I Have Fallen in Love with American Names

The writers who shaped my sense of my country were mostly born in America some thirty to sixty years before me, around the time that millions of the impoverished were leaving the Old World for the New and the tenement slums of our cities were filling up with, among others, Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. These writers knew little about the families of youngsters like myself, a rather typical American grandchild of four of those poor nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants, whose children, my parents, grew up in a country that they felt entirely a part of and toward which they harbored a deep devotion—a replica of the Declaration of Independence hung framed in our hallway. Born in New Jersey at the start of the twentieth century, my mother and father were happily at home in America, even though they had no delusions and knew themselves to be socially stigmatized and regarded as repellent alien outsiders by any number of their anointed betters, and even though they came to maturity in an America that, until the decades following the Second World War, systematically excluded Jews from much of its institutional and corporate life.