Essay Questions

How does social class impact Eva’s parents’ marriage?

Eva confirms, “Mama married beneath her. Of this she was sure. Her husband was a well-respected man, a young doctor, who eventually provided her with a beautiful four-storey house and two daughters. But Papa’s was first-generation wealth. His parents were merely shopkeepers, and Papa had worked extremely hard to achieve his station in life. On the other hand, Mama’s family were bankers, who, on both sides, were born to wealth and privilege as far back as one looked. Mama’s sense of herself became the source of much of Papa’s unhappiness…It grew difficult for Papa to talk to Mama, and he spent increasing amounts in his surgery. And Mama grew to distrust her daughters, for her husband clearly preferred his children to his wife. She was Isolated. She had married beneath her, and suddenly found herself marooned between her distant husband and her difficult daughters.” Divergent social class is the cause of the strain in the matrimony. Mama’s superiority complex humiliates Papa who diverts his attention and time to profession. Papa interprets Mama’s actions as a communication that she is inferior to her which hurts him psychologically. Surgery is an opening of Avoidance which permits Papa to elude Mama. Eva and Margot endure the consequences of the strain when Mama Displaces her anger on them; Mama considers Eva and Margot as competitors in the quest for her husband’s attention.

What is the implication of the Christians’ and Jew’s history in Portobuffole?

Philips elucidates, “ The Jews had first begun journeying to Portobuffole in 1424, many of them migrating from Colonia in Germany. Back in 1349, the Christian people of that region had suddenly become incensed and irrational from fear of the plague, and the Jews began to suffer as this Christian hysteria manifested itself in violence. Eventually the Jews could take no more and they barricaded themselves into their large synagogue, set fire to it, and recited moribund payers to each other as they waited for the end. The few Jews that survived this catastrophe remained in the region, but finally were driven out.” This precise historical allusion is significant in providing the backdrop in which Eva’s story transpires. The hysteria is emblematic of the widespread antisemitism which sets ground for the persecution of Jews. Jews resort to self-immolation because they agony of Nazism is unbearable. Being a Jew upsurges the odds of dehumanized and stereotyped by the Christians.