Snow JULIA ALVAREZ

 Snow

JULIA ALVAREZ

Our first year in New York we rented a small apartment with a Catholic

school nearby, taught by the Sisters of Charity, hefty women in long black

gowns and bonnets that made them look peculiar, like dolls in mourning. I

liked them a lot, especially my grandmotherly fourth grade teacher, Sister

Zoe. I had a lovely name, she said, and she had me teach the whole class

how to pronounce it. Yo-lan-da. As the only immigrant in my class, I was put in

a special seat in the first row by the window, apart from the other children so

that Sister Zoe could tutor me without disturbing them. Slowly, she enunciated

the new words I was to repeat: laundromat, corn flakes, subway, snow.

Soon I picked up enough English to understand holocaust was in the air.

Sister Zoe explained to a wide-eyed classroom what was happening in Cuba.

Russian missiles were being assembled, trained supposedly on New York

City. President Kennedy, looking worried too, was on the television at home,

explaining we might have to go to war against the Communists. At school,

we had air-raid drills: an ominous bell would go off and we’d file into the

hall, fall to the floor, cover our heads with our coats, and imagine our hair

falling out, the bones in our arms going soft. At home, Mami and my sisters

and I said a rosary for world peace. I heard new vocabulary: nuclear bomb,

radioactive fallout, bomb shelter. Sister Zoe explained how it would happen.

She drew a picture of a mushroom on the blackboard and dotted a flurry of

chalkmarks for the dusty fallout that would kill us all.

The months grew cold, November, December. It was dark when I got up

in the morning, frosty when I followed my breath to school. One morning as

I sat at my desk daydreaming out the window, I saw dots in the air like the

ones Sister Zoe had drawn—random at first, then lots and lots. I shrieked,

“Bomb! Bomb!” Sister Zoe jerked around, her full black skirt ballooning as

she hurried to my side. A few girls began to cry.

But then Sister Zoe’s shocked look faded. “Why, Yolanda dear, that’s

snow!” She laughed. “Snow.”

“Snow,” I repeated. I looked out the window warily. All my life I had heard

about the white crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter. From my

desk I watched the fine powder dust the sidewalk and parked cars below.

Each flake was different, Sister Zoe had said, like a person, irreplaceable

and beautiful.

[1984]

Read the following story — “Snow” by Julia Alvarez — and then discuss your experience of it, your analysis of it, and how you might extend your analysis beyond the story. Keep in mind that these are not entirely separate steps. Simply go through the three steps by talking with your classmates about the story.

 

Ans 1

The passage “snow” by Julia Alvarez starts off as a simple story about a girl named Yolanda who had just recently moved to New York. Then, the passage shifts in tone when it starts to describe the atmosphere of world war 2 from a child’s perspective. The brief passage does an excellent job at portraying the great loss of innocence in such a small period of time. Towards the start of the story young Yolanda is being taught English. The words she learns are, “laundromat, corn flakes, subway, snow,” then as the war approaches she has to learn words like “nuclear bomb, radioactive fallout, bomb shelter.” These words are directly juxtaposing the earlier terms as being more violent and corrupt. Alvarez uses describes the political climate at the time when says, “holocaust was in the air.” Literally, holocaust means a mass slaughter and iis used to refer to the religious genocide of German Jews by the Nazis. At the end of the story, the narrator mistakes snow, an innocent concept, for a nuclear bomb due to the fact that instead of being taught “normal” things taught in schools, Yolanda’s first impression of America as a whole was very dark in that she learned what to do when a nuclear bomb is dropped rather than what to expect when seasons change.
This concept can be applied to our lives in 2018, where we have to teach kindergarteners what to do if there is an armed person in the school. As a country we are forced to take valuable time that could be used to teach the children writing or math, to have lockdown drills. This relates to how the innocence of children are ripped away due to the violence in the world. In the passage the catalysts for this loss of innocence just happens to be a world war.

 

 

Ans 2

The poem “Snow” by Julia Alvarez is about a girl named Yolanda that is not from America and is in a catholic school class. One day the students were in class and saw white stuff in the air, but thought that it was bombs in the air since they had drills of what to do if there were bombs. It was at a paranoid time for everyone when Russians were making bombs aimed for New York City, and the President of t.v warning people. “All my life I had heard about the white crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter. From my desk I watched the fine powder dust the sidewalk and parked cars below” (Alvarez). This piece of text is very elaborate and shows that Yolanda is still a young innocent child that is unaware of many things. “Soon I picked up enough English to understand holocaust was in the air” (Alvarez). The author uses the word holocaust to illustrate fear that was going around (air) about the concerns of being bombed. The deeper understanding of this poem is that snow is the resemblance of peace because since there was fear of bombs, the snow shows a more calm peaceful idea of safety for Yolanda and the students. “Each flake was different, Sister Zoe had said, like a person, irreplaceable and beautiful” (Alvarez). This shows that it took everyone's mind off of the drills and the fear of destruction and fallouts and put there thoughts on a more “beautiful” thing/idea. The snowflakes were basically a distraction for the kids innocence of being corrupt and placed in a time of fear. Towards the beginning of the poem the tone was more of a gloomy straightforward but towards the end of the poem the writer is more joyful to see snow, especially since she has heard about it being in American and her first time actually seeing it in person.