Killing off Tateh

It's been a few days since we've finished Ragtime, but I wanted to make this last point before we jumped into Mumbo Jumbo. One of our final topics in class discussion was, naturally, the ending of the book. We looked at Tateh and Mother's reinvented family as possibly the largest, and perhaps only, beacon of optimism in the sea of violent character-death. Although it is a refreshing point, I can't help but hold a particularly cynical view of this idea. In Ragtime's finale, the Tateh-Mother ending is the most off-putting for me--more so than the deaths.

Father, although dying in a violent explosion on the Lusitania, is taken in a fitting fashion. We discussed in class that Father's traditional nineteenth century character simply couldn't survive into the new age, as earlier began to show from the rift between him and Mother--Father's character finally crumbles while he significantly is still holding onto his firearms, the symbolic constant of his life work.  

In this case, we contrasted the progressive nature of the Tateh-Mother family versus the immobile condition of Father's mentality. The ones who changed were able to poke through the modern era, while the unchanging character was left behind. In class, we proposed to view the situation of the Tateh-Mother family as a ray of hope in modernity compared to Father's bleak ending. This pulls on the core assumption that the progressive changes in the reinvented family are a superior development over Father's constancy--an assumption I find controversial.

As earlier analyzed, the death of Father at the end of the story, although violent, was not unfitting. Father was a character who remained steadfast in following his beliefs and work to the end, an individual who held onto his identity. This lends reason to why the brash character-death doesn't feel more off-putting, just also a bit pitiful, despite the tragic setting.

In contrast, there is something continuously disconcerting about Tateh's success story. The full-blown and ironic manifestation of Baron Ashkenazy is definitely something to point out. Doctorow is blatantly dancing around the American success story, what with the high-end but meaningless connotations of "Baron" and Jewish presentation of "Ashkenazy." The new identification, although a splotch in the seriousness of Tateh's evolution, isn't much to completely overturn the good feeling of Tateh's success. No, it's something else.

At the beginning of chapter 34, I was shocked when Doctorow casually dropped the bomb on the Baron's identity. Although there were plenty of signs in the previous chapter of who Baron Ashkenazy was (his daughter, film-making, ethnicity, etc.), I had been unsuspecting of his identity as Tateh and aligned him as a new character Doctorow was introducing to the story. The main reason for this is the apparent difference between what the story had established to us as the character of Tateh and Baron Ashkenazy; the "flamboyant, excited person [with] eyes darting here and there, like a child," is too much of a contrast between the serious, white-haired, and grim character of Tateh (254). It is as if these are two completely different people and is also what I think the root of the problem.

En route to success, it seems as if Tateh was forced to lose himself in the process. Baron Ashkenazy has consumed his existence. The name is one thing, but Doctorow also decides to do a complete 180 on Tateh's character, and that is what makes this success story off-putting. The happiness of the Tateh-Mother family and the film-making success itself is not disputed. The push of Tateh into a different identity and then into someone else's (Hal Roach, producer of the Little Rascals) identity completely is my point of contention. By finalizing "Tateh" as someone who has, in actuality, a completely different background then Tateh's origins in Ragtime, there is a falseness to the whole bright ending of this situation.