blog #4

This essay seems to address 3 things. A father's relationship to his past, a daughter's relationship with her father, and a daughter's newfound understanding of her father and his past. As this segmented essay goes on, the white space seems to represent shifts in what that section of the text is about. The first segment focuses on giving some background information about this family, and has a father who is still holding onto his past in Rindheim, and a daughter who doesn't understand her father and why he is so stuck on his "favorite lines". The second segment is mostly about the father and gives insight into his childhood in Rindheim, thus beginning to explain why he says/does/things the things he does in America that the author comments on in the first segment. In the third segment,it seems that the narrator is beginning to understand her father better and is feeling some sympathy for him. She is learning things that she did not know previously and Nazi Germany and the types of things her father and his kin endured during that time. The fourth segment is relatively short, and mainly serves to shed some like on Jewish life and customs before the war, as well as giving a look into the relationship the narrator's mother and father had in Germany. The fifth segment shifts back to the narrator and what she is learning at that moment in the graveyard. It seems that by this point, the father and daughter and comeing to a degree of closeness and understanding not previously seem in the piece, and it also seems that the narrator is learning a great deal, and that her father is healing through his mourning. Finally, in the sixth segment, we are back to learning about the narrator and we see that she now has a much better understanding of the Holocaust and what it entailed for not only her family, but for Jews as a whole. At this point, it seems as though both she and her father have learned and grown from their experience in Germany, and it seems that both have gained from the trip.
Each segment in this piece seems to bring a new level of understanding for the narrator. She goes from knowing very little about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany in the first segment, to having a far greater understanding of both the World War II era and her father by the sixth segment. Each section focuses on a different aspect of the lives of the characters, and they also serve to designate a new realm of understanding for the narrator.