Memory Informative Speech
Memory brings history alive.
Good Morning/Good Afternoon
Today I would like to explore how memory brings history alive and how successfully it is achieved in Mark Baker’s novel The Fiftieth Gate. Memory brings history alive and helps history to live on. History validates memory however it lacks personal experience and emotions. Memory gives a human face to history and confronts people with a subjective recollection of events. Throughout the book, Mark Baker retells his parents and his grandparent’s ordeal during the Holocaust. The purpose of this book was to remove the blackness from his family’s dark past and redefine his history as well as to remove the burden from his children that he was left with as a child. Mark Baker masterfully created …show more content…
The historical context of the Holocaust, which included the cultural genocide of the Jews of Europe occurred because after the First World War Germany was experiencing great economic and social hardship. The Germans had been defeated in World War 1, and had been forced to pay huge amounts of compensation to the Allies. As a result, Germany suffered terrible inflation and mass unemployment. Hitler blamed the Jews for the hardship that weighed down upon his country. Hitler then began to introduce policies to make it difficult for Jews to live in Europe, which lead to the final solution, the mass killing that took place in extermination camps. Most of the events during the Second World War were carefully documented which makes it relatively easy to access historically accurate documents that made writing Yossl’s story more historically correct. Where Yossl’s memory fails him because his memories become repressed and begin to deteriorate, history can back it up, however this is not reciprocated in Genia’s case. Genia was the sole survivor of the village that she lived in, and she spent a lot of the war in hiding, her past is not documented at
Good Morning/Good Afternoon
Today I would like to explore how memory brings history alive and how successfully it is achieved in Mark Baker’s novel The Fiftieth Gate. Memory brings history alive and helps history to live on. History validates memory however it lacks personal experience and emotions. Memory gives a human face to history and confronts people with a subjective recollection of events. Throughout the book, Mark Baker retells his parents and his grandparent’s ordeal during the Holocaust. The purpose of this book was to remove the blackness from his family’s dark past and redefine his history as well as to remove the burden from his children that he was left with as a child. Mark Baker masterfully created …show more content…
The historical context of the Holocaust, which included the cultural genocide of the Jews of Europe occurred because after the First World War Germany was experiencing great economic and social hardship. The Germans had been defeated in World War 1, and had been forced to pay huge amounts of compensation to the Allies. As a result, Germany suffered terrible inflation and mass unemployment. Hitler blamed the Jews for the hardship that weighed down upon his country. Hitler then began to introduce policies to make it difficult for Jews to live in Europe, which lead to the final solution, the mass killing that took place in extermination camps. Most of the events during the Second World War were carefully documented which makes it relatively easy to access historically accurate documents that made writing Yossl’s story more historically correct. Where Yossl’s memory fails him because his memories become repressed and begin to deteriorate, history can back it up, however this is not reciprocated in Genia’s case. Genia was the sole survivor of the village that she lived in, and she spent a lot of the war in hiding, her past is not documented at