Blog 4

The focuse of Schwartz essay is how many people fear change and are more comfortable and happy with what they are familiar with than something different. In this story Schwartz is a young modern Americanized women with an old school Jewish father who grew up in a town in Germany called Rinheim that he loved. But dring world war 2 the Nazi's drove him out of Rinheim to a Forrest Hills New York where he settled and had a family. He misses his home town greatly and won't give his adopted home a chance, he would rather stay the same than blend in and Americanize himself like his children have. During the story you see Mimi and her father gradually having finding some common ground and realizing that niether was knew were the other was coming from originally. Mimi found out the importance of her families history and why they are the way the are, and her father fond out that grass isn't always greener on the other side, his memories of how his how town was was different with how it actually was when he went back.

The first section was when Mimi was 13 and her father was showing her Rindheim, it was the first time back since the end of the war and her father wanted to show Mimi how great Rindheim was compared to Forrest Hills. But oce they got there they noticed Rindheim was not like it was once before, the synagogues were no longer there, all the jews had left to Israel or America, and the town was now multi-cultural like Forrest Hills was.

The second section was Mimi learning some of the history and traditions that she never understood such as how Jewish life was destroyed in Germany, and how Christians and Jew worked together to rebuild after the war. How her father knew the family had to leave Germany as soon as Hitler took power when nobody else knew they were in danger. And how her family had to gather as much money as possible so that America would even take her family. I think in this section she began to realize every thing her father went through, I think here she stopped being ashamed of her father and started being more appreciative.