Rosenblatt gives very few explicit details about his life in the memoir; most details are given through a certain memory because it serves that particular story. From the details the reader gets we know Rosenblatt lived his life uncertain of his background only trying to assimilate to an American lifestyle. It all started with his parents, Dr. Milton B. Rosenblatt and Mollie Ruth Spruch. His mother was German and was originally named Marta, but in grade school authorities told her mother that her name was not American enough and it was changed to Mollie. Roger doesn’t know where his father comes from, he could be Polish, Russian, he doesn’t know. “B” standing for Barrington was chosen on a drive through Massachusetts because it gave off an upper class “WASPy” vibe. Since Roger was little his father made efforts to make the family as American as possible, through politics, interactions with their neighbors and many other little ways. So it could be said that American society caused his parents to have a belief in assimilation and a desire to make it to the top. All his father ever wanted was to be the best and overcome being different, after “beating all the Harvards and Yales” (mostly white upper class men) out of a prime doctoring job at an “ritzy hospital.” And these ideas were passed down to Roger. He never had a concrete idea of his identity, he was forced to create his own. In another section of the book, he tells a story of how a Jewish friend he had told him that he too was Jewish. He went home and asked and there was no denial, only avoidance. It wasn’t clear why the family didn’t embrace their Judaism, but going along with the theme, it was most likely because it wasn’t American enough. There’s no indication of how this directly affected Roger, but one can only imagine. It’s like living your life as a lie, not entirely sure who you are or where you come from. You have to spend all your efforts making sure you fit in with the lifestyle and the environment around you, not letting anything set you apart. Not to say this is how everyone lives, but this was how the society he lived in impacted his family, and the way they saw themselves in America.
Ambramsky brought up a great point about America, which I had not really thought about before I came across it. People in American society only see what they want to see, and they only pay attention to what they want to pay attention to. Unless the issue is directly affecting them, they choose not to get involved. Poverty is a rather sensitive subject in America. Poverty, as you may have guessed, is a large problem in urban areas, or very rural areas. However, as you also may have guessed, a large part of the population of people that decide to ignore this issue live far from the “epicenter”, in suburban communities. They keep a very strong “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” mentality. I can't think of many people that would want to come out to their friends and family to announce that they are living in poverty. It is an embarrassing thing. There are people who live in regular suburban homes, which only stand as a facade, because some of those families do live in poverty. Those of us that are having a hard time find ways to hide their hardships. No matter where you go in America, you will be able to find poverty if you look hard enough. The trouble is, you have to be willing to open your eyes to see it. I think that there are so many people in America that don't want to do anything about it because they know if they got into it, they would feel like they were fighting a losing battle. Poverty is such a complex problem because it does not just affect one subset of people. It can affect anyone. I found that this had a very close relationship to how American Society treats the LGBTQ community. There are people who will go out of their way to speak up and try to help, and there are also people who will do their best to stay away from it as much as possible. Not only are Americans closeting the LGBTQ community, but we are also closeting the less affluent as well.
I completely agree with you when you say Americans only see what they want to see. Obviously the majority of people know about poverty, and the wealth gaps, but no one ever wants to admit its existence or its severity. In the book I read the narrator barely discusses any financial issues, he mentions a couple times that his family struggled on occasion to make it through, but he never talked about how it affected him or the people he knew, it's like he didn't want people to know he had a hard time, or didn't want to remember it. People find a hard time trying to facing poverty issues, and they get upset when the issue isn't solved, but it won't get anywhere unless they make a true effort to find a solution, and it only gets harder the deeper into it you get. Hopefully as a generation we will be able to do something to help out in as many ways as we can.
I agree. I was actually just talking to a teacher about this!
"real world" problems are so convoluted. There is never just one side to it, never just one facet. But as people, we cannot understand every single part of the problem, and we can't be good at solving every single part of the problem.
That is why problems like world peace and world hunger are seemingly unsolvable. There are people that have been incredibly influential, but nobody has all of the answers. Nobody, of course, wants to admit that though, and we refuse to allow people with different opinions than our own to voice them.
(This is why I feel we get no where in the government... political parties are slightly counterproductive)
Julius was raised in Nigeria, his father’s country but he also had a German mother. Coming to America, it seen at all the times the effects of American society on him. Even in modern times there is still ethnic tensions and subtle segregation. New York is seen from Julius’s point of view and what he notices is truly peculiar. This society is diversified yet at times he found those of the same ethnicity gravitating toward each other. And as much as the city was made up of many neighborhoods, it was divided at the same time. He shows such a contrast as “Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance” (Cole 7). There was the bridge lights and the shuttered shops, or from the housing projects to the luxury hotels. As Julius walked around, he tried to sort everything but all these forms just seemed to morph into each other. Julius found the walks around New York to be a “releases from the tightly regulated mental environment of work” and he discovered them early on to be therapy. American society can be seen as a “melting pot” but even being mixed race, Julius felt alone a lot. In one instance he is in a theater mostly populate by white folks, and even being in a crowded theater, he felt alone. Through Julius’s eyes we could see how interesting he found the world. In America, in one day he could meet a guy from Morocco, or a girl from the Congo. You could see him looking into each person in detail, as if one woman looked to be from Haiti but was from Liberia, and you said Julius really wanting to think deeply about every encounter he had, but each one flowed into the next one. Julius had a patient named V, and she was being treated for depression but had recently written a book, and Julius had decided to start reading it. After he had left the movie, came into the books shop to find the historical biography, The Monster of New Amsterdam, by V. V was an assistant professor at New York University and a member of the Delaware tribe. So V was Native American herself and had based this book on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia. This was the first comprehensive study of Cornelius Van Tienhoven. Tienhoven was notorious for his many brutal acts under the Dutch East India Company, arriving to these lands in 1633. V seemed to have a more profound impact on Julius; she was part of the natives. And V’s depression was partly due to the emotional toll of these studies. Julius talked to V quite a bit and the horror Native Americans had had to endure at the hands of the white settlers, and they still continued to suffer, affected her on a profound personal level. Julius the one who is telling the story later comments after coming back to Brussels, and the Julius who is “in the moment” is hit with the news that V committed suicide. The interactions, just like with V, that flow into one another really make a statement as to the extent America has affected Julius.
Rosenblatt gives very few explicit details about his life in the memoir; most details are given through a certain memory because it serves that particular story. From the details the reader gets we know Rosenblatt lived his life uncertain of his background only trying to assimilate to an American lifestyle.
ReplyDeleteIt all started with his parents, Dr. Milton B. Rosenblatt and Mollie Ruth Spruch. His mother was German and was originally named Marta, but in grade school authorities told her mother that her name was not American enough and it was changed to Mollie. Roger doesn’t know where his father comes from, he could be Polish, Russian, he doesn’t know. “B” standing for Barrington was chosen on a drive through Massachusetts because it gave off an upper class “WASPy” vibe.
Since Roger was little his father made efforts to make the family as American as possible, through politics, interactions with their neighbors and many other little ways. So it could be said that American society caused his parents to have a belief in assimilation and a desire to make it to the top. All his father ever wanted was to be the best and overcome being different, after “beating all the Harvards and Yales” (mostly white upper class men) out of a prime doctoring job at an “ritzy hospital.” And these ideas were passed down to Roger.
He never had a concrete idea of his identity, he was forced to create his own. In another section of the book, he tells a story of how a Jewish friend he had told him that he too was Jewish. He went home and asked and there was no denial, only avoidance. It wasn’t clear why the family didn’t embrace their Judaism, but going along with the theme, it was most likely because it wasn’t American enough.
There’s no indication of how this directly affected Roger, but one can only imagine. It’s like living your life as a lie, not entirely sure who you are or where you come from. You have to spend all your efforts making sure you fit in with the lifestyle and the environment around you, not letting anything set you apart. Not to say this is how everyone lives, but this was how the society he lived in impacted his family, and the way they saw themselves in America.
Ambramsky brought up a great point about America, which I had not really thought about before I came across it. People in American society only see what they want to see, and they only pay attention to what they want to pay attention to. Unless the issue is directly affecting them, they choose not to get involved. Poverty is a rather sensitive subject in America.
ReplyDeletePoverty, as you may have guessed, is a large problem in urban areas, or very rural areas. However, as you also may have guessed, a large part of the population of people that decide to ignore this issue live far from the “epicenter”, in suburban communities. They keep a very strong “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” mentality.
I can't think of many people that would want to come out to their friends and family to announce that they are living in poverty. It is an embarrassing thing. There are people who live in regular suburban homes, which only stand as a facade, because some of those families do live in poverty. Those of us that are having a hard time find ways to hide their hardships.
No matter where you go in America, you will be able to find poverty if you look hard enough. The trouble is, you have to be willing to open your eyes to see it. I think that there are so many people in America that don't want to do anything about it because they know if they got into it, they would feel like they were fighting a losing battle. Poverty is such a complex problem because it does not just affect one subset of people. It can affect anyone.
I found that this had a very close relationship to how American Society treats the LGBTQ community. There are people who will go out of their way to speak up and try to help, and there are also people who will do their best to stay away from it as much as possible. Not only are Americans closeting the LGBTQ community, but we are also closeting the less affluent as well.
I completely agree with you when you say Americans only see what they want to see. Obviously the majority of people know about poverty, and the wealth gaps, but no one ever wants to admit its existence or its severity. In the book I read the narrator barely discusses any financial issues, he mentions a couple times that his family struggled on occasion to make it through, but he never talked about how it affected him or the people he knew, it's like he didn't want people to know he had a hard time, or didn't want to remember it. People find a hard time trying to facing poverty issues, and they get upset when the issue isn't solved, but it won't get anywhere unless they make a true effort to find a solution, and it only gets harder the deeper into it you get. Hopefully as a generation we will be able to do something to help out in as many ways as we can.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I was actually just talking to a teacher about this!
ReplyDelete"real world" problems are so convoluted. There is never just one side to it, never just one facet. But as people, we cannot understand every single part of the problem, and we can't be good at solving every single part of the problem.
That is why problems like world peace and world hunger are seemingly unsolvable. There are people that have been incredibly influential, but nobody has all of the answers. Nobody, of course, wants to admit that though, and we refuse to allow people with different opinions than our own to voice them.
(This is why I feel we get no where in the government... political parties are slightly counterproductive)
Julius was raised in Nigeria, his father’s country but he also had a German mother. Coming to America, it seen at all the times the effects of American society on him. Even in modern times there is still ethnic tensions and subtle segregation. New York is seen from Julius’s point of view and what he notices is truly peculiar. This society is diversified yet at times he found those of the same ethnicity gravitating toward each other. And as much as the city was made up of many neighborhoods, it was divided at the same time. He shows such a contrast as “Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance” (Cole 7). There was the bridge lights and the shuttered shops, or from the housing projects to the luxury hotels. As Julius walked around, he tried to sort everything but all these forms just seemed to morph into each other. Julius found the walks around New York to be a “releases from the tightly regulated mental environment of work” and he discovered them early on to be therapy. American society can be seen as a “melting pot” but even being mixed race, Julius felt alone a lot. In one instance he is in a theater mostly populate by white folks, and even being in a crowded theater, he felt alone. Through Julius’s eyes we could see how interesting he found the world. In America, in one day he could meet a guy from Morocco, or a girl from the Congo. You could see him looking into each person in detail, as if one woman looked to be from Haiti but was from Liberia, and you said Julius really wanting to think deeply about every encounter he had, but each one flowed into the next one.
ReplyDeleteJulius had a patient named V, and she was being treated for depression but had recently written a book, and Julius had decided to start reading it. After he had left the movie, came into the books shop to find the historical biography, The Monster of New Amsterdam, by V. V was an assistant professor at New York University and a member of the Delaware tribe. So V was Native American herself and had based this book on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia. This was the first comprehensive study of Cornelius Van Tienhoven. Tienhoven was notorious for his many brutal acts under the Dutch East India Company, arriving to these lands in 1633. V seemed to have a more profound impact on Julius; she was part of the natives. And V’s depression was partly due to the emotional toll of these studies. Julius talked to V quite a bit and the horror Native Americans had had to endure at the hands of the white settlers, and they still continued to suffer, affected her on a profound personal level. Julius the one who is telling the story later comments after coming back to Brussels, and the Julius who is “in the moment” is hit with the news that V committed suicide. The interactions, just like with V, that flow into one another really make a statement as to the extent America has affected Julius.