Baker, Nancy K. Spring 2002. "Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allan): Political Commentator and Social Conscience." American Music 55. This source, taken from the Spring 2002 Journal of American Music, explores how Abel Meeropol used his music to support his political activism. Abel Meeropol and his wife, Anne, were the adoptive parents of Robert and Michael Rosenberg. This secondary source covers the Meeropol's membership in the communist party in the 1940's to explain the relationship to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It also discusses the Meeropol’s childhood influences on the Rosenberg sons, particularly their early exposure to political and social dissidence. Barinsky, David. 1993. "At the Bar; In Honoring His Parents, the Rosenbergs' Younger Son Finds a Mission for Himself." NY Times, July 16: Section D; Page 19; Column 5; National Desk. …show more content…
Barinsky portrays these events through the lens of Meeropol’s search for a way to make his parents’ life and death relevant. This secondary source will be used as support material to describe Robert Meeropol’s journey to live his own life while not letting his parents be forgotten. Meeropol, Ivy. 2004. “Heir to an Execution.” Directed by Ivy Meeropol. Performed by Robert and Michael Meeropol Ivy Meeropol, the Rosenberg’s granddaughter, produced and directed this video about her father and uncle’s experiences as the orphaned sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In interviews with her father, Michael, and Uncle Robert, Ivy’s video captures interviews as they discuss coping as youngsters following their parent’s execution. This primary source material will augment material from the book “We Are your Sons” written by the Rosenberg sons about their childhood with the Meeropols. Meeropol, Michael and Robert. 2015. "Exonerate our Mother." NYTimes.Com, August 10: Opinion
Rosenberg, Jennifer. "Mengele's Children: The Twins of Auschwitz." About.com 20th Century History. About.com, 2014. Web. 01 Feb. 2014. .
The Holocaust will forever be known as one of the largest genocides ever recorded in history. 11 million perished, and 6 million of the departed were Jewish. The concentration camps where the prisoners were held were considered to be the closest one could get to a living hell. There is no surprise that the men, women, and children there were afraid. One was considered blessed to have a family member alongside oneself. Elie Wiesel was considered to be one of those men, for he had his father working side by side with him. In the memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, a young boy and his father were condemned to a concentration camp located in Poland. In the concentration camps, having family members along can be a great blessing, but also a burden. Elie Wiesel shows that the relationship with his father was the strength that kept the young boy alive, but was also the major weakness.
“The Bielski Brothers” is a story of three amazing brothers, their journey of survival and experience they faced in World War II. Peter Duffy places this extraordinary story of survival in context by describing the Bielskis lives and experiences , quoting from Tuvia Bielskis previously unknown journal, and revealing the sociopolitical history, including the anti-Semitism of Belarus, a region the Bielski Brother’s had grown up in.
Released in 1997, Buena Vista Social Club immediately became an international success and won a Grammy Award in 1998. Around the world, especially in U.S. where the album was welcomed most heartily, Ry Cooder was considered the hero of Cuban music (Hernandez 65). Being the producer of the album, Cooder was assumed to discover a “lost treasure” in Cuban culture. However, Tanya Kateri Hernandez, in an article about Buena Vista Social Club, revealed that Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, not Cooder, was the person “who masterminded and facilitated the collaboration.” (Hernandez 62). Also in this article, it is noted that Juan de Marcos Gonzalez “implicitly acquiesced to Cooder’s propagation of the colonial myth for the purpose of ensuring the commercial success of the collaboration.” (Hernandez 64). Other musicians in the Buena Vista Social Club ensemble followed Gonzalez’s step, as there was hardly another choice for them.
“The Perils of Indifference” In April, 1945, Elie Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp after struggling with hunger, beatings, losing his entire family, and narrowly escaping death himself. He at first remained silent about his experiences, because it was too hard to relive them. However, eventually he spoke up, knowing it was his duty not to let the world forget the tragedies resulting from their silence. He wrote Night, a memoir of his and his family’s experience, and began using his freedom to spread the word about what had happened and hopefully prevent it from happening again.
From the years of 1938 to 1945, while the entire world was preoccupied with World War II, the Nazi Party led by dictator Adolf Hitler planned and executed the killing of almost six million Jewish people.This calamity snatched the innocence of those who survived in inconceivable manner. They suffer withanimmense amount guilt simply because they believe that are wrong for surviving whereas their loved ones paid the ultimate price. In recent years Holocaust survivors have had an “increased risk of attempted suicide” (Barak, Y). For these people forgetting is a crime but recollection will not allow them to move. However there are some survivors who found a way to optimistically look towards the future. Holocaust survivor and writer, Ellie Weisel, summed up these feelings by explaining that, “Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.” Learning from the past and growing up comes with a certain end of childhood innocence without which the progression to maturity cannot occur. This enlightenment and the journey from innocence to experience are prominent themes in both The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephan Chbosky. The former outlines four days in the life of a troubled teenaged boy named Holden Caulfield who is expelled from his preparatory school and spends his time roaming the streets of New York City. The latter is a compilation of letters written by a young boy, who goes by the alias Charlie, in which he discusses deepest feeling regarding his grief stricken adolescence. Both Chbosky and Salinger explore the behaviours and minds of teenaged boys who are trying to find themselves in a world that they do not fully understand yet. However, bot...
Art Spiegelman's graphic narrative Maus gives the reader an inside glimpse into his father's memoirs. Vladek was not an easy man to live with, nor was a cold tyrant neither. Instead, he was domineering and a difficult father. Artie feels alienated from his father, and has no relationship with him outside their recounting of the Holocaust narrative. Although, Artie does respect his father for all the suffering he survived through, at the same time he is infuriated at his father. In Vladeks memoirs, Artie shows mixed emotions towards his father; on one hand, he memorializes his father as a hero who survived the Holocaust. On the other hand, he exposes his father's mistakes and shortcomings through his artwork. I will be presenting the confusion of Arties feelings between hero and villain concerning his father.
Nadel, Ira Bruce. Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen, New York: Random House Inc., 2007. Print.
The determining concern of survival confronts both Elie and Chlomo throughout Night. The concept of survival is illustrated by the complications brought upon Elie and Chlomo. Elie and Chlomo believe they could only survive the concentration camps with one another; the father-and-son link was held together for the survival of each other. One complication in particular, was the i...
Meeropol, Robert and Michael. "Michael Meeropol Statement on Ethel and Julius Rosenberg."1995. http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/meeropol/-on-rosenbergs.html (15 Jan. 1998).
Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, is an account about his experience through concentration camps and death marches during WWII. In 1944, fifteen year old Wiesel was one of the many Jews forced onto cattle cars and sent to death and labor camps. Their personal rights were taken from them, as they were treated like animals. Millions of men, women, children, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled people, and Slavic people had to face the horrors the Nazi’s had planned for them. Many people witnessed and lived through beatings, murders, and humiliations. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish
When I was a child, a very close family friend of ours from Israel, Joyce Kleinman (now Wilner), and her sister Reisi Kleinman (now Greenbaum) entered the Auschwitz concentration camp at the ages of 15 and 12 years old. Years later, Joyce’s son Mike Wilner composed an interview that included his mother Joyce and Aunt Reisi outlining the significant events that led to the survival of both sisters and illustrated the events that took place during the Holocaust in which an estimated 6 million Jews were killed.
By means of comic illustration and parody, Art Spiegelman wrote a graphic novel about the lives of his parents, Vladek and Anja, before and during the Holocaust. Spiegelman’s Maus Volumes I and II delves into the emotional struggle he faced as a result of his father’s failure to recover from the trauma he suffered during the Holocaust. In the novel, Vladek’s inability to cope with the horrors he faced while imprisoned, along with his wife’s tragic death, causes him to become emotionally detached from his son, Art. Consequently, Vladek hinders Art’s emotional growth. However, Art overcomes the emotional trauma his father instilled in him through his writing.
...frican American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2002. 54-100. EBSCOhost. Web. 8 May 2015.
Sergei was born in Oneg, Russia, to an aristocratic family who was falling apart. His father was a gambler and a drinker and spent all of their family’s wealth on his addictions. Their family, which consisted of Sergei’s mother and five other siblings, were forced to move from their mansion to a small apartment in the city of Petersburg. But they moved just at the wrong time, for a sickness was spreading. Sergei’s sister Sophia died from the illness. Guilt heavy on his father’s shoulders, he abandoned his family, never to return. Sergei’s mother, Lubov, did her best to raise her children. She was a pianist, as was her father before her, and so she began to teach Sergei at the young age of four. He showed much talent for the piano, but when he was old enough to join school on a scholarship, Sergei began to show his father’s habits. He took up gambling and wasted his money, and his family members, including his cousin Alexander Siloti, were very concerned. Alexander was also a musician, and, to save ...