having] breakfast and getting ready for school… entertaining distinguished lawyers... walking his daughter to school” (901, 905).

By analyzing Rose Cohen’s autobiography, “Out of the Shadow”, it uncovers the various social and economical hardships that Russian-Jews faced living in America. Even though adapting to a new life in America came with many obstacles for Jews, Rose’s story shows that many of them made it through their hardships and ultimately overcame their adversities. Rose Cohen’s autobiography serves as a great resource as to what Jewish life was in everyday America during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Were it a testimony to the rigors and cruelness of human nature, it would be crushing. As it is, it shatters our perception of man and ourselves as no other book, besides perhaps Anne Franke`s diary and the testimony of Elie Wiesl, could ever have done. The prisoners of the labor camp, as in Shukhov?s predicament, were required to behave as Soviets or face severe punishment. In an almost satirical tone Buinovsky exclaims to the squadron that ?You?re not behaving like Soviet People,? and went on saying, ?You?re not behaving like communist.? (28) This type of internal monologue clearly persuades a tone of aggravation and sarcasm directly associated to the oppression?s of communism.

From Stalin’s Cult of Personality to Khrushchev’s period of De-Stalinization, the nation of the Soviet Union was in endless disarray of what to regard as true in the sense of a socialist direction. The short story, This is Moscow Speaking, written by Yuli Daniel (Nikolai Arzhak) represents the ideology that the citizens of the USSR were constantly living in fear of the alternations of their nation’s political policies. Even more, the novella gives an explanation for the people’s desire to conform to the principles around them.

Life for the Russian Jewry from the period of 1880 to 1920 was not a life desired by anyone. The Jews were forced to live in harsh conditions, lost their ability to have certain jobs, and faced extreme violence from their neighbors, the Russian peasantry. Escaping to America was the only way they could ever live normal and safe lives. Jews were forced to live in the area known as “The Pale of Settlement.” The Pale of Settlement was overcrowded and created poverty among the Jews. These sources show how the immigrants changed the way ethnic groups were, made the societies become equal and diverse, and influenced many cultures

Tevye, the village milkman, explains, as narrator, the customs and traditions of the Jewish people and their lives in the Russian village of Anatevka in the early 1900s. Here life is as shaky as the perch of a fiddler on a roof. At Tevye's home, everyone is busy preparing for the Sabbath meal. His witty wife, Golde orders around their five daughters, about their tasks such as setting up a table and getting dressed properly.

The Holocaust becomes the center of this. Whether it be at his Hebrew school, where Jewish history shaped not only the curriculum they learn. But, also as a collective identity shared by a new and contemporary Jewish generation. While still being connected to the past. This is a struggle for Mark, who does not even identify himself as Jewish for most of the story, He is continuously challenged with where to place himself in this new world, as a second-generation immigrant to Toronto. For Mark, being a young Latvian Jew is not easy.

The anonymous diary of a female journalist during the occupation period of Soviet Russia in Berlin gave a deafening voice to a completely silent victim, the ethnically Germanic female citizen in postwar Germany. This discourse of power relations and sexual appeal come together fluidly in this book. There is also a voice of women in history that has been growing ever stronger which this diary adds to. Without this diary, the victimization and helplessness of the German woman goes overall untold. This diary also adds a valuable insight into the absolutism of policies against these German women carried out by the Soviet male soldiers coming into the capital during and after the Siege of Berlin. These together add a precious window to the databank of knowledge in the understanding of the totality of war and the personal experience of struggling of survive during the Second World War where rape is not only a war tactic and military policy in breaking down the German people but also a spoil of that war itself. What is more is the majority of German people still alive in Berlin are mostly women.