What is the importance of Carmel Lake Village in the short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank?

Carmel Lake Village is mentioned briefly by Lauren, but serves as the backdrop for Mark’s anecdote about his father meeting another survivor from the same concentration camp. “It’s like a D.P. [displaced persons] camp with a billiards room,” Lauren describes, and Mark agrees: “From Europe to New York, and now, for the end of their lives, again the same place” (9). Although the South Florida experience of the narrator and Deb is largely independent of the ‘old country,’ in Carmel Lake Village the worlds of pre- and post-Holocaust intermix. Notably, Mark explains that his father used to look like him—an Orthodox Jew—but now looks more like the narrator—a secular one. However, his command over Yiddish is the same: appearances need not reflect internal identities.