“Snow” by Julia Alvarez is a short yet powerfully work of realistic fiction. 10-year-old immigrant, Yolanda, is living in New York and going to a Catholic school. Her teacher, Sister Zoe, beings to teacher her basic English words like snow and subway. Yolanda soon picked up enough English to learn about holocaust and the Cold War which terrorize her. One day, it snows, however, Yolanda thinks that the bombs dropped and began shrieking in terror. Sister Zoe tell Yolanda that it’s just snowfall. This text explores important theme like loss of innocence, immigration, Cold War paranoia. Yolanda loses her some innocence as she become more aware of the world around her. The definition of loss of innocence is usually an experience in a person's life that leads to a greater consciousness of evil, pain, or suffering in the world. The experience that make Yolanda more aware of her surrounding was her learning the English language. In the beginning, Yolanda schooling was simple, “Slowly, she enunciated the new words I was to repeat: laundromat, cornflakes, subway, …show more content…
Cold War was an era of geopolitical tension between the USA and USSR. Many people feared a nuclear war that would kill countless people and irradiate the land. This fear bleed even to schools, “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.” (Alvarez 127) Alvarez uses the order of the air-drills meant to protect students in juxtaposition to the horror it instills in students. This growing anxiety about a nuclear attack is captured Yolanda and displayed when she sees the snow. Although she knows what snow is, her mind thought it was nuclear fallout due in part to the societal worries around her. The Cold War created apprehension in everyone from the president to young