Essay --

Growing up in an affluent New Jersey neighborhood, Peter Balakians house can tell us a administer about his up bringing. Tenafly, New Jersey seems to be a common topic in Balakians memoir Black Dog of Fate. Not except must we study the house, but also the relationships that atomic number 18 formed within Balakians household. His extended family is made up of physicians, merchants, and well-known literary authors. Arguably the biggest bearing in Peters life was his Grandmother, along with his Mother and Father.One of Peters most vivid memories is of his Grandmother. He starts off his memoir with a lengthy description of her and her apartment, as if she were ease alive when he wrote it. He describes her apartment as mysterious and exotic after the suburban houses of Teaneck (6). He seems to learn her apartment as old fashioned (it was a 1940s kitchen with long white cabinets, a white enamel sink, red-speckled linoleum cracking at the seams, and a coiled buzzing fluorescent l ight on the ceiling (7)) and different then the houses he is used to in suburbia. Her apartment seems to be laced with Armenian culture compared to his Americanized fellowship back in Teaneck. A tradition or at least custom that seems important to Peter and his life at home is his love for and following of the Yankees. The Yankees were a type of family bonding for Peter, and he even followed them with his Grandmother. My grandmother and I followed the Yankees together, and by the time I was ten it had become an on-going conversation between us. Box scores, averages, pitching rotations, prenogis for the World Series because there was almost never a series without the Yankees (12). The Yankees were a symbol of American arrogance for Peter, they were more than a team... ...e. On either side of our new development were grand nineteenth-century houses and manors set back behind high hedges. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stone Dutch houses still spotted the town and some q uite fabulous nineteenth-century estates surrounded our new street (50). This description of Balkianss house, as he remembers it, might tell him that his family is decent more accustomed to the American culture, yet still keeping with their Armenian roots. The move from Teaneck to Tenafly just shows that his family is living the American Dream by finding a city that fits them best and a house that is custom built to their liking. All of a sudden Peter is living in a community where families are larger and dinner is just a race to get done with. It seems as though the move to Tenafly is an immersion into the American lifestyle, even more than Teaneck.