Tateh’s “Transformation”?
The Tateh we see by the end of Ragtime appears to be a very different man from how he was when Evelyn Nesbit visited him and his daughter in the Lower East Side. As readers, we are supposed to think that Tateh has overcome all his misfortunes, and that he is one of the few cases of a character having a “good ending” in Ragtime . In fact, it seems almost silly to question whether he has truly changed, for his personality seems to have taken a complete 180 and his appearance is completely unrecognizable. Consider page 254, where we are introduced to Tateh, now known as the “Baron Ashkenazy,” who is described as a “small, limber man who wore jodhpurs and a white silk shirt open at the neck” with “shining black hair”. Compared to when we first saw him as a “frail” and “white-haired” man, he has fundamentally altered himself, at least physically (48). However, these actions that he had taken to transform himself are by definition surface level, and essentially act as a coverup for what he t...