Bella Spewack Street Analysis
Streets Paper, Due Monday, 2/18
Topic:
While Bella Spewack’s Streets is one woman’s memoir, it also tells us more generally about European immigrants’ experiences in urban America at the turn-of-the twentieth century. For this essay, you will explain what this one memoir can tell us about immigrant life. Is it effective in capturing the lives of turn-of-the-century immigrants? In what ways does it alert us to the problems that immigrants faced? In what ways does it display the triumphs and pleasures of life in the tenements? Provide specific textual examples of these struggles and triumphs. Assessing this evidence, would you say that Streets is above all a story about struggle, or a story about survival? Why?
Other questions to
Topic:
While Bella Spewack’s Streets is one woman’s memoir, it also tells us more generally about European immigrants’ experiences in urban America at the turn-of-the twentieth century. For this essay, you will explain what this one memoir can tell us about immigrant life. Is it effective in capturing the lives of turn-of-the-century immigrants? In what ways does it alert us to the problems that immigrants faced? In what ways does it display the triumphs and pleasures of life in the tenements? Provide specific textual examples of these struggles and triumphs. Assessing this evidence, would you say that Streets is above all a story about struggle, or a story about survival? Why?
Other questions to