Blog#4: Form and Focus in Schwartz

The overall themes of Mimi Schwartz's essay, My Father Always Said, include memory, the importance of family history, and the difficulties faced/gaps left by cultural assimilation or cultural translation. Mimi focuses on her journey "through time" to visit the Rindheim of her father's pre-Nazi Germany childhood, as well as the impact her father's history had on her growing up as a first generation American. Mimi eventually learns to accept and appreciate the rich though seemingly irrelevant traditions of her parents after seeing the suffering and displacement they experienced and the loved ones they had to leave behind.
The prose, simple yet impactful, reads like a typical autobiographical novel/essay, and closely resembles the structure/tone of Beard's Out There. Schwartz uses her parents’ harrowing experience of the Holocaust to make a commentary on the strength of familial love and the bonds that flourish despite the hatred that surrounds us.
Schwartz uses gaps in the storyline to indicate either the passage of time or the movement from real time events to exposition and reflection. The first section introduces readers to Mimi’s German-American household, where she struggles to reconcile her Jewish extraction with her Queens environment. She is frustrated that she has to forgo outings with friends to honor the Sabbath and embarrassed that her parents cannot say “moder” and “fader” without showcasing their non-American origins. The following sections include an account of the family's return to Germany and Mimi’s introduction into the world of family graveyards, cannon fodder, and Kristallnacht. Something shifts inside Mimi when she sees the stone remains of her family, multiple generations, some who led fulfilling lives and others who were robbed. Those who perished at the hands of Hitler's Germany have no legacy; their daughters will never wear lipstick at twelve or go bowling with friends, and more tragically, never honor the Sabbath or know the story of their people. These scenes bridge Mimi's "gap" on two levels: the first is the transition from child to young adult, the second is the incongruency between a disconnected German-Jewish girl and her ideal American self.
Mimi continues by punctuating the story with her father’s bittersweet memories and the ride through his hometown, then shifting to events taking place 40 years later where, in hindsight, she can thoroughly evaluate the situation and understand things on a deeper level (such as the realization that present day Rindheim is not all that different from the illustrious Forest Hills Gardens). I think this particular form is extremely useful and gives the effect of a camera rolling through the scenes of Mimi's life. Readers are drawn in and can both visualize and perhaps empathize with this Jewish -American girl's plight, the yearning to belong to the present without sacrificing the history of self.