The overall focus of the essay "My Father Always Said" by Mimi Schwartz are her father's typical sayings when she was a teenager growing up in Forest Hills, Queens. From this, Schwartz talks extensively about her experience as an American teenager whose parents fled from their hometown of Rindheim when the Nazis forced them to leave during World War II.
In each section, Schwartz goes back and forth from the past of when she was a teenager to the present looking back at her youth. The opening section gives the reader a brief description of her life in Forest Hills, Queens. Her upbringing in America is different from her father's because she has more freedom to go out and do as she pleases, though it is against her fathers wishes. At the end of this section, Schwartz realizes the irony in his father's three favorite sayings ("In Rindheim, you didn't do such things!", "I don't care about everybody!", and "Forest Hills, Queens is not the world.") when they go on a trip to Rindheim at the age of thirteen.
In the second section, Schwartz is in Rindheim with her family in her father's hometown. She wants to go into the house that he grew up in but her father refuses to enter. She sees how different life is in this town compared to her neighborhood in Forest Hills. They reach the synagogue where he would spend his Friday nights. They also find out that the synagogue was converted into a Protestant Evangelical Church in order to accomodate Eastern Germans that settled in Rindheim.
Section 3 starts with Schwartz's father talking about the importance of being in the synagogue on Friday nights. She also begins to see the shift in her father's personality while there in Rindheim. In this section, she describes the man who was a leader, like a Moses who lead his family out of harms way and brought them into America. She notices this change when her mother, for the first time, takes over and serves as the leader. Schwartz also hears about the story of
Kristallnacht when all the Jews finally realized that they had to leave in order to save themselves from the Nazis.
In section 4, the family is in the Jewish cemetery. She remembers how the sun lit the names on the gravestones, all somewhat erect yet tilted on either side. She remembers the silence and solemnity of that place looking at each gravestone picturing the people that once lived in that town. Her father also tells her about Tante Rosa who was "deported" because she didn't think the Nazis would bother her. She then remembered all of the other people who had no gravestone of their own because they were killed in the death camps.
The last section starts with Schwartz giving an account of how many people from Rindheim were "deported" or died in concentration camps. She did not know this information when she was a teenager. It was much later when she did her research that she found this out. Schwartz, in the present, described how that trip transformed her father because he no longer said his three favorite sayings. He took up golfing and played with his American friends. He seemed more optimistic and encouraged his daughter to try new things by saying, "Smile, smile! You are a lucky girl to be here!" I guess in a way, Schwartz's father left his old self behind in Rindheim and became a new man because of it.
The gaps in the sections serve as a breaking point wherein the reader could absorb everything that was read. Schwartz would jump back in time and talk about her trip and then go back to the present in another section. Since the subject matter was "heavy", she included the breaks in order for the reader to fully understand and reflect on her experience as a teenager growing up with parents that went through the Holocaust. These breaks helped the reader see how her understanding of her parents and life in general shifted as she got older.
