Margarita Engle is a Cuban-American. Her mother was born in Cuba, and her father was born in California. Her mother at about mid age moved to America and met her father in California and that is where she was born. She lived in California most of her life. During the summers she would travel back to Cuba to be with her extended family. When she was in Cuba her and her cousins would go for walks through the country. She would makeup poems as they were walking.That was kinda the start of her love for writing.Margarita Engle expressed and portrayed the Cuban culture through her literary works including Tropical Secrets, The Firefly Letters, and Slave of Cuba.
Margarita Engle’s text Tropical Secrets opened eyes into what was like for a Jew kid that got sent to Cuba during the holocaust. He gets to leave Germany and is supposed to meet up with his parents latter, but things go wrong. He is sent to Cuba and is controlled by the
…show more content…
leader, he makes a new life for himself there and still try's to get back to his parents. “How weary I am, how sleepless and hopeless—there is no escape from the torment of wishes”(Goodreads). Explain meaning of quote: He is hopeless because he is separated from his family not knowing if he will ever see them again. He is being tormented by the wishes of getting out of there and seeing his family again but knows that it will probably never happen. When people read this they get to see how fast things can change and go wrong because this little boy though he was getting out of bad place and meeting up with his parents. But wishing a couple hours he was sent on a completely different path, and never to see his parents again. Margarita Engle’s text The Firefly Letters shows how women in cuba are treated.A girl moving to cuba thought to be a good thing, only to find out how bad life is there for women. She and two others escape from there home and go explore the county, and form a close bond becoming great friends. “Without even trying to be a teacher, Fredrika is teaching us, Showing us how to see things in new ways Instead of always thinking The same old thoughts That have been passed along by strangers Day after day, year after year Without any spirit of amazement or wonder”(Firefly Letters Quotes). Explain meaning of quote: She is showing them that if they want to change the way they are living and being treated that they need to stop just going with what has been done in the past. If you want something to change then you need to do it yourself.This book impacted women around the world to start standing up and showing that we are just as important as men. And that we need to be treated equally. Margarita Engle’s text slave of cuba impacted people when they read the book and see how badly the slaves are treated. This book the Slave of Cuba is about the story of a little boy who is growing up in a house with a very rich slave owner they were his “parents” and he had to call him mom and dad even though he had parents back at his original home that he got taken from. Life is very hard and rough but he finds a hidden talent, he is good at writing poems and he writes them to escape the pain of everyday life. “Spending my life alongside a girl that makes me call her mom, even though I have a mom back in my town.”(poet Slave of Cuba). He is saying that he is living a lie basically because he is having to say things that are not true.
He knows very well that is not his mom. That he has a mom at his relay home, but can't be there because he was talked away to be a slave.This text impacts the people that read it because when they read it they realize how bad and unfair it was to slaves. And most people when they read they think it's not a big deal because most of the time it is made up. But you can't push it off like that this time because this is a true story. This really happened to this little boy but not only to him but thousands and thousands of other slaves, and it was just seen as not a big deal because everyone was doing it. As you can see through these three pieces, Tropical Secrets, The Firefly Letters, and Slave of Cuba. Margarita Engle has shined a light and opened eyes on what Cuba's dark past was like and how unfairly people were being treated.Through hre work she showing the bad part of Cuba hoping to try and change the past, to make it a brighter
future.
The main character in this story is a Jewish girl named Alicia. When the book starts she is ten years old, she lives in the Polish town of Buczacz with her four brothers, Moshe, Zachary, Bunio, and Herzl, and her mother and father. The Holocaust experience began subtly at first when the Russians began to occupy Buczacz. When her brother Moshe was killed at a “ Boys School” in Russia and her father was gathered up by German authorities, the reality of the whole situation quickly became very real. Her father was taken away shortly after the Russians had moved out and the Germans began to occupy Buczacz.
While staring back into the faces of small children much like his younger self, Rodriguez starts to run through points of his life where the need to know more pushed him further from his family and their norms and culture. Mainly focusing on the bright future an education offers him, he continues to knowingly distance himself from his family. Douglass went through similar situations on his path for education. Focusing on his chance for freedom, with no family ties to distance
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.
Alvarez was born in New York and then moved to the Dominican Republic shortly after she was born . Later in 1960 , she immigrated back to New York and received her education in boarding schools . She has spent a majority of her life in the United States , and considers herself to be an American , yet she likes to bridge the two worlds of Latina and American culture . Most of her stories have hints of her Dominican roots but she show’s her experiences with human insight . Even though her
A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal is a memoir about his time as a Jewish child in multiple ghettos and death camps in and around Germany during World War II. The author shares about his reunions with family and acquaintances from the war in the years between then and now. Buergenthal wished to share his Holocaust story for a number of reasons: to prevent himself from just being another number, to contribute to history, to show the power and necessity of forgiveness, the will to not give up, and to question how people change in war allowing them to do unspeakable things. The memoir is not a cry for private attention, but a call to break the cycle of hatred and violence to end mass crimes.
Because this woman is a slave, she has no right to her own child, therefore she cannot claim him as her own. No matter how much she loves him or how much joy that he brings into her dreary life, he can never be hers, and her heart breaks when he is taken away from her. Mothers have a very special bond with their children; they feel a love that can be described as much stronger than any other kind of love in the world. This love that is felt by the slave mother in this poem literally changes the tone of the poem when the narrator speaks about the mother and her son. Despite the anguish and despair that she feels, the thought of her child can lift her spirits, only for the child to be taken away from her. Because of her race, she cannot claim any right to love her own child. As a woman, her right to be a mother and raise and love her child was taken away from her. The slave mother had no rights to herself or her own children, and her race and gender are the main causes for
The novel Dreaming in Cuban, written by Cristina Garcia, is a novel following the lives of a Cuban family during La Revolución Cubana. Garcia develops her story in great detail, particularly through the struggles this family faces and how each of them attempts to find their own identity. Although the novel has many characters, Cristina Garcia primarily develops the story through the eyes of Pilar Puente. Even though she is one of the youngest characters, Pilar endures a plethora of struggles with her life and her identity. Her mother, Lourdes Puente, moved the family away to New York in order to shield Pilar from what Lourdes deemed to be an unfavorable past in Cuba. The main source of Pilar’s frustration is her internal conflict between her Cuban heritage and her American identity. This struggle stems from the relationship with her grandmother, Celia del Pino, contrasting with her life in America. Along with her struggle with her Cuban heritage, Pilar Puente has many experiences that shape her self-identity throughout the novel Dreaming in Cuban.
The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel gives an in depth view of Nazi Concentration Camps. Growing up in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Wiesel, a young Jewish boy at the innocent age of 12, whose main focus in life was studying the Kabbalah and becoming closer in his relationship with God. In the memoir, Elie Wiesel reflects back to his stay within a Nazi Concentration Camp in hopes that by sharing his experiences, he could not only educate the world on the ugliness known as the Holocaust, but also to remind people that by remembering one atrocity, the next one can potentially be avoided. The holocaust was the persecution and murder of approximately six million Jew’s by Aldolf Hitler’s Nazi army between 1933 and 1945. Overall, the memoir shows
As a former slave, bereft of any free will, written words were all but unavailable to Frederick Douglass. Slaves were unable to tell their stories, to expose the dehumanization that their enslavement caused on both sides of the racial rift; so it was necessary for Douglass to fight tooth and nail to obtain the right to learn, and ultimately to narrate his own life story. Amongst the narration, multiple rhetorical strategies are integrated into the text in order to uncover the dehumanizing effect their mistreatment had on slaves during this time. His primary purpose is to educate those who are ignorant of the horrible conditions that slaves lived in and the cruelty that they suffer. He does this through the use of rhetorical devices such as anecdotes, irony and by further connecting to his audience with pathos and ethos. By using his own personal experiences as the subject of his argument, Douglass is able to make a strong and compelling case against slavery; at a time when it was socially unacceptable to do so.
Trujillo. She is respected throughout the Dominican Republic. In every aspect of her life, she
The book Celia, a Slave by Melton Alonza McLaurin provides a critical insight into one of the pivotal points in the history of the American slavery: the trial of a young African American slave who had the courage to stand up against abuse but was executed by her master. McLaurin does not attempt to romanticize the story and instead strives to show the realities of the time when slaves were treated as commodities, deprived not only of their freedom but also of dignity and ethical treatment. The book Celia, a Slave by McLaurin is a good piece of historical writing that empowers to reader to live through the hardships of slaves, to learn more about the society based on slavery, and to ultimately gain deeper appreciation for racial and ethnic diversity that the American nation currently has.
Douglass managed to escape this and moved to a life in Baltimore. He was still a slave, but he was not treated as such. His mistress, Mrs. Auld, taught him to read and write. She was kind and caring, and Douglass said “that woman is a Christian.” By this the audience gets an insight into how Mrs. Auld was treating Douglass and can compare his current situation to his time on a plantation.
The author demonstrates Willenberg as an educator of the Holocaust. Willenberg educates young or old men and women about his experience in The Treblinka Concentration Camp with public speakings, books, sculpting, and youth mission trips. Public speakings and books fill your mind with new thoughts and sometimes influences you to do better in the
In this way, Julian tries to teach his mother that now it is not time for difference but equality, and her thoughts about those blacks should be changed to fit in with the society. Not only that, but the author also shows equality with the background of the story. Julian graduated from university and his mother is an heir of a rich family, yet he is still to-be-a writer, he is poor and has no job at the moment and is desperately in need of money because of his mother's illness.
The narrative begins by informing the readers that slaves were kept in the dark about crucial issues in their lives such as their dates of births. The slaves, particularly those born in slavery, were not allowed to know such important aspects of their lives as birthdays. For instance, Douglass was not sure of his exact birth date. They were even kept in the dark on the identity of their parents, “I do not recollect ever seeing my mother by the light of day” (Douglass, 10). This implies that the slaves were separated from their biological parents at a tender age, and subjected to harsh living conditions. One of the slaves, Fredrick Douglass, was separated from his mother, Harriet Bailey, when he was seven years old. The slaves are not emotionally affected by the separation since they are separated from their parents at a tender age and they become used to living without their parents. Slaves are subjected to harsh co...