All Amir knows about Polish people when he first comes to
America is that "Polish men [are] tough steelworkers and that the women [cook] lots of
cabbage." He has gotten this mental picture of the Poles through what he has heard, so
his perception of them is limited, and amounts simply to stereotypes. Amir has never
actually known a Polish person until he meets the old woman whose garden plot borders
his.
Amir says that he speaks [quite often] with this
woman, who walks seven blocks to the garden along the same route he takes. Both he and
the woman plant carrots. Amir notices that when "her hundreds of seedlings" start to
sprout, she refuses to thin them, to take out the weak ones to give the strong ones a
better chance to grow. In a moment of trust and revelation, the Polish woman explains to
Amir that she cannot bear to do the thinning, which she knows she should do, because it
reminds her
"too closely of her concentration cmp, where the
prisoners were inspected each morning and divided into two lines - the healthy to live
and the others to die."
Amir
recognizes that in sharing this information, the Polish woman is allowing him to see the
rich culture and unique perspective from which she comes; she is revealing to him
something about whom she is as an individual. From that moment, Amir sees her as a
person, unique in her own right, and not just a Pole, and he realizes the limitedness of
stereotypes - "how useless [is] all that [he's] heard about Poles." Once Amir gets to
know the Polish woman for herself, he no longer "care[s]...whether she cooks cabbage."
To him, the woman is more than her nationality; she is a living, breathing human being
with a story and worth that transcends artificial stereotypes.
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