Summary Of Moses Milstein's Memories Of Montreal, And Richness?

1211 Words3 Pages

Second Draft Moses Milstein ``Memories of Montreal – and Richness`` and Rohinton Mistry ``Lend Me Your Light`` are two essays written to explore cultural identity. Moses was born in Austria; however grew up and was educated in Canada. Rohinton was born in India; went to school in India and then immigrated to Canada when he was 27. Milstein and Mistry both explore cultural identity through the different experiences that they had throughout childhood. Both essays explore the why cultural identity is important in how we grow up. Milstein and Mistry essays are both about their childhood. They were both happy and care free in their childhood. Even though they grew up many countries away from each other their childhoods had a lot in common. They …show more content…

Milstein grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood of Montreal and Rohinton grew up in a middle class neighbourhood in India and immigrate to Canada as a young adult. Milstein grew up in a very ethnic neighbourhood; his home was around the corner from a Chinese laundry. Wing Ling and his wife are both survivors of World War II and the Holocaust. With most of their family deceased “an air of sadness...enveloped the place.” (Milstein 150) His neighbourhood was enveloped by the sights, sound of smells of the local Jewish vendors that sold traditional Austrian treats. Milstein’s essay reflects back on his own childhood then he compares it to his sons childhood. Realizing that his sons walk to school is not an enriching as his own. Mistry’s essay goes through his childhood and focuses on his relationship with his brother’s friend. When growing up in a middle class neighbourhood in India the narrator did not have access to all of the luxuries that upper class citizens would have. Growing up in a society where your friend is a in a higher social class is not easy. They may go to school together however they eat lunch apart, and when his brother came home from playing with Jamshed he would receive interrogations from their Mum. Jamshed was from India’s upper class society; he lived in a “collection of hyphenated lavishness.” (Mistry 153) The main difference between the three boys was economic class. This may not sound like much however this class difference had a big impact of the brother’s lives. Little things like a CD soundtrack had great meaning to the brothers it symbolized the cultural and social class differences that was happening in India during the 50`s. The narrator’s childhood had a large impact on his cultural identity; he was growing up in a small social class, treated like a child whenever he was around his

Show More
Related

  • David Chariandy's Brother: An Analysis

    1806 Words  | 4 Pages

    Differences present between immigrant and non-immigrant families in terms of opportunity, social inclusion and cultural acceptance is a prominent issue in the world today. In the novel, Brother, David Chariandy shows how these inconsistencies affect the opportunities present for second-generation migrants. Francis, Michael and Aisha are all children of migrants residing in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough or “Scar-Bro” as Michael refers to it (Chariandy). This suburb is home to immigrants of colour struggling to raise families on minimum wage jobs and the institutional racism present. This essay will first examine how the opportunity of second generation migrants is affected due to the preconceived idea of what opportunity is from the first

    Read More

  • Out of This Furnace by Thomas Bell

    1509 Words  | 4 Pages

    For the Kracha family, a slow rise to proud business ownership was ended by a series of events: (1) a summer of drunken abandon by Djuro; (2) his return to the steel mills (3) his daughter's (Mary) marriage to a fellow countryman also in the mills; and (4) his grandson's growing discontent with unfair labor practices and abuses. These events in the Kracha family's lives become intertwined with the story of America's own transformation between the 1880s and the 1940s. At the time that this family arrived in the United States, a new wave of Eastern European immigration - spurred by growing industrialization and the advances in technology leading to the establishment of steel mills and other manufacturing and raw material processing factories and plants - was reshaping the American labor force. Djuro's experiences, and those of his son-in-law, Mike Dobrejcak, reflect a certain level of hostility towards these Eastern and Central Europeans from "mainstream" Americans and earlier, more acculturated groups of immigrants including the Irish.... ... middle of paper ...

    Read More

  • Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

    945 Words  | 2 Pages

    “We’re one family and we should stick together, just like the Rockefellers. In our own small way, I mean.” As boy living on St. Urbain Street in the ghetto of Montreal, Duddy Kravitz, the main character in Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, is budding in a society where people with wealth and power are highly respected. However, the complexity of a person’s character, like Duddy’s, is influenced immeasurably through his family. The main three people who manipulate Duddy, and also give insight into his character, are his grandfather Simcha Kravitz, his older brother Lennie Kravitz, and his Uncle Benjy.

    Read More

  • King Lear and Death of a Salesman

    2158 Words  | 5 Pages

    Social pressures change as time passes, therefore it is interesting to see how these three texts whom differ by almost four hundred years perceive society and the effect this has on the protagonists; Shakespeare’s King Lear which was first performed in 1606 during the Jacobean era, presents a patriarchal society. Whilst, Arthur Miller uses the characters in ‘Death of a salesman’ to show the failure of the ‘American dream’ during the “golden era” of America in the late 40’s. The ‘American Dream’ was a set of ideals which suggested that anyone in the US could be successful through hard work, and had the potential to live a happy life. The sense of the deterioration in the equality of opportunities links to the fall in power and hierarchy in King Lear. Arudanthi Roy, however, uses her contemporary Indian novel to illustrate, using a proleptic and coalesce structure, the lives of the protagonists living in a post – colonial society. In each of these three texts there are characters who fit the stereotypes that society has instilled in them, but then there are those characters who noticeably differ from the norm; According to 19th century novelist Alfred de Musset “how glorious it is – and how painful – to be an exception.” Hence this statement can be seen as applicable to these characters, because in all three texts these characters do end up losing a lot.

    Read More

  • How Does Sherman Alexie Overcome Stereotypes

    767 Words  | 2 Pages

    Growing up on a reservation where failing was welcomed and even somewhat encouraged, Alexie was pressured to conform to the stereotype and be just another average Indian. Instead, he refused to listen to anyone telling him how to act, and pursued his own interests in reading and writing at a young age. He looks back on his childhood, explaining about himself, “If he'd been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity” (17). Alexie compares the life and treatment of an Indian to life as a more privileged child. This side-by-side comparison furthers his point that

    Read More

  • Trudeau's The Search For One's Identity

    1542 Words  | 4 Pages

    Many people to this day still do not have a collective agreement on what is the Canadian identity? Depending whom you ask you may get a wide variety of answer spanning the spectrum of possibilities, more so now, than at any point of the history of our nation. This essay will investigate how Pierre Elliott Trudeau found himself as a Canadian, and will demonstrate how it is his surroundings in which he immersed himself that shaped who he became. It is only later in his life that he truly discovered himself as well as his identity. Through the use of John English's biography as our primary reference we will investigate the development in Trudeau's character as he becomes older and experiences turning points in his life.

    Read More

  • Is a strong sense of national pride tantamount to isolationist thinking?

    1050 Words  | 3 Pages

    My mother, Molly Galloway, is a Canadian. She grew up in what would also be my hometown, Stratford, Ontario. My father, Wil Perrell, is an American. He spent most of his childhood life in Crossnore, North Carolina. They met in Boston where my mother attended university. Married in Denver in 1978, my parents moved to Canada in the summer of 1984, so that they could have their first child under the superior Canadian health care system that my mother’s nationality afforded them. I was born Aaron Galloway-Perrell, a Canadian-American, June 21st, 1984 in London Ontario’s Parkwood Hospital, the first son of an international couple.

    Read More

  • Identity Essay: My Cultural Identity, Is Haitian American

    1240 Words  | 3 Pages

    My cultural identity, is Haitian American. My parents come from a country of beautiful landscape and valleys of the hidden treasures of knowledge, diverse people, and rustic towns. My parents walked up steep plateaus for water, laid in grassy plains for peace, and dive into the sea for cooling in Haiti’s humid heat. Although, I come from a culture of deep history, the first country to gain independence in the result of a successful slave rebellion, my parents knew the plague of suffering Haiti’s battle with will not recover through the poverty, unemployment, and illiteracy. As Haiti fought through its demons, my parents fought to provide plentiful opportunity for their family and immigrated to the United States of America.

    Read More

  • Essay On Ethnicity And Nationality

    730 Words  | 2 Pages

    Many first and second generation Canadians are struggling to balance their ethnicity and nationality.  Once one may embrace who they are, they can express and be who they truly are. David Suzuki, Amy Tan, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s have demonstrated that no matter how much a person changes themselves on the outside, they will always remain the same on the inside.

    Read More

  • Immigration in USA

    1379 Words  | 3 Pages

    Knott , Kim, and Seán McLoughlin, eds. Diasporas Concepts, Intersections, Identities. New York : Zed Books, 2010. Print.

    Read More

  • Sherman Alexie's Indian Education

    1266 Words  | 3 Pages

    Adjusting to another culture is a difficult concept, especially for children in their school classrooms. In Sherman Alexie’s, “Indian Education,” he discusses the different stages of a Native Americans childhood compared to his white counterparts. He is describing the schooling of a child, Victor, in an American Indian reservation, grade by grade. He uses a few different examples of satire and irony, in which could be viewed in completely different ways, expressing different feelings to the reader. Racism and bullying are both present throughout this essay between Indians and Americans. The Indian Americans have the stereotype of being unsuccessful and always being those that are left behind. Through Alexie’s negativity and humor in his essay, it is evident that he faces many issues and is very frustrated growing up as an American Indian. Growing up, Alexie faces discrimination from white people, who he portrays as evil in every way, to show that his childhood was filled with anger, fear, and sorrow.

    Read More

  • Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

    3438 Words  | 7 Pages

    Mitgang tells us that the novel is about the life of two children who live in a small town, where they deal with racism in society. Prejudice surrounds their childhood, and it lurks with them while they are playing, and even while they are in the classroom. Mitgang tells us that on top of all this, racism is conveyed in the children?s language.

    Read More

  • Theme Of Colonialism In Jhumpa Lahiri

    517 Words  | 2 Pages

    In her unornamented style, Lahiri portrays the tension between the family tradition and individual freedom. The central characters of the novel are woven to highlight the social and cultural polarities. While Ashima and Ashok Ganguli are conscious and nostalgic about their ‘home’, this feeling, on the other hand, is simultaneously contested in the characters of the siblings, Gogol and Sonia, who try to ‘root’ themselves in America. The travails of Ganguli seniors is explicative of the two most important phases of the immigrant settlement, viz., nostalgia for the homeland, laced with anxiety and dilemma in a strange land; and secondly, tentative and calibrated attempts at embracing foreign culture while keeping one’s native customs and tradition in perspective. Thus, while they have tried to assimilate the Americanism to the nitty-gritty’s of their everyday life.

    Read More

  • Behavior in the Home in Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families by Annette Lareau

    713 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...parents were much more successful in the working world encouraged him to complete many daily activities such as choir and piano lessons. His parents engaged him in conversations that promoted reasoning and negotiation and they showed interest in his daily life. Harold’s mother joked around with the children, simply asking them questions about television, but never engaged them in conversations that drew them out. She wasn’t aware of Harold’s education habits and was oblivious to his dropping grades because of his missing assignments. Instead of telling one of the children to seek help for a bullying problem she told them to simply beat up the child that was bothering them until they stopped. Alex’s parents on the other hand were very involved in his schooling and in turn he scored very well in his classes. Like Lareau suspected, growing up

    Read More

  • Essay On Memories Of Montreal And Richness

    482 Words  | 1 Pages

    The text memories of Montreal - and richness by Moses Milstein and the text Lend Me Your Light by Rohinton Mistry deal with the main idea/topic of cultural identity. The authors want to prove how their cultures have influenced them as individuals by explore family, friends, and neighborhoods. The authors describe their childhoods having grown up in vastly different ways. They are recalling their past in

    Read More

More about Summary Of Moses Milstein's Memories Of Montreal, And Richness?

Open Document