Blog #4

“My Father Always Said” is a connection of past and present.  It is the awakening of a young girl to a world outside of her comfort zone. Many of us take for granted the comforts of our everyday lives as did Mimi Schwartz. Her father, however, opened her eyes to the beauty and cruelty of another life.

The first section of this essay deals with the author’s life as an adolescent growing up in Queens, New York. She tells us of the everyday things that kids do, watching sports, going to school, even hanging out in front of the local store. What separated her from the rest of the children in her neighborhood was a past her father cold not let go of and one she did not understand.

After getting to know the author and the kind of life she lives we are introduced to her father’s childhood home. A place that he loves and reveres, yet at the same time haunts him still. It is a small farm town in Germany where everyone knows everyone else, where the community is a family. At least that’s how he chooses to remember it. When they get there they find all traces of the once predominantly Jewish town have been wiped away. Even the old synagogue has been replaced with a Protestant church.

The only remnants of this town’s Jewish heritage is in the local Jewish cemetery, which is the focus of the third section. It is here that the author finally begins to grasp the emotion this place holds for her father. She sees the family and friends he lost even if she herself never knew them. She even participates in the old Jewish ritual of placing stones on the graves of loved ones. This is the moment in which she and her father seem to come to an unspoken understanding. He will stop living in the past and she will remember it.

The last section of this essay pertains to what happens after their trip. Her father begins to live his life, not according to how it would have happened in “Rindheim”, but how he should have been living all of those years in America. The author, on the other hand, returns to her father’s hometown years later and learns the whole truth of what took place during that terrible time in history.

I believe Schwartz uses the pauses between sections to give the reader a sense of finalization. With each pause a new part of the story begins and in a way the author herself moves forward.