The realism-social constructionism discussion has been consistent over the past decades. Silverstein’s lexicon of micro-/macro-contexts helps in grasping why the tension can be a helpful epistemological heuristic for discourse analysts. Narratives were gathered in focus groups of Ethiopian-Israeli college students. Five narratives were chosen for ethnic references and found to have a special ‘iterative’ ‘emplotment scenario’ (IES) – recurrent storylines and settings – across tellers and telling events. ‘the only Ethiopian’ is an IES of being sent away to a majority-White elementary or secondary school, socially secluded and disparaged. How is one to grasp it when a specific plotline and setting revert in the corpora? It is asserted that albeit each story and storytelling is unique, they all derive from a larger-than-single-telling, already extant trope, that is, a promising master narrative. Taken together, a singular perspective of a special socio-cultural process – in this case, something of what it signifies to be an Ethiopian Israeli – appears.