Blog 4 - "My Father Always Said"

The overall focus of this essay is how things change so much from generation to generation. The essay includes history, traditions, memories, and culture. In the beginning of the essay, "In Rindheim, you didn't such things," didn't seem to be of much importance to Schwartz, but at the end of the essay the phrase gave her a new meaning and understanding. This essay deals with A LOT of personal experience, not only from Schwartz, but from her father as well. The experiences are relating to Shwartz's encounters with her father as they took a trip to visit Rindheim. During this trip they stopped at her father's house, downtown, the synagogue, the school, and then finally the Jewish cemetery, which are different focuses of the essay.

The essay is divided into six different sections. The first takes place in Queens, NY. The second takes place in Rindheim, the third at the synagaogue, the fourth at the school, the fifth at the cemetary, and the last is back in the U.S.A. In my opinion, this shows the process of culture shifting from generation to generation (Rindheim to U.S.A). The section that took place in the cemetary was very emotional. At this stage, Schwartz is beginning to understand her heritage and is starting to connect with her ancestors.

It is almost as if the different focuses are stages of her father's life and even Jewish life in Rindheim as it fades to death. Also, just like culture fades/changes from generation to generation, especially once people from other countries have come to America.

There were different parts in the essay where Schwartz shortly mentions another time period/trip to Rindheim. The first trip was eight years after World War II, when Schwartz was eight years old. The second was in 1993.

"It would be forty years before I'd follow Frau Hummel, the blacksmith's daughter, up the narrow, dark stairs to a loft with two windows like cannon holes and search the heavy low beams for my dad's initials- A. L.- carved in the worn, smoothed wood."

"'Well, at least it didn't become a gymnasium or a horse stable, like in other villages,' the mayor's wife told me huffily in 1993 when I returned to Rindheim on my own."........... "This village is more like Forest Hills than you thought, Dad, I told myself, wishing he were around to discuss these ironies of migration.

"Eighty-seven Jews, not a handful, were deported from my father's village during 1941 and 1942, I found out forty years later."

Schwartz's gains a new look on her father's perspectives about life in Rindheim. She understands the meaning of his words and why his culture was so important to not only him, but her as well, which she realizes at the end of the essay. She seemed to be disappointed that her father took up golf and became Americanized. Although, it was something she really couldn't stand before hand. Schwartz's last line is extremely important to the entire essay and I believe that it is the overall idea for the essay. "His magical village of memory had disappeared among the graves that weren't there and the weightless souls with no stones of remembrance." Here she also takes a look back on placing stones on the graves so that the people could gain peace faster in heaven. I don't think there was any better way for her to end this essay!