Blog 4 "My Father Always Said"
This essay, "My Father Always Said" describes the relationship that the author had with her family, history, culture and beliefs. This essay was about discovery and how the writer learned more and more about her father’s homeland, her father’s childhood, her parent’s memories, her family’s hardships, persecutions from the Nazis and how life in Queens was different from life in Germany. She also discovered how time has changed so many things in the town of Rindheim.
Mimi Schartz also breaks up the essay into sections by using the white space between certain paragraphs. She breaks up the sections according to time and place. She does this in order to guide her reader into another part of her journey of storytelling. She guides them through recollections of memories and breaks up the section depending on time and place.
In the first paragraph, Mimi Shwartz begins by talking about how her father always mentioned the cultural differences between Americans and people of Rindheim. She tells the reader that her father has a common phrase for displaying his disapproving expressions towards his daughters. She also mentions that she was from Queens and that she never really paid much attention to what her father was talking about until she went to Rindheim Germany with her family. Within the first section, she tells the reader that her father fled from Germany. She also describes the cultural differences between her and her father and explains that she and her sister were rebellious during her teenage years.
The second section takes place in Rindheim. In this section the author tells the reader about her trip to her father’s homeland. She describes the differences between Queens and Rindheim. She describes the curiosity she had in seeing her father’s former house and her wanting to go into the home even though her father said no. In this section, she tells the reader that her father refused to teach her German because he didn’t want his children to speak the language of the Nazis. It is in this section that the author begins to display the father’s painful memories and resentment towards the Nazis and Hitler.
The third section takes place in Germany as her family draws closer to synagogue. Here the father tells his daughter about what his religious routines were as a child. He then revealed memories about the pain of leaving his country. He described how hard it was for his family of forty to leave Germany. He tells his daughter that he that to smuggle money in toilets in order to bring funds to America. He describes the brutality of the Nazis and how they burned churches and sent helpers of the Jewish people, to become cannon fodder.
The fourth section takes place in Rindheim as the author describes her hunger during the car ride to her father’s former schoo. It is then that her father tells her that the school used to be segregated between Jews and NonJews. The author attempts to draw a connection between her father’s childhood experiences to her own.
The fifth section takes place in the caras the father goes down a crooked road. She tells about how she headed to the cemetery to see graves of former family members. It is at the cemetery that she draws a connection between her relationships with her grandparens in New York, to her nonexistent memories with her grandparents whose graves she added stones to. She tells the reader about how her father was putting stones on a grave in order to show respect. By writing this, the author was able to portray her connection with her so called cultural background to her actual family history. This allowed her to feel more connected with her culture and family legacy. She also learned that she had an older aunt who never made it to America and was instead sent to a concentration camp. She believed only a small amount of people went.
In the six section of the essay, she describes how years later she has learned that it was almost a hundred people from her father’s small hometown that was sent to the concentration camps. In this section she describes how the phrase that her father always used in reference to Rindheim, meant so much more to her after her visit. Here the author connects her past experience with her current views about her father’s Rinheim. She also connects the differences between her past views about Rindheim, to what she learned from returning to her father’s homeland.
Posted in: on Sunday, September 21, 2008 at at 10:49 PM
