The Fixer

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.

Day by day the Nazi’s would come and take people off the streets and they would disappear and never return. Adolf Hitler had been in power and declared that Europe would be Jew free. From this point on, Yanek and the rest of the Jewish population in Europe had been hiding, in fear of the Nazi’s.

Despite the political and cultural struggle, her parents help her be a normal teenager by bringing her posters, Nike’s “and [her] denim jacket with the Michael Jackson button,” (Satrapi 131). Although she is religious, she feels the need to be a modern and normal teenager. Marji also creates community for herself by having friends who are marginalized. This is portrayed when Marji and her friends stop taking torture sessions seriously and joke with their teacher as a form of escapism. Even though they get suspended, she says, “We were completely united,” (Satrapi 97). Despite being marginalized by wearing the veil during the Islamic Revolution, Marji overcomes this barrier with the support of her family and friends who were also marginalized. Like Satrapi, Wiesel is also marginalized early on in Night. However, it is not a veil that marginalizes him, but the yellow star that every Jew was forced to wear to distinguish themselves from others. Marginalization is also represented when two ghettos were created for them, they were forbidden to own gold, jewelry, or any valuables and “[they] no longer had the right to frequent restaurants or cafes, to travel by train, to attend synagogue or to be on the streets after six o’clock,” (Wiesel 11). Although the Germans gave the Jews rules that marginalized them from other nationalities, they created a community where

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 prisons we typically think of in modern American society are distinctly and majorly different from the Stalinist labor camp Ivan Denisovich Shukhov presides in the book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but all prisons have four major purposes. These purposes are retribution, incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation. By rating the prison camp that Shukhov resided in for 3,653 days, a greater understanding of the negative impact placed on Shukhov can be granted. Before stating how well the specific prison camp followed each of these purposes, I will first go into further detail into what each of these purposes includes in order to provide a rubric when grading the Stalinist prison camp.

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.

Everything from classic novels to obscure pieces of literary work can depict the immigrant experience and reflect the author’s opinion and attitude on the subject matter. To my surprise writers during the 1900-1930s had a very “positive and sympathetic” mindset towards eastern European immigrants. This is not the norm for numerous immigrants of a different race or, ethnicity. In most stories written at the time,“The immigrant is portrayed as an economic success” (Elliott 28). This is out of touch with reality since it does not

In the autobiography, “Out of the Shadow”, author Rose Cohen, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, explains the social and economic conditions during the late 1800s and early 1900s for Jews immigrating into the United States. Cohen explains how many Jews fled Eastern Europe and Russia during this time due to the ruling of the tsar, fear of religious persecution, and economic restrictions. Because these restrictions were becoming the norm for Jewish people in their county, Rose’s father, a tailor, began to embark on a journey to the United States of America, in hopes of beginning a new life for himself and his family. Even though her father is captured at the border of Russia and returned home, he managed to get to America. Once in

The aim of this work is to answer the question, “Can we generalize why certain people were able to survive more than others”? To survive the Gulag, many prisoners had to fight with others for food, shelter, and simple medical care. Certain prisoners went into religious and intellectual medications to preserve at least the appearance of intelligence. The survival required willpower, strength of mind, skills, mercilessness, and a lot of luck.

Arthur Miller’s Focus (1945) is a revolutionary work that highlights racism, especially anti-Semitism, in America. Written during the last year of the Second World War, Focus is a groundbreaking work in every sense of the word inasmuch as it is the first literary work that deals directly with anti-Semitism in the United States. Statistically speaking, there were two main waves of Jewish immigrants to the United States between 1820 and 1920. According to Susan Haberle, “the first group of Jewish people came from Germany, Austria, and Hungary. These immigrant left to seek a better life” (Haberle 6). The second group was the biggest wave; they came between 1880 and 1920: “these immigrants came from Poland, Romania, Russia, and other eastern

Anzia Yezierska’s personal immigrant narrative began in Russian Poland. She was born around 1885, and immigrated to America with her family when she was 15 years old. Yezierska’s family were Jews who escaped from the anti-Semitic government that was in control of Russia at that time. They settled in New York’s Lower East Side, along with millions of East European Jews who fled to the United States ("Anzia" 28:332).

In the first volume, Artie ruminates on the subject of Jewish stereotypes and the ways in which his father fits into them. In one panel, he says, “In some ways he’s just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew” (Maus I, Spiegelman 131). It’s important to Artie to portray his father accurately, but he’s understandably concerned about playing into stereotypes. Just like the animal and nationality stereotypes, the stereotypes that Vladek fits into work in two ways. Vladek is the ‘miserly old Jew’ but the text shows over and over again that this same pragmatic tendency helped him survive a lot of times in the war, and so in some ways validates the practice. It’s important to note though, that the tendency to save negatively affected Mala and Artie; they both carried a lot of resentment towards Vladek in the ways that he denied them a lot of basic necessities, and in a lot of ways prioritized material items and money over members of his family. So while the text shows an explanation of sorts for Vladek’s behavior, it doesn’t necessarily make excuses for the problems he caused with his actions later on. The engagement between cultural perceptions and lived experience continues the subversive action that is the basic underlying function of the texts.

In addition to this, in the mindset of the day, if someone was suspected of anti-Bolshevik activities, they were automatically guilty. The investigator would look for anything he could find that could possibly make the person guilty at all. Sometimes the investigator would take up a random piece of literature, say it was bad, and have the suspect shipped off, even if the “incriminating” evidence was something as benign as the children’s story Goodnight Moon. The investigator would not be the one to tell the suspect what he was even accused of; he would just take the “evidence” and people would soon kidnap the suspect and toss him in a cattle car to Siberia, which was cramped with a mass of other convicts. When the prisoners reached the Gulag, an official there would take everyone’s valuables and toss the convicts into cramped cells. The interrogation could start at any time. For some the interrogations were that day, and for others it never came and their lives were lived out in the dirty cells. When and if the interrogator got a confession out of someone, a prison sentence was read out and the convict was sent off to the actual Gulag.

The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth is a story about a German freelance crime reporter, named Peter miller. In this story Peter Miller becomes interested in a case that involves Eduard Roschman, leader of a concentration camp in Riga. It starts off when Peter Miller follows an ambulance to the to the apartment of Salomon Tauber, a Jewish Holocaust-survivor who has committed suicide. The next day, a friend in the police gives Miller this dead man’s diary. Miller reads Tauber’s diary and finds out that he had been in a concentration camp in Riga, headed by Eduard Roschman.

The story is spread over a period of 26 years, where the main character Aksionov changes over time. He becomes a person whom everyone in the prison, including the guards, trust. He was liked for his meekness and his fellow prison mates respected him. He was called’ grandfather’ and ‘The saint’. He became the spokesman for petitions and was the person to whom people came to when they had quarrels or any kind of problem. He is interpreted as a person who stuck to his values and his identity even after all the years in prison. He had no news of his family and was hurt by this fact alot. He had aged over the years and looked older than his age. His hair was gray, he stooped, walked slowly spoke very