Farewell to Manzanar Study Guide
This non-fiction novel is the memories of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston about her family, imprisoned and sent to the concentration camp of Manzanar. The story starts from her parents, who had their own issues even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor that caused the repressions against American Japanese people. The family of Jeanne are the immigrants of first generation, who fled from war. They are relatively well adjusted in America in terms of economy, but the mentality of Jeanne’s father still remains Japanese. The culture clash appears to hit him much harder than his children raised in America.
We see the honor issues that the men of the family face and the ways they try to solve it. The fact that everything is in vain and they still have to be forcefully moved to Manzanar just for the fact of being Japanese disrupts all their life. Jeanne, who is just a child at that time, takes it relatively easy. She describes the initial conditions of the camp that were awful - cramped space, scarce food, absent hygiene conditions - so precisely that the book might become a complete shock for the American readers used to the thought that such treatment was possible only in Nazi Germany or USSR. The camp is torn apart by the growing anger of its residents and despise of the guards still embittered after the Pearl Harbor bombardment.
Jeanne’s childhood experience and her coming of age story is tightly interwoven with the story of the camp itself, the rebuilding of relatively normal life in it, her simple joys and sorrows and finally, the understanding that, despite all the sweet memories, she and her family were the prisoners there.
The book is a very powerful piece of literature that may make you rethink everything you knew about the war period in America and the fates of Japanese immigrants who were just trying to start the life anew.
Author: Loretta Bowman
New Essays
Prejudice tore apart families, destroyed lives, and lead to murders and deaths. As the Jews in Germany were persecuted, the Japanese were in the United States. Many of these Japanese had lived in the United States all their lives. In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne W. Houston explains her experiences...
“The reason I want to remember this is because I know we'll never be able to do it again.” — — “From that day on, pay of me yearned to be invisible. In a way, nothing would have been nicer than for no one to see me. Although I could not have defined it at the Tom me, I felt if attention were drawn...
?ELAH 1 Susana Mendoza Expository EssayPeriod 112 November 2013 Axworthy In the memoir, Farewell to Manzanar, written by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Papa was born in Japan and he moved to America. While he was living in America the bombing of Pearl Harbor occurred. He was a...
In the early year of 1942, the families of Japanese people are being ordered to start a move to Manzanar, California; the Wakatsuki family is one of them. Many Japanese accept the move because they are afraid of Caucasian aggression, but some simply see it as an adventure. Families have to put on...