During my senior year of high school, I kept hearing other students saying how much they wanted to get out of Pennsylvania. I was one of these students, since I lived in the Lehigh Valley for nineteen years of my life, obviously I wanted to move to a city and not get stuck driving behind tractors every morning. Many people have felt this before, including the author of Home at Last, David Mengestu. What people don’t realize, however, is that moving away to a different location is not going to change where your home is. Mengestu finds this out in the essay, through chronological events of his childhood and early adulthood. In his personal essay, Mengestu writes about his journey of moving to the neighborhood of Kensington in Brooklyn, New York, and uncovers his epiphany of the meaning of home to the reader. Mengestu believes that you can recreate home while moving to a new location, while I believe that home is where you believe your family is, and that becomes part of your background. …show more content…
(Mengestu, 203) This saying also pertains to Mengestu’s concept of what home means to him. Mengestu moved to Kensington in order to redefine himself, and not be too attached to his Ethiopian background. Most of the civilians in Kensington were immigrants, and they still held loyalty to the countries they were from. Mengestu realizes toward the end of the essay that you can make anything feel like home, even remnants of former neighborhoods. He states toward the end of the essay ,”Farther down the road from where they stood were the few remaining remnants of the neighborhood’s older Jewish community- one synagogue, a kosher deli- proof, if one was ever needed, that Brooklyn is always reinventing itself, that there is room here for us all.” (Mengestu,