Libby Copeland, in “Who Was She? A DNA Test Only Opened New Mysteries,” explores the mystery of Alice Collins Plebuch’s family heritage through the journey that DNA testing and hard work reveals. In this essay I will be analyzing how Libby Copeland uses tone and sentence structure to share Alice Plebuch’s story with others. In this article Libby Copeland does an excellent job at making the writing relate to the readers. This article is about somebody else’s family mystery and somebody else’s journey, but Copeland makes us feel as though we are a part of it. The article is filled with facts and information, but Copeland doesn’t overwhelm us with it. She makes the article interesting; she uses diagrams and pictures to help explain things, or …show more content…
“To solve the mystery of her identity, she needed more help than any DNA testing company could offer. After all, genetic testing gives you the what, but not the why.” This sets the tone for the long journey that Plebuch is going to have to go through to find out where she came from, and it keeps us eager to find out. After finding out that Nolan was not her real cousin, Plebuch felt defeated. As a cost of coming closer to the truth, Plebuch lost the bloodline connection to one of her favorite people. “‘I really lost all my identity,’ Plebuch says. ‘I felt adrift. I didn’t know who I was – you know, who I really was.’” This sets the tone for how devastating this journey was becoming to be, but also the determination she felt to figure it all out, to figure out who she was. After cracking the case and finding out that her Jewish father was switched at the hospital and went home with an Irish family, while an Irish baby went home with her fathers Jewish family. Plebuch was grateful to figure out what happened, but also could not help herself from thinking of what her fathers life would have been like if he hadn’t been switched and gone home with his real family. “If not for the switch, Jim would have been raised in an intact home. He almost certainly would have completed high school and might have done something with his gift for mathematics.” Plebuch came to terms with everything, and in the end was grateful. If not for the switch, she would have never
Sarah and her mother are sought out by the French Police after an order goes out to arrest all French Jews. When Sarah’s little brother starts to feel the pressures of social injustice, he turns to his sister for guidance. Michel did not want to go with the French Police, so he asks Sarah to help him hide in their secret cupboard. Sarah does this because she loves Michel and does not want him to be discriminated against. Sarah, her mother, and her father get arrested for being Jewish and are taken to a concentration camp just outside their hometown. Sarah thinks Michel, her beloved brother, will be safe. She says, “Yes, he’d be safe there. She was sure of it. The girl murmured his name and laid her palm flat on the wooden panel. I’ll come back for you later. I promise” (Rosnay 9). During this time of inequality, where the French were removing Sarah and her mother just because they were Jewish, Sarah’s brother asked her for help. Sarah promised her brother she would be back for him and helped him escape his impending arrest. Sarah’s brother believed her because he looks up to her and loves her. As the story continues, when Sarah falls ill and is in pain, she also turns to her father for comfort, “at one point she had been sick, bringing up bile, moaning in pain. She had felt her father’s hand upon her, comforting her” (Rosnay 55).
All through the times of the intense expectation, overwhelming sadness, and inspiring hope in this novel comes a feeling of relief in knowing that this family will make it through the wearisome times with triumph in their faces. The relationships that the mother shares with her children and parents are what save her from despair and ruin, and these relationships are the key to any and all families emerging from the depths of darkness into the fresh air of hope and happiness.
McBride’s mother grew with her Jewish family that came from Europe to America in order to get new opportunities for their family. Ruth McBride moved from many different areas throughout the country. Her father was abusive to Ruth’s family including her mother. Her mother had many disabilities, and her father seemed to have superiority
“The Inheritance of My Father: A Story for Listening” comments on the issues of family ties, identity and belonging in relation to hybridization. Roemer’s purpose involves the highlighting of the relationship between finding one’s identity and finding one’s voice. He achieves this by allowing the readers to embark on a journey of self-discovery with the child narrator Bonkoro, who changes from a docile, almost voiceless “child” before the summer vacation to a renewed, confident and articulate “adult” at the end of her vacation. This short story is a unified and coherent production since several aspects of Roemer’s craft testify to the intimate interrelation of finding one’s identity and one’s voice. Roemer emphasizes the theme of self-discovery
Peters almost dismissal through the closing of his eyes of Anna’s love for story making allows for a distancing and ultimately a deep seeded feeling of isolation and disunity.
Each friend and family member played an important role in the main character’s life that encouraged and allowed their path of
With the amount of anti-Semitic activity in Germany, no Jew was safe and Helen realized this quickly. In order to protect her child he had to give her to family to keep her safe. “There we said goodbye as casually as possible and gave these strangers our child.” After this moment, Helen’s fight for survival to see her child once again. Finding a place to hide became very difficult as no one wanted to host a Jewish family due to the fear of the Nazis finding out. “People were understandably nervous and frightened, so the only solution was to find another hiding place.”
Elizabeth Bishop’s Sestina is a short poem composed in 1965 centered on a grandmother and her young grandchild. Bishop’s poem relates to feelings of fate, detriment, and faith that linger around each scene in this poem. There are three views in which we are being narrated in this story; outside of the house, inside of the house, and within the picture the grandchild draws. The progression of the grandmother’s emotions of sadness and despair seen in stanza one to a new sense of hope in stanza six are what brings this complex poem to life. Bishop’s strong use of personification, use of tone, and choice of poetic writing all are crucial in relaying the overall message. When poetry is named after its form, it emphasizes what the reader should recognize
“The story employs a dramatic point of view that emphasizes the fragility of human relationships. It shows understanding and agreemen...
During the course of The Family Romanov by Candace Fleming, Fleming using elements of fiction that are woven into the narrative nonfiction story. Although the story of the Family Romanov is true, the author added small elements of fiction to make the story more engaging and better. The main elements of fiction in “The Family Romanov” is expressed through dialogue and descriptions of objects. In The Family Romanov, the author used elements of fiction to enhance the story.
Creative Writing Topic: Fred and Frank are identical twins who live in a rural village in England. A rape has occurred, and the police are asking for voluntary DNA samples to help narrow the search for the rapist. Fred is ready to volunteer for the DNA testing, when Frank asks him not to…
Florens’ perception of a moment early in her youth had a profound impact on her, rendering her desperate for love and validation from others. In the opening chapter, Florens divulges her sorrowful account of the moment that defined her childhood, recalling her mother pleading to her master, “Take the girl, she says, my daughter, she says. Me. Me” (9). From Florens’ perspective, her mother willingly volunteered Florens to be taken away from her family, in the interest of protecting her baby brother.
Nonetheless, this really is a tale of compelling love between the boy and his father. The actions of the boy throughout the story indicate that he really does love his father and seems very torn between his mother expectations and his father’s light heartedness. Many adults and children know this family circumstance so well that one can easily see the characters’ identities without the author even giving the boy and his father a name. Even without other surrounding verification of their lives, the plot, characters, and narrative have meshed together quite well.
In the story “Two Kinds”, the author, Amy Tan, intends to make reader think of the meaning behind the story. She doesn’t speak out as an analyzer to illustrate what is the real problem between her and her mother. Instead, she uses her own point of view as a narrator to state what she has experienced and what she feels in her mind all along the story. She has not judged what is right or wrong based on her opinion. Instead of giving instruction of how to solve a family issue, the author chooses to write a narrative diary containing her true feeling toward events during her childhood, which offers reader not only a clear account, but insight on how the narrator feels frustrated due to failing her mother’s expectations which leads to a large conflict between the narrator and her mother.
Both Zadie Smith with “Some Notes on Attunement” and Vanessa Veselka with “Highway of Lost Girls” use their essay to tell a story. Yet in analyzing these pieces of writing, it is clear that there are more to them than just the stories themselves. These stories, filled with personal thoughts and experiences, also are full of an assortment of stylistic choices such as repetition and comparisons that emphasize many deep, underlying ideas.