Reb Smolinsky spent his life studying the Torah while his wife and daughters saw to the financial needs of the family. He never cared about their personal needs or saw reason to actually provide for them. When his wife became sick, he seemed to care little for her and is seemingly already courting his future wife. After the funeral he made a huge scene out of rending his garments while Sara refused, claiming she needed her clothes for work. But after his new wife spent all of his money he was eventually forced to live in the real world where he became sick. Sara took pity on him and helped him, despite everything that had happened between them. Do you think that she was right to take pity on him or should she have responded “so you have made your bed, now you must lie in it”?
Telling her father to lie in the bed he had made would have been great cosmic justice to him, but honestly, it would have made us dislike Sara as a character - it would mean that she had learned nothing, and had kept with the "old ways" she had been taught. Sara's character is all about growth, about new things, about learning how Americans work and how to adapt to living in the "New World" - for her to have gone and done that to her father would have negated all character growth she had, no matter how satisfying it may have been.
ReplyDeleteI kind of think the opposite of Adam. At the beginning of the novel, she is burdened by her Dad, and that doesn't go away at the end. After Sara helps get him better and offers to take him to her house, he still quotes scriptures against women. I think, and this is kind of sad to say, that Sara taking her Father back shows that she has yet to outgrow the "old ways." She may have had success in America but she couldn't escape her Dad.
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