take Sadie in section 2:
She - who stabs the piece-work with her bitter eye
And bids the girls: "Slow down -
You'll have him cutting us again!"
She - fiery static atom,
Held in place by the fierce pressure all about -
Speeds up the driven wheels
And biting steel - that twice
Has nipped her to the bone.
Nights, she reads
Those books that have most unset thought,
New-poured and malleable,
To which her thought
Leaps fusing at white heat....
How would you describe the characters in this world?
Would she date Yekl?
Yekl couldn't handle Sadie. Sadie would just either tear him apart and flat ignore him. There's something dark about this section. " She-who stabs the piece-work with her bitter eye". Sadie reminds me a little of Stephen Crane's Maggie. Living in an environment like the ghetto can change people. survival mode kicks in. One must be tough enough to handle it. Maggie and Sadie seem like two women who live in the ghetto and have to go to lengths to survive. "Yekl" and "The Ghetto" are two different views of the American Yiddish Ghetto. "Yekl" had a brighter view of the Ghetto. I'm not saying that in "Yekl" there weren't difficulties and issues. Compared to "The Ghetto", which is written in a very dark and foreboding tone.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Rachel. Sadie and Yekl do not live in the same type of world, even though they live in the same neighborhood. Yekl's world is that of dances and trivial marriage problems. In the end, Yekl is too flippant to care about important things because he dwells too much on the trivial. Sadie, however, faces the dark realities that Yekl cannot seem to grasp. She is living in a world where she must do what she must to survive. I think that though Sadie would have no interest in Yekl, Yekl would also have no interest in Sadie; she does not seem to possess the desire to drop all of her cares as Yekl frequently does, and Yekl would not be happy with someone of such a determined stature as Sadie seems to be.
ReplyDeleteThis passage is filled with words that speak to Sadie's suffering. The words "stabs," "fiery," "biting," and "nipped" jump off the page to describe that Sadie's view of the Ghetto is all about pain, and what must be done in order to avoid that pain.
The two places in which Sadie and Yekl live seem to be two completely different ones. This may be due to the fact that Sadie is a woman while Yekl is a man; though immigrants often have to face hardships of the same degree, it was the women in that time that had to face even harder issues in order to gain the same money, acceptance, and respect.
I'm going to have to hop on the band-wagon for this one. Yekl is too caught up in the ideal and superficial world. Like Julia said, he just wants to go to dances and flirt with girls and live his version of “The American Dream”; Ridge is very much the realist. So they would seem to be each other’s foil. Ridge appreciates the struggle necessary to make it in the city and Yekl is just too caught up in his own fantasy life to even appreciate what he has; though he does eventually do that when it’s too late. The only thing they would seem to have in common is that they work in sweatshops. At least that is what it seems Ridge is referring to with the line “…the driven wheels and biting steel - that twice has nipped her to the bone”. Ridge also shows a character that has a strong will to become more intelligent; one that reads books that expose her to new ideas. The only new idea that Yekl seems to be interested in is a more attractive wife for himself. They say opposites attract but I would say there’s no chance in hell they would date because, though they live in the same type of area, they are from two different worlds.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read this, I instantly thought of this being written by a woman scorned, instantly making me think of Yekl's wife. How interesting would it be if this had been written in response to his mistreatment towards her? In other words, this seems like something written by someone abandoned and left behind by someone they love. I do not see this person dating Yekl, because I feel that this person's guard would be up from having this happen to her before. But you never know, as dan stated, oppositives attract.
ReplyDelete