Historically, the Jewish identity has been replete with hope and the desire for better circumstances. The immigration that caused the number of Jewish people in America to spike was a direct result of the Holocaust, an event centered around the decimation of the Jewish population in Europe. Immigrating was done out of a hope that North America would offer a protective haven for Jewish people to regain their communities and retain their culture. Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and Shalom Aquarium’s Hope: A Tragedy details these Jewish American stories through a lens of security and suffering, juxtaposing the ways in which the new American landscape treats Jewish people. Hope is a thread throughout The Ghost Writer and Hope: A Tragedy, to emphasize the importance of …show more content…
She ventured to America out of hope that when she arrived, her life would be better than it was in Europe. However, Hollander deliberately forced Anne Frank back into an attack to punctuate her struggle. Hope was used to undercut her survival, because Anne Frank didn’t want to merely survive. She yearned for greatness. The book that she works on for the entirety of Hope: A Tragedy is indicative of this struggle. Anne Frank is compelled to keep hoping, believing that it will save her like it did in the concentration camp, yet all it does is remind her of the cyclical structure of her life and how she is not in a vastly better circumstance than she was prior to leaving Europe. She realizes this in herself when she monologues, “What is the point of a phoenix rising if all it ever does is gaze down with perverse longing at its torches reliquiae? Stay down, you miserable bastard bird, stay down! glory was in rising, fool, not in having burned!” (Auslander 67). Anne Frank is that phoenix, who after achieving what she had hoped for, survival of the Holocaust, she is now forced to simmer in her inability to reach anything else she