Politics & Power Quote by Abraham Polonsky

Polonsky turns a parental lament into a scalpel aimed at the mythology of American choice. The speaker wants the tidy immigrant script: relocate to the "nice place", raise a "nice boy", give him a "profession". It’s a sentence built on aspiration, the kind of upward-mobility chant that’s supposed to make the city legible. Then the counterimage hits: not a neighborhood but a "jungle", not a future but a forced adaptation. The word choice matters. A jungle isn’t just dangerous; it’s a system where the rules are naturalized and brutality looks inevitable. The boy doesn’t fail to become civilized; the environment manufactures the "wild animal."

That last line is the jab: "D'you think I picked the East Side like Columbus picked America?" It’s streetwise sarcasm with a politics behind it. Columbus stands in for the triumphalist story that discovery equals destiny, that bold individuals steer history. The speaker rejects that fantasy. Poverty and segregation aren’t adventures; they’re assignments. The rhetorical question doesn’t ask for an answer because the answer would require admitting how little agency the working poor have inside a city marketed as opportunity.

Polonsky, a left-leaning filmmaker shaped by midcentury New York and the era’s pressure on dissenting artists, writes dialogue that sounds casual but works like an indictment. The line exposes how the American Dream often depends on blaming parents for conditions they never chose, and how quickly "character" becomes code for surviving structural neglect.