My Father Always Said, Fittings, and The Ashes of August

I related to each of these memoirs in different ways. Because I'm Jewish, the one that affected me most was "My Father Always Said." I've known holocaust survivors and children of survivors, so I read this memoir as another testimony to the horror of what happened then. On a more personal level, my father died when I was very young. I experienced the ritual of going to visit his grave, and pay respect to his memory,until my mom died. She always insisted that I find a stone and place it on top of his tombstone. I never knew why. I just did what my mom told me to do. I was moved by Schwartz's interpretation of the stones placed atop tombstones in a Jewish cemetery. It made me want to go to visit my parents graves, and it made me think about all those who perished in the holocaust -- and the way those who survived embraced life.

My uncle died of Alzheimer's disease. The last time I saw him, he thought I was my mother, his sister, so "Fittings," also personally affected me. I liked the way the author made something so tragic more accessible by using humor.

"The Ashes of August" brought back to mind a few trips west I've had -- the heat, the dryness, the awesome beauty, the people, as rugged as the landscape and as fragile.

"Independence Day..."

I've always been so focussed on the racism in this piece that I never noticed that the mom in the piece wasn't acting very momlike ...Maybe all the emphasis on the narrator's age, only 12 years old, was also meant to make us think about how maturity is not just measured in years. The mom may have been older, but maybe she wasn't acting so maturely... Anyway, Jillian's post made me think about that and the memoir in a slightly different way than I have in the past.

Someone else in class ... can't remember who it was... commented on how surprised she was that anyone would move to Alaska, a place she thought of as so "boring" in comparison to California. That struck me... because in the piece, it turns out Alaska isn't much different from California. The family lived in a dangerous neighborhood, riddled with violence... but if a reader doesn't know about that neighborhood, then I suppose she wouldn't understand why anyone would want to get away from it.

Another thing I thought about this time I read this memoir was the significance of the title: "Independence Day ...." The narrator is a twelve year old and twelve year olds are always struggling to assert their autonomy, their independence. They think of themselves as "grown up." This is a kind of "coming of age story," in that the narrator is forced to grow up because of the racism she confronts.