Reader: Claudine Phillips
Respondent: Michael Luna
Recorder: Giselle Hewett

Tattoo

By Gregg Shapiro

(Unsettling America, 34-5)

Biographical Information: 

Gregg Shapiro is a fiction writer and poet, published in various literary journals, websites, anthologies, and textbooks. He is the music and cinema editor at Windy City Times (Chicago) and the music editor at NEXT Magazine (NYC) and currently resides in Chicago, Illinois.

Literary Term:

Persona:  Generally, the speaker in any first-person poem or narrative.  The term derives from the Latin word for “mask” and literally refers to that through which sound passes.  Although the persona often serves as the “voice” of the author, it nonetheless should not be confused with the author, for the persona may not accurately reflect the author’s personal opinions, feelings, or perspective on the subject. 

For her 2002 poetry presentation, Kristy Kaizer conducted an email interview with Gregg Shapiro.  The following excerpt is his answer to her question about his motivation for writing “Tattoo”.

“At one time, Skokie had a large population of survivors of concentration camps and the Nazi atrocities of World War II. Even though both of my parents were born in the United States, I had many friends whose parents were survivors. The interactions between my friends' parents and their children was very different from the way I interacted with my parents. I came to realize that these parents, who had seen the worst that mankind had to offer, were intent on sheltering their children from the horrors that they had experienced. The poem, written in the voice of the child of a survivor, is strictly a persona poem.”

Objectives:

The Immigrant Narrative

Stage 1:  Leave the Old World Stage 2: Journey to the New World

Forced from the Old world, the father remains tied to memories of his past experiences there. The journey to the New World has physically happened, but the father is psychologically imprisoned by his traumatic memories of the German concentration camps.   The journey may or may not have been voluntary, possibly a result of the extermination of his family and a desire to reclaim his Jewish identity.

Stage 3:  Shock, resistance, exploitation, and discrimination

The shock is carried over from previous experience, making the father resistant to the new world.  The tattoo on his arm is a visible reminder to Americans of his ethnic identity, possibly setting him up for future discrimination.  We understand the resistance from the viewpoint of the narrator. 

Stage 4:  Assimilation to dominant American culture and loss of ethnic identity

The narrator has assimilated to American culture, but the father has not.

We don’t breathe the same air

Speak the same language

Live in the same universe

We are continents, worlds apart. (UA 35)

Literary Objectives

2a: Narrator or viewpoint

The narrator is a second-generation Jew, reflecting on the influence his father’s experience in a concentration camp has had on both their lives.

2b: Setting

This poem takes place in the United States, but is influenced by the father’s previous experience in Europe.

2c:  Character by generation

            Father:  first generation as “heroic”

Narrator:  second generation as “divided”

Cultural Objectives

2: Generational tensions over assimilation, expectations. 

The narrator wants his father to experience America without the painful experiences from his past, not only for the father’s benefit but also so the narrator can be free from the imprisonment.

Interpretation:

The narrator portrays his father in relation to his experience in a concentration camp, represented by the reference to his tattoo: 37825.  Numbers are symbolic of his experience.  The father won’t talk about what happened, but words like blood, acid, burns, bone crushing, drowning, and choke allude to acts of violence he may have witnessed in the past.

Stories in the lines on his face:  Refers to the ancestry or lineage of the father, which might not have continued

The color blue:  The sadness the father and son feel.  Aristocratic reference:  pure lineage.  Death and damage to the body-bruises.

Body parts:  wrist, elbow, blood, face, eyes, bone, flesh. These serve as reminders of the physical casualties of the Holocaust, outside the realm of this individual father/son relationship.

 Discussion Questions:

1. How does the image of the tattoo work in this poem?

·        Literal level

·        Symbolic level

·        Ideas and visions represented by this tattoo

2.      Discuss the narrator’s relationship with his father and his attitudes towards his father’s past experience. 

The narrator is defined by his father’s experience, suffocated by his memories.  Instead of the relationship normal American fathers and sons have, this father/son relationship is tainted.  There is longing for connection, in order to understand, but also cautiousness as the narrator understands what is hiding beneath the surface is more than he can bear.  Isolation.  He feels guilt for not experiencing the same hardships.  The narrator wants his father to experience life without the past haunting him

Related Links:

·        http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/womens-studies/ws399/ws399_03/Projects/Brooke%20Lee/escape_map.html

This map provides an illustration of the immigration patterns of Jewish refugees between the years of 1940 to 1948.

·        http://voices.e-poets.net/Pride2K/:

Biographical information/link to listen to Shapiro read his poem “Laughing   With Your Seams Straight”

·        http://www.ushmm.org/

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Discussion notes:

Question:   How do images of the tattoo work in this poem?

- it's a scar, a constant reminder

- something deeper than just a number, it shows how they were not treated as people,  but numbers

- father marked as Old World, maybe the son doesn't feel he is a true Jew because he  has been left out of the experience

- like in "2G" the second generation feels it is hard to live up to (White)

- experiences endured remain permanent with the tattoo, son can't feel the pain he can  only hear the stories

- parallel of prison numbers, they were imprisoned

Question:  What is the narrator's relationship with his father and what attitude does he have towards his father's past?

- son defined by the father's experience

- son wants to make a connection with his father, he wants to know his father's pain

- child is protecting the parent - parent/child role reversal

- son has to carry his father's "weight", take away the pain, carry his pain

- in the end I get pushed a pulled, fire is usually the warmth and life, but the son wants  to "extinguish the fire" - why? Is the fire the incinerators? (White)

- immigrants are marked by accent, but this wears off after a few generations - will the  son carry the tattoo as a marking as well…

- the father may want to assimilate, but can't because he can't escape his marking