Some Key Gates
Gate XXVIII
¨Yossl, Baker's father, recollects his arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau and how it was the ‘worst day in his entire life’.
¨Yossl saw the gas chamber and thought that himself and his ‘katzetniks’, his concentration camp inmates, were all going to be gassed and die.
¨His son and himself go to visit the barracks and Yossl leads his son to where he hid inside a toilet.
In Yossl’s act of hiding in a toilet, the author provokes the idea that his father was literally hiding from his fear.
The toilet may be viewed as a metaphoric shelter, where Yossl could escape and not have his Jewish identity burned.
In saying this, Mark Baker purposefully uses detached and staccato asyndeton sentences which imposes a sense of fragmentation within Yossl’s mind; “I hid in the toilet. I remember, it was a toilet outside the shower barrack. And everyone was crying. Maybe something will happen. Something good”.
Here, we can witness the contradiction and confusion of Yossl’s mind as his memories are vivid, but his stained relapse of memory of the Holocaust still subsists, and will never leave him.
Gate XXIX
¨In this chapter, there is a contrast between a Jewish parable, and Yossl and Genia’s
experience of death and fire.
His parents remember; “the fire, the parchment burning, the bodies burned, letters soaring high, turned to ashen dust”.
Likewise in Chapter 28, the motif of death and fire is prominent;
the fire
the parchment
the bodies burned
letters soaring high
turned to ashen dust
Here, the motif acts as a medium for us to feel a sense of sympathy and pathos for
the victims of the Holocaust, as the harsh and repressive diction creates a
metaphoric bricolage of the ‘bodies burned’.
The anaphora of ‘the’ could be interpreted as being a structural, or metaphoric,
representation of the physical anaphora, or accumulation, of ‘the bodies
burned’.
The ‘letters soaring high’ is symbolic of the Jewish Parables. These parables may be
seen as the Jewish law, or way of life, and the personification of the‘letters
soaring high’ may be alluding to the message that all of the Jewish human
rights, ethics and sanity have evaporated, and transformed into a blood-thirsty
Holocaust.
¨Yossl, Baker's father, recollects his arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau and how it was the ‘worst day in his entire life’.
¨Yossl saw the gas chamber and thought that himself and his ‘katzetniks’, his concentration camp inmates, were all going to be gassed and die.
¨His son and himself go to visit the barracks and Yossl leads his son to where he hid inside a toilet.
In Yossl’s act of hiding in a toilet, the author provokes the idea that his father was literally hiding from his fear.
The toilet may be viewed as a metaphoric shelter, where Yossl could escape and not have his Jewish identity burned.
In saying this, Mark Baker purposefully uses detached and staccato asyndeton sentences which imposes a sense of fragmentation within Yossl’s mind; “I hid in the toilet. I remember, it was a toilet outside the shower barrack. And everyone was crying. Maybe something will happen. Something good”.
Here, we can witness the contradiction and confusion of Yossl’s mind as his memories are vivid, but his stained relapse of memory of the Holocaust still subsists, and will never leave him.
Gate XXIX
¨In this chapter, there is a contrast between a Jewish parable, and Yossl and Genia’s
experience of death and fire.
His parents remember; “the fire, the parchment burning, the bodies burned, letters soaring high, turned to ashen dust”.
Likewise in Chapter 28, the motif of death and fire is prominent;
the fire
the parchment
the bodies burned
letters soaring high
turned to ashen dust
Here, the motif acts as a medium for us to feel a sense of sympathy and pathos for
the victims of the Holocaust, as the harsh and repressive diction creates a
metaphoric bricolage of the ‘bodies burned’.
The anaphora of ‘the’ could be interpreted as being a structural, or metaphoric,
representation of the physical anaphora, or accumulation, of ‘the bodies
burned’.
The ‘letters soaring high’ is symbolic of the Jewish Parables. These parables may be
seen as the Jewish law, or way of life, and the personification of the‘letters
soaring high’ may be alluding to the message that all of the Jewish human
rights, ethics and sanity have evaporated, and transformed into a blood-thirsty
Holocaust.