Importance Of The Homeplace And Nostalgia For It - Book Report/Review Example

?Deepening Essay: “Lost in Translation” and “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” The story “Lost in translation” by Eva Hoffmann is a simple tale that takes the form of a memory about the author’s childhood. In particular the author writes about the day when she left Europe with her family to travel to Canada in search of a better life. Her native country, Poland, had just come out of a bitter war, and it is clear that the small family has suffered hardship because of poverty and hunger. Another reason for their journey is that they are Jewish and are escaping persecution from people in Poland who hated the Jews. The main idea that comes from this story is the loss of homeland and how this affects a child in later life. The story is told from the point of view of an adult looking back at what happened in the past. It combines the incomprehension of the child, with the rather sad later knowledge of the adult. The author makes the story come alive by using the first person and the present tense at the start of the story: “It is April 1959, I’m standing at the railing of the Batory’s upper deck, and I feel that my life is ending.” (Hoffman, p. 176). As the story progresses it becomes clear that the journey to Canada is just a beginning, and the start of a whole new life, but what makes the story so moving is the fact that the child cannot imagine what lies in the future. The child clings to memories of her old house, the city of Cracow, and all the familiar sights and sounds of her childhood, because that is all she has ever known. The fact that she confuses the concepts of “Canada” and “Sahara” shows that she is ignorant and scared, likely to be very shocked and surprised by what lies ahead. This story is a very remarkable one because it captures a very sad moment in the history of the whole Jewish people, as well as an important transitional phase in the life of a young child. The most memorable feature of the story is the way that it makes the idea of “nostalgia” come alive through the description of tiny details in the girl’s life. Even ordinary things like the sight and sound of tram cars in the city makes the child long for home. I was very impressed by the author’s skill in presenting the city with tenderness. The child is very attached to this place, and says that she loved the city of Cracow as she “as one loved a person” (Hoffman, p, 176). This made me realize that each person grows up with a well-defined sense of place, and that it is natural to think of one’s home as if it were a beloved person, with all its faults and problems as well as all its good qualities. I can identify with the feeling of abandoning the past, and losing connection with a place of great innocence, just as the author explains in the phrase: “I, too, felt I was being pushed out of the happy, safe enclosures of Eden” (Hoffman, p. 177). It is the innocence of the child, and not the place, that makes the memory so sweet, but of course at the time the child cannot understand it. Cracow was a place of terrible atrocities in the Second World War, but the message of the story is that for the children there, it was an idyllic place of great beauty and peace. I learned from this story that a sense of place, even when it is only a distant memory, is an essential part of a person’s identity, and that writing about its loss is a good way of dealing with the pain of separation. This story made me reflect on how important places are in our lives, and how each person is in some way imprinted with a certain kind of thinking, which comes from the place of their birth. I was born in China, and though I now live many thousands of miles away, I have an eternal link to the place of my birth, and the people who cared for me when I was a child. Even though new experiences come along, and my thinking changes as I grow older and learn about the wider world, I am very conscious that a deep part of me is always going to reflect my native origins. I would recommend this story because it describes a very important element in human psychology. It gives a space to the grief of children who are forced to break from the place of their early years. It shows that children are capable of deep feelings, even when they only partly understand what these feelings are and where they come from. For me the value of the story lies in the way it opens up memories for me that I usually try to suppress. Sometimes things are too painful to remember fully, and reading about them in fiction is a way of gently working on these difficult memories, and fitting them into a new vision of the world that combines the old and the new in a positive way. I suppose I see this story as a kind of bridge which takes me over the break in my own past history, and lets me identify with all those people in history who felt lost and isolated because of migration to a different country. The second story “the way to rainy mountain” by M. Scott Momaday contains some similar themes about the past, and the way the author faces up to an enforced break with former traditions. In this story there is a loss of homeland which is on the huge scale of a whole indigenous people. The author has feels a dual attachment to the place of his ancestors, which is a mountainous region in modern North America, and for a particular individual who is the author’s grandmother. The grandmother has died and the author takes a kind of pilgrimage to the place where she is buried, and this journey to the mountain area is like a journey into the past. The location is very different from the city of Cracow that is mentioned in the previous story. In this story the landscape is wild, and the author feels that the land belongs to “the eagle, the elk, the badger and the bear” (Momaday, p. 183). This is an important observation because it situates human beings on a level below the wild animals. This author feels close to the land, but does not feel in any way that he owns it. He is just one of the many creatures who live in it and enjoy its beauty. The narrator of “the way to rainy mountain” goes back to the place where his grandmother grew up. The description of his grandmother’s life and death makes her in some way like a personification of the Kiowa tribe: with increasing age she, like the tribe, is restricted in her movements, and unable to carry out her traditional activities. In her case this is bead making, while in the case of the tribe it is carrying out religious rituals that celebrate natural forces like the sun. The idyllic past which Momaday conjures up is one that has been severely damaged by the white settlers who took away the land from the indigenous American peoples. There are parallels here with the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis in Europe. The real danger, it seems, and the force that causes so much loss and pain, is the inhumanity of one group of human beings to another. The perspective of Momaday is that the land is indifferent to these struggles. The mountain remains there, and although the animals have changed, in this case from buffalo herds, to masses of crickets, the author retains some of the sensibility of his ancestors. The loss of homeland here is something very spiritual, and the author feels it even across many generations, One image remains in my memory from this story and it is the vision of the cricket, framed against the moon: “my line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil. It had gone there, I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal” (Momaday, p. 185). I was touched by the author’s observation that the cricket now shared his grandmother’s former home, and his ability to imagine the world from the perspective of a cricket. This shows that even though his tribe has been forced out of its ancestral lands, and his people no longer celebrate some of their rituals, they have left to him an important inheritance in the sensitivity he has for the natural world. His literary efforts show that something of his grandmother’s life lives on in him, and he carries the responsibility of passing on her wisdom to future generations. Both of these stories are uplifting narratives. They are examples of the strength of the human spirit to make something beautiful out of even the worst situations. Children in today’s world are often transplanted from one continent to another, and their ancestral culture is under threat from many different sources. I am encouraged by both of these stories to cultivate my own past memories, and make sure that in the future I incorporate their nostalgia and also their imaginative power into the rest of my life. The loss of my homeland is something that I cannot change, but in seeing it against the background of these two stories I can feel that it is part of the human story to be forever moving on from the places that are most dear. Read More