Blog

Wall Street’s pocket change


Morgan Stanley settled a discrimination lawsuit yesterday. To avoid going to trial, the firm agreed to pay $54 million. Most of the money will go to 340 women who worked or still work for the institutional-stock division at the Wall Street securities company. The news seems good. But somehow, after reading it, you just can’t make up your mind to cheer for women’s rights.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Pamela Martens, a former employee who settled a different discrimination suit against Smith Barney six years ago. She said the $54 million was merely “pocket change” for a firm like Morgan Stanley. As to whether the settlement, which includes $2 million for outside monitoring of gender bias, will do anything to change the environment on Wall Street, Martens predicted it would do “absolutely nothing.”

Morgan’s chief executive, Philip Purcell, is reported to have personally called the Equal Employment Opportunity Chairwoman, Cari Dominguez, to work out the final settlement by midnight Sunday. The deal was reached almost four years after the lawsuit was first filed. The lead plaintiff, 43-year-old Allison Schieffelin, said, “I’m happy that there’s such a great settlement for everybody.” The EEOC’s lead attorney said she hoped the settlement would send a strong message to other Wall Street companies.

Please excuse the cynics among us, who might wonder whether the message may affect all that much. Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, said in The New York Times that the $54 million was “nothing” to a firm like Morgan Stanley. In last quarter alone, the firm earned more than $1 billion.

Probably the executives at Morgan were thinking less about the $54 million and more about the 20 or so witnesses who were scheduled to testify. Probably they were more concerned about a public airing of episodes in which employees supposedly ordered birthday cakes shaped like breasts and had strippers at work. Probably.

—Vinnee Tong

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Bringing the war home


A recent study has found no evidence of Gulf War Syndrome, but soldiers and specifically veterans of the first Gulf War still suffer from numerous debilitating medical problems. If there is no Gulf War Syndrome, what is it that these soldiers are suffering from?

A recent study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researchers, based on a study of 40,000 former soldiers, finds no evidence for the existence of Gulf War Syndrome. As the BBC reports, the myriad problems that afflict the former soldiers — including “mood swings, memory loss, lack of concentration, night sweats, general fatigue and sexual problems,” — are particularly common for veterans of the first Gulf War, but inexplicably so. The study concludes that

“Gulf War veterans report significantly more symptoms of disease than non-Gulf War veterans in almost all ill-health categories examined, yet there is still no consistent explanation for this discrepancy.”

Even if we table the question of whether Gulf War Syndrome exists, this research does highlight a troubling but often neglected aspect of war: The psychological and physical damage that war inflicts on a solider. In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Dan Baum focuses on the psychological damage that killing inflicts on a solider, and he reports that the U.S. Army is shamefully unprepared to alleviate the suffering of soldiers traumatized by the killing they have done. According to Baum, the Army’s “Field Manual 22-51: Leaders’ Manual for Combat Stress Control” is completely mute on the issue of the stress created by killing an enemy solider. The individual soldier’s conscience, it seems, is his own domain, and it is the soldier’s lonely duty to resolve the deep trauma that results from killing.  

This is not to suggest that what veterans — or more specifically, veterans of the first Gulf War — are suffering from is related to killing. Rather, Baum’s article and the recent study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine highlight the fact that those who are shipped off to battle and manage to return may be affected by devastating trauma. Some of the soldiers who return safely from their tour of duty bring their war home with them; the shame is that their suffering — and more importantly, the specific reasons for their suffering — are so seldom addressed honestly, directly, or productively.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

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No place like home


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From Judy Garland we learned “there’s no place like home.” If only we, like her fictional character in The Wizard of Oz, could just click our heels a few times and find ourselves at home.

But beyond the silver screen, navigating our way home is rarely that simple. Thanks to globalization, refugee flows, the dissolution of nation-states and the advent of new ones, and drastic cultural changes in the definition of family, it is increasingly difficult to locate and define home. As we partner up with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for this issue of InTheFray Magazine, we examine the complex meaning of “home” — for both those who have left one country to resettle in another and those who feel like outsiders in their country of origin.

We begin with three narratives about the immigrant experience, illuminating the multitude of ways in which assimilation — and the lack thereof — shapes notions of home and identity. In her photo essay, Open Wounds (which will be published on Monday, July 19), Lajla Hadzic documents the destruction of Sarajevo, Bosnia, nearly 10 years after civil war and genocide displaced 2.2 million people. Despite international reconstruction efforts, Hadzic reveals that bombed buildings, deforested parks, and ramshackle housing projects are the rule rather than the exception, leaving millions of Bosnians homeless — both literally and figuratively. San Diego Union-Tribune reporter and first-generation American Elena Gaona, meanwhile, shares her struggle to carve out a sense of belonging in the United States while her cultural traditions reside primarily in Mexico in This is my country. Rounding out this series of personal narratives, InTheFray contributing editor and Indian émigré Radhika Sharma describes the role that her senses of sound and taste play in shaping her post-emigration identity and how they help her gauge the extent of her Americanization in I liked tea.

Just north of the U.S. border in Canada, the struggle to retain a sense of self continues. As I suggest in Strangers in a strange land, my review of David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories (this month’s selection from Off the Shelf), Soviet Jews, once persecuted for their religion, struggle to fit into the Canadian Jewish community as their more privileged brethren question — even belittle — their brand of Judaism. As Ayah-Victoria McKhail elucidates in Seduced by the Stars and Stripes?, cultural identity is also political. The narrow reelection of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal Party last month may have jeopardized cross-border cooperation on President Bush’s National Missile Defense program — and Canada’s close alliance with its neighbor.

Back home in the United States, three authors meditate on our politics of exclusion. Richard Martin eloquently explores the double bind  experienced by queer men in prison in his poem GAY LIT. ITF columnist Afi Scruggs in “I don’t care that it is not signed by a senator,” argues that introductory footage from Michael Moore’s acclaimed film Fahrenheit 911 illuminates the importance of electing black officials and of holding democracy accountable to its less privileged constituents. Finally, on Monday, July 19, InTheFray columnist and Managing Editor Henry P. Belanger will serve us a little of his home-style political wisdom as he questions whether the “revelations” in Robert Greenwald’s guerilla documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism are really all that groundbreaking in Confessions of a Fox News junkie.

Happy reading – and don’t forget to pick up your copy of The Working Poor, Off the Shelf’s featured book for August!

Laura Nathan
InTheFray Editor
Austin, Texas
“

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The interconnectedness of all things


While the horrors that occur routinely in Africa — massacres in the Darfur region of Sudan, the AIDS crisis, absolute poverty — often seem callously but comfortably far away, it is bracing to remember that in the age of globalization, we cannot unsympathetically dismiss another country’s problems as irrelevant to us; we are, after all, very intimately connected.  

Consider that in the city of Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an average family of seven will spend approximately $63 a month. Accepting bribes, peddling goods on the street, and prostitution are some of the means of eking out a living. As Davan Maharaj reports in the Los Angeles Times, 37-year-old Goma resident Mama Rose turned to prostitution after her husband was robbed and killed by militiamen. As a mother with four children to support, she parlayed her gender into a dangerous and only marginally profitable profession: prostitution. As Mama Rose explains, “Every truth is not good to say … But let us face it. In Goma, everything has a price. And I don’t want to sell myself short.”

When Mama Rose’s clientele is, like herself, impoverished, she earns less than $25 a month. In the months when her clientele includes the United Nations soldiers who are stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo — since the five-year long regional conflict that wreaked havoc in the DRC only ended in 2003 — her income may be somewhere in the region of $75 a month. According to the regional governor, 80 percent of Goma’s sex workers are infected with HIV or AIDS.

As the AIDS crisis increases its stranglehold on Africa, there is a brain drain occurring in the African health care sector as nurses are lured to practice their profession in more lucrative and less hellish conditions abroad. Celia W. Dugger reports in The New York Times:

In Malawi, a quarter of public health workers, including nurses, will be dead, mostly of AIDS and tuberculosis, by 2009, according to a study of worker death rates in 40 hospitals here.

The statistics are staggering and the prognosis bleak.  

While the Bush Administration officially introduced its $15 billion emergency anti-AIDS program in February of 2004, the project has been criticized for lengthy funding delays. As an entire continent is destroyed by the AIDS epidemic, it should benefit everyone to keep in mind the sobering fact of the interconnectedness of all things.

—Mimi Hanaoka

  
  

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Reviews

Strangers in a strange land

BEST OF OFF THE SHELF (SO FAR)
2004 Best of Off the Shelf

Just as Texans are told to remember the Alamo, Jews are told to remember the Holocaust. But as David Bezmozgis suggests in Natasha and Other Stories, maybe it’s time for Jews to remember that they’ve also wandered through the desert and trekked across international waters.


(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

To read Laura Nathan’s interview with David Bezmozgis about Natasha and Other Stories, please click here.

What does it mean to be a Jew? What defines a “good” Jew? Is one’s Judaism something that is performed through active participation in certain rituals and religious services? Or can Jewish identity be proven simply by referring to oneself as a Jew?

In a sense, the debate over Jewish identity is as old as the Torah. One could say debating Jewishness is part of being Jewish. But the increasing cosmopolitanism, refugee flows, and globalization that have characterized the last half-century have left Jewish communities around the globe grappling with these questions in a new context. As David Bezmozgis demonstrates in his debut short-story collection Natasha and Other Stories, the answers, when they are reached, are hardly final — or universal.

For the 320,000 Soviet Jews who fled the U.S.S.R between 1960 and 1989 to escape persecution, the debate over what constitutes Jewish identity is especially pronounced as refugees like Bezmozgis and his family cautiously — and somewhat naively — navigate the newfound ability to practice their religion freely. Only seven years old when his family left Riga, Latvia, for Toronto in 1980, Bezmozgis offers an intoxicating exploration of the poignant arguments about Jewishness among émigré communities, using his own experiences as a guide. Having just emigrated from Riga to Toronto at the age of seven, when the book begins, Mark Berman, the narrator in each of the seven stories, has stolen part of his author’s biography.

In Natasha, Mark tells the story of his family: himself, his mother Bella, and his father Roman, as the Bermans — like those making the transition from closeting their queerness to “coming out” — learn how to live the once persecuted identity publicly, openly, and as part of a community. In the Soviet Union, saying “I am a Jew” affirmed one’s Judaism. But in Toronto, the Bermans’ relationships to Judaism — and the Jewish community — are complicated by the tendency of some North American Jews to expect — even require — more than a moniker to substantiate Jewish identity. The family discovers that they must reconcile conflicting desires in order to remember the past, practice Judaism on their own terms, and assimilate into the North American Jewry.

Bezmozgis depicts North American Jews, meanwhile, as needing to balance the freedoms they’ve taken for granted with those previously denied to their brethren. What they’re all left with is a community that simultaneously demands definition and refuses certain definitions — and the people who embody them.

The metamorphosis

The death of a neighbor’s dog. The labor of establishing a clientele for an émigré’s new massage business. The visit of a Soviet weightlifter. A fight on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Sexual encounters with a cousin. The quest for knowledge about a great Jewish American boxer. A controversy at a Jewish old folk’s home when one man’s death leaves his male partner to fend for himself in a community of opportunists.

In the course of a full novel, these events might seem pedestrian. But without intervening chapters to denote the passage of time and make the process of change seem less acute, Bezmozgis’ seven stories demonstrate that identity is a work-in-progress. Or as L.A. Weekly columnist Brendan Bernhard puts it, “mysterious and seemingly random.” Although Mark participates in and narrates each story, one might not know that these stories bear connection to one another if not for the recurring Berman name. A mere first-grader when the book begins, Mark is in middle school by the fourth story — “An Animal to the Memory” — and is a sexually active 16-year-old just one story later in “Natasha.” Although Bezmozgis leaves us in the dark about Mark’s exact age at the book’s conclusion, he assures us that the narrator has matured considerably, exhibiting a thirst for knowledge and embracing the responsibilities of work, family, history, and Judaism.

Given Mark’s evolution over the course of Bezmozgis’ stories, one can’t help but read Natasha as a coming-of-age narrative — one at times reminiscent of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

But Bezmozgis sets his coming-of-age narrative apart by complicating the common experiences of adolescence with the struggles of migration, loss, and Jewish identity. As we come to realize, Mark isn’t the only one to come of age in Natasha. In many ways, immigration is a form of rebirth, an event that puts adults back at square one and forces them to unlearn every cultural custom and norm that they internalized in their homeland over the years.

Children, however, tend to be more malleable, making the changes they undergo seem less drastic. Or perhaps their metamorphosis just seems inevitable, given the usual pitfalls of adolescence. This, of course, could lead one to expect that an émigré child would assimilate more easily than an adult. But as Natasha surmises, it isn’t that simple.

For Bezmozgis, an émigré’s life cannot be divided into two simple categories of pre- and post-Soviet life, religious persecution and religious freedom. Rather, the author shows destruction stalking each individual stage of change as each story ends with a form of death: The death of the neighbor’s dog. The disposing of an unwanted, non-kosher apple cake that denotes a bond between the Soviet Jews and the Canadian Jews. The death of dreams and the defeat of the “strongest man in the world.” The death of millions of Jews and the death of one individual’s understanding of what it means to be a Jew. The death of an identity associated with drugs, sex, and incestuous relationships. The death of a grandparent and the death of a stranger whose only relationship to Mark is a shared enthusiasm for a legendary Jewish boxer. The death of an ostensibly gay elderly man, the death of uncertainty over what it means to be a Jew. Occurring so frequently in Natasha, death and drastic change become predictable rites of passage.

With death ever-present as Mark comes of age, Judaism plays a more defining role in his identity, demonstrating that it is possible to keep vestiges of his past alive in his present. From his parents and their contemporaries — people who fear assimilation after living the majority of their lives in the Soviet Union — Mark learns that he can’t simply discard history. Or rather, he can’t discard the history his parents want for him, the religious freedom that became the cause for sacrificing everything in moving to a new land. Meanwhile, those who seek to erase the Bermans’ history and redefine Judaism for them reinforce the past the family fled. The feelings of inadequacy and invisibility that their critics inspire remind the Bermans that the past — their past — will always be with them.

Are you a good Jew or a bad Jew?

Coming to Canada with nothing but their history and their religion, as documented on their emigration papers, the Bermans initially milk their Jewish identity for all it’s worth. Judaism, after all, seems to be their only currency of any value, their only connection to others who don’t speak their language or understand their cultural idiosyncrasies.

As Mark explains: “This was 1983, and as Russian Jews, recent immigrants, and political refugees, we were still a cause. We had good PR. We could trade on our history … My mother … believed that [my father’s] strongest selling point [as a massage therapist] was his status as a Soviet refugee. The most important appeal, she said, was to guilt and empathy. That would get them in the door.”

Heeding this advice rather than appealing to the poor Soviet émigré community, Roman looks to Canadian Jews to help build his clientele. After all, Canadian Jews are privileged. They know people. And they know what it means to be Jewish.

Unfortunately, they don’t fully grasp what it means to be persecuted for being Jewish.

“The rabbi,” for instance, “was supposed to be particularly sympathetic to the plight of the Russian Jews,” Mark suggests. “To improve his chances [of getting the rabbi to help him establish a clientele], my father brought me along.”

Roman could of course prove his Jewishness simply by pointing to his emigration papers. But because Mark also attends Hebrew school and can speak very rudimentary Hebrew, Roman has living, breathing proof that the Bermans are not just Jews, but good Jews — Jews who make their religion a priority and consequently, are deserving of help.

But the rabbi doesn’t accept the “Jew card.” As Mark says upon leaving the synagogue: “Fifteen minutes after going in, we were back out on the street … and on our way home. For our trouble we had five dollars and the business card of a man who would print my father’s flyers at a cost.”

Given Mark’s tone, the Bermans seem to have naively believed that the sympathy of Canadian Jews would improve their lot and help them fit right in. But a combination of sympathy and guilt cannot lay the groundwork for an equal relationship between two peoples, particularly of such contrasting backgrounds.

In the story “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,” this becomes increasingly evident through the Bermans’ interaction with the Kornblums, a Jewish couple that invites them to Shabbat dinner. One might assume that the Kornblums are simply making a kind gesture, but their intentions seem slightly selfish, more imbued with sympathy than empathy, as they try to play the part of model Jews.

This is evident when Rhonda Kornblum returns the entire apple cake that the Bermans bring to dinner. Explaining to the Bermans that “although they sometimes took the kids to McDonald’s, they [keep] kosher at home,” Rhonda makes Bella feel inadequate. The reader, meanwhile, can’t help but question this qualification. Why do the Kornblums make exceptions for McDonald’s and for their own kosher-raised children while refusing to make exceptions for Soviet Jews who never had the privilege of keeping kosher? Why don’t the Kornblums just keep the cake and throw it away rather than making their guests feel inferior?

The Kornblums, it seems, are a reminder that established Jews may manipulate newcomers’ pleas for pity to make themselves feel that they are “good Jews.” In other words, marketing one’s Jewishness may gain one access into the Jewish community; it may even earn a dinner invitation or a few minutes of the rabbi’s time. But it can never guarantee genuine, unmotivated inclusion. Perhaps at best, it can ensure a place on the margins, as the disparity between the Jewish émigré experience and the Canadian (read: privileged, un-persecuted) experience undermines the inclusiveness that the community prides itself on.

All for one and one for all: Memories of suffering

Telling the couples “what an honor it was to have them at his house,” Dr. Kornblum reveals that he and his wife have been trying to help Soviet Jews “for years” and “If it wasn’t too personal, he wanted to know how bad it really was.” After hearing their stories, Kornblum takes out a family photo album and makes a point of identifying each person killed by the Nazis.

We see this concerted effort to remember the Holocaust not just at the Kornblums’ but also when Mark fights with another student on Holocaust Remembrance Day in “An Animal to the Memory.” Ironically, Mark’s parents have sent him to a Jewish school to “learn what it means to be a Jew.” But when the rabbi — the son of a Holocaust survivor — tells Mark that even the Nazis wouldn’t do what he did, he implies that Mark hasn’t fulfilled his parents’ objective. Making Mark repeatedly yell, “I’m a Jew,” the rabbi replies nonchalantly, “Now maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew.”

But does he? Do we? Perhaps more than any other story in Natasha, this one concludes with more questions than answers. That is, we know there’s some connection between being a Jew and remembering the Holocaust. But the inability to pinpoint this connection is something with which Bezmozgis takes issue.

You can’t help but wonder why the Holocaust is treated as the end-all-be-all of Jewish identity throughout a book that is predominately about the Bermans, who never discuss their connection to the Holocaust. Pointedly, whenever Bezmozgis puts Soviet Jews in the same room with non-Soviet Jews, the Holocaust — rather than the countless Jews who died under Stalin or subsequent Soviet regimes — becomes the rallying point for Jewish identity. Those whose connection to persecuted Judaism derives from some other epoch tend to be treated as outsiders.

In fact, Natasha questions whether North American Jews are capable of articulating a shared history based on anything other than the Holocaust and its assault on their collective identity. The reader — at least this reader — can’t help but wonder: As North American Jews belabor this epoch more than the rest, do they disregard their own individuality and the potential of the Jewish community to forge a collective identity that is more true to the diverse experiences and memories of its members? And by focusing their energy on remembering a specific past, might they end up forgetting, overlooking, or trivializing something occurring in the near-present?

The problem, as we learn through the Bermans, is that the Holocaust isn’t the only thing Jews must remember in order to retain a sense of who they were and who they are becoming. Looking backward to a specific epoch — one that some members of a given community might not identify with — does not necessarily hold the answers for defining shared identity. For as Mark learns in “Minyan,” only empathy — genuinely and unselfishly connecting with and relating to other people for an extended period of time — can begin to ensure membership in the Jewish community. Easier said than done.

Death becomes them

Mark comes to realize this through the death of Itzik, a man who has been living in a Jewish old folk’s home. When Itzik’s death leaves Herschel — the man believed to have been his lover — alone in their apartment, hordes of people vie to move in and displace the bereft partner. Suddenly, Zalman (the man who runs the building and organizes weekly religious services) finds people he never met before, people who have never attended religious services, appealing to him for help. They go out of their way to convince him that they are “good Jews,” better than Herschel. In fact, whereas Zalman typically struggles to find ten Jewish men to form a minyan at religious services, more than 20 men attend services the Saturday following Itzik’s funeral. “Everyone [making] an effort at making an effort …” Mark recalls. “Voices battled for distinction.”

Here history is simultaneously relevant and irrelevant in defining Judaism. That is, the opportunists believe they’re Jews because their ancestors were. But they want Zalman to disregard who they personally have been in the past — Jews who have never bothered to attend religious services — and embrace them for who they promise to be in their moment of desperation.

One might expect Zalman, who was never a fan of Herschel, Itzik, or their queer bond, to accept the “good Jew” card, to privilege imagined history over active, selfless participation in the Jewish community. But Zalman’s explanation as to why he will allow Herschel to stay is telling about the myth of the “good Jew” and the futility of bartering Judaism:

Here the only question is Jew or not. And now I am asked by people who never stepped into a synagogue to do them a favor. They all have friends, relatives who need an apartment. Each and every one a good Jew. Promises left and right about how they will come to the synagogue. I’ve heard these promises before. And they say, “With so many good Jews who need apartments, why should Herschel be allowed to stay?” This is not my concern. My concern is ten Jewish men. If you want 10 Jewish saints, good luck … They should know I don’t put a Jew who comes to synagogue in the street. Homosexuals, murderers, liars, and thieves — I take them all. Without them we would never have a minyan.

Ironically, in casting himself as non-judgmental, Zalman, by equating gays with criminals and other immoral types, implies that some forms of morality — and sexual preferences — are inferior to others, even within the Jewish community.

At best, then, Bezmozgis leaves us with an open-ended final answer in the final pages of Natasha. That is, attempting to articulate a more coherent, more universal definition of Jewish identity — or any identity category, for that matter — only raises more questions. Sure, we can conclude that being a “good Jew” is less productive for the community than simply being a Jew on one’s own terms and showing up to ensure that the community lives on. But inevitably it’s impossible to call oneself a Jew and avoid being scrutinized by others who consider themselves more Jewish as they fall back on their own understanding of what it means to be a Jew.

Maybe the question we should be asking, then, isn’t what it means to be a Jew. Perhaps it’s time instead to ask why we as individuals and sub-communities define our shared identity in particular ways. For instance, why does being a Jew mean you have to remember the Holocaust above all other instances of anti-Semitism and all other manifestations of community and tradition? And how does the way that we identify ourselves in comparison to others impact the constitution of the Jewish community by creating divides within?

Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, on some level, we’re all strangers living in a strange land — even if our passports suggest otherwise.

To read Laura Nathan’s interview with David Bezmozgis about Natasha, click here.

STORY INDEX

BOOKS >
Order through Powells.com, and a portion of the sale goes to InTheFray to defray publishing costs

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0316769177

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679723161

Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0374281416

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679756450

HISTORY >

Operation Exodus
URL: http://www.jewishgates.com/file.asp?File_ID

World Jewry: Ethiopian Jewry and Soviet Jewry
URL: http://www.rac.org/issues/issuewj.html

REVIEWS >

“One man shock-and-awe” by Chris Nutall-Smith
URL: http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/profile.cfm?article_id=5795

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Interviews

Writing home

2004 Best of Off the Shelf

A conversation with David Bezmozgis concerning Natasha and Other Stories.


Recently, InTheFray Editor Laura Nathan interviewed David Bezmozgis about his debut collection of short stories, Natasha and Other Stories. Their conversation — and Bezmozgis’ thoughts on “home,” what it means to be a Jew, and writing — follows:

The interviewer: Laura Nathan, InTheFray Editor
The interviewee: David Bezmozgis, author, Natasha and Other Stories

Though the stories in Natasha are fictional, the similarities between the Bermans’ life and your own suggest that writing this must have been a very personal experience — one that you seem to be somewhat critical of. Tell me a little bit about what inspired you to write Natasha.

I wrote Natasha because I had wanted for a very long time to write about my community. As far as I knew there had been nothing written about the Soviet Jewish immigration in English – though there had been books in Russian and, I believe, Hebrew. As a reader of American Jewish fiction, I had seen previous generations of Jewish immigrants treated and, inspired by that, wished to do the same for my own community.

As for being “somewhat critical,” I am “somewhat critical” about everything. But the distinction, perhaps unintended on your part, between “somewhat critical” and “critical” is an important one. In the totality of the immigrant experience there are things to both criticize and admire. As with any experience — if observed honestly.

Natasha repeatedly comes back to the centrality of the Holocaust in defining what it means to be a Jew. Why do you think this is the case, and what are the dangers (if any) of this tendency? Also, as an emigrant, is this a phenomenon that you’ve found to be unique to North America?

The Holocaust is an undeniable part of Jewish identity. To think otherwise is naïve and to suggest that it could or should be otherwise is offensive. However, the Holocaust is hardly the only thing that defines Jewish experience. There is, obviously, much more. We are talking here of a people who have a history of several millenia and who have in many ways influenced Western thought and culture.

Now as for why the Holocaust and the Second World War feature in Natasha I think you need to understand the Russian (Latvian) Jewish experience. Latvian Jews (and Western Russian Jews) suffered, like most Eastern European Jews, from the Nazis. Those who did not evacuate or join the Red Army were exterminated. And those who evacuated lived in the eastern depths of Russia, sent their sons and husbands to the front, and — at the war’s conclusion — returned home to find that home no longer existed. This happened only 60 years ago. These people are still alive. The experience is central to who they are. How could is be otherwise? The experience (if only of the Great Patriotic War) was made central to the education of their children. To this day, speaking to my grandfather or his friends, talk of the war is common. It has marked them permanently.

As for dangers of this tendency to invoke the war and the Holocaust — I think any gratuitous invocation is dangerous. But I think just as dangerous is any reactionary tendency to begrudge these people the right to speak about their past.

Twenty-four years after emigrating from the Soviet Union, do you find that you have fully assimilated into the North American Jewish community, or do you still feel like an outsider at times?

Your word “fully” presupposes a lot. As much as possible, the local Jewish communities invited the Russian Jews to assimilate. I think “full” assimilation is not possible. I don’t think most Russians wanted to assimilate “fully” because that would entail abandoning their Russian past — a past which incorporates culture, language, history. So, as far as I know, most Russian immigrants of my parents’ generation keep as their intimate friends other Russian immigrants. But they have, to various degrees embraced the North American lifestyle. They now eat more salads and use less butter.

As for my “embrace” of Judaism and Jewishness, I have no doubt that by living in North America my identity as a Jew is much stronger and more informed. But as for “full assimilation” I don’t think I have the temperament to assimilate fully into anything. I would argue that this is common to most writers and artists. Some amount of objectivity is probably genetically programmed.

Fighting, violence, and aggression play an important role in Natasha. Tell me a little bit about what inspired your interest in this sort of sadism and why it plays such an import role in your stories.

Sadism?

As a Russian-turn-Canadian who has now resettled in California, do you find that there are differences between Jewish communities in Canada and those in the United States? If so, what are those differences?

Well, I no longer live in California, though I did live there for five years. I now live in Toronto where I find no discernible difference between American and Canadian Jews. I am told that the Canadian version is slightly more conservative in religion and politics. This may be true. But on the whole, communities of middle class Jews are the same. And communities of lower class Jews are probably also the same. The distinction that interests me is one of class, not nationality.

The émigré experience — that sense of loss of home and the quest for a new identity — in Natasha is, of course, centered around the Jewish Soviet émigré experience, but many of Mark’s experiences seem to extend beyond the struggles with religious identity. How, if at all, might your stories be read by other (non-Soviet/non-Jewish) émigrés, by other people who are struggling to discover a sense of belonging in a place that, at times, feels nothing like home?

With only two exceptions — “An Animal to the Memory” and “Minyan” — I think all of the stories are secular. Meaning, in order to understand them you require no background in Judaism as a religion. I live a secular life. My concerns, almost exclusively, are secular concerns. I think the stories reflect this. Though set in the Russian community, the stories are mostly about basic struggles – get work, learn a language, find and survive love. I think these are things common to all immigrants and, really, most people. These are not stories of existential conflict; they deal instead with a pursuit of concrete things. Generally, I am not interested in existential conflict (although I just finished reading a book called Rituals by Cees Nooteboom which was exceptional.)

Throughout Natasha you allude to the question of what it means to a Jew. With all of your experience as an émigré and a writer, what do you think it means to be a Jew? How do you define Jewish identity? And do you think that definition can ever be generalized or applied to the Jewish community as a whole? Why or why not?

… Some of the stories certainly deal with is the question of what it means to be a Jew. As for what a Jew is, I always think of the answer Rabbi Hillel gave in response to a similar question. The question was posed by gentile and I believe he asked if Rabbi Hillel could teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot. (Already a good story, and even Jewish in its comic irony.) Hillel said: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go learn.”

To my understanding, then, to be a Jew involves not hurting others and learning perpetually.

Throughout Natasha you allude to the way in which people barter Judaism, the way in which they say things like “I’m a Jew,” or “I’m a good Jew,” to get ahead or to get what they need. When you allude to this tendency, you seem to do so with both an emphasis on the necessity of doing so for the new immigrant and with a critical eye toward opportunists. Would you mind elaborating a little on how you think this sort of behavior implicates the formation of a community, Jewish or otherwise, and what it says about the question of what it means to be a Jew?

People barter all the time. Life is a series of power transactions. This is not limited to Jews. If people were patient with one another and understood one another it would be different. (See above for Rabbi Hillel.) But this will never happen. The only compensation for the pain is if one can look at all of this with some level of objectivity and accept that the misunderstandings are often what make life interesting. That these misunderstandings are indeed the conflict which writers term “conflict.”

What are you working on now? Do you think that you’ll continue to write about the émigré experience, or do you see yourself moving onto other matters?

I am working on a novel. Though I am reticent to say to much, the subject matter is related to Natasha. I think I will continue to write about my particular émigré experience. Or, at least, this particular community. I will probably write about other things as well — though perhaps more in film than prose.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTOR >

The interviewer
Laura Nathan, InTheFray Editor

BOOKS >
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Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0374281416-0
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Commentary

Shanghai spectacle

Being a female gym rat in China isn’t as easy as it looks. Part two of a three-part series.


I clench my gloved palms around the cold serrated steel bar, at either end of which sit several rubberized 5, 10, and 20 kilogram plates. My knees bent, I attempt to deadlift the weight by pulling the bar over my knees and straightening my back. As I prepare for lift-off, I try to ignore the gawking observers to my left. I suppose lifting over 80 kilograms (176 pounds), for a girl weighing less than two-thirds of that, is generally considered no small feat in China or elsewhere. But the fact that I am in Shanghai makes weightlifting a uniquely challenging experience.

When I joined the First (phonetically translated into Fei Si Te) Fitness Center near my apartment in Shanghai’s Yangpu District, I was not quite prepared for the adjustment process I would have to undergo: an abrupt introduction to the cultural gaps between Chinese and Western concepts of exercise and personal space.

My initiation into the Fei Si Te community brought me the dubious privilege of celebrity status, me being 1) a small-framed Chinese-American female, and 2) an avid weightlifter with an admittedly odd penchant for lifting dumbbells and barbells that are about as big as I am. Thus, not only was I upsetting conventional notions of femininity, but I was also doing so in a booming post-Communist metropolis whose youth culture is hovering precariously somewhere between Maoist puritanism and Britney Spears. So I guess I shouldn’t feel surprised that I attracted stares of fascination mixed with horror and fear as I squatted close to twice my body weight. Not that my weightlifting didn’t draw surprise from male bystanders back in the United States, but at Fei Si Te , the blatant shock plainly smeared on the faces of exercisers was a Shanghai specialty, and months would pass until they began gradually to accept me as simply a grotesque fixture at the gym.

Alone in the crowd

To complicate matters, Fei Si Te, like many new enterprises in Shanghai, is hopelessly over-invested and over-staffed. Though it is nice having an entire gym all to oneself in the afternoon, it is slightly unnerving to be the only other animate object in the cavernous space besides three trainers and the custodian, all uniformed in pert warm-up suits.

On busier days, the five of us are joined by several 30-something ladies who maniacally monopolize every sit-up bench. As I push around the freeweights, the custodian meticulously wipes clean all the cheaply manufactured equipment with pleather trimmings that manage to peel despite hardly being used, and the trainers idle in the 10-foot radius around the air-conditioner, or do a few random chin-ups. They often have nothing to do but watch the exercisers. Though they sometimes offer me advice on good form, which I appreciate, they are more eager to engage the American in conversation about powerlifting techniques, protein powders, bodybuilding contests, and other aspects of fitness culture in the United States of which Chinese are just beginning to catch on and be mass marketed to.

On occasion, a trainer or a bold male bystander has been known to reaffirm his masculinity by jumping in between sets and attempting to throw my barbell around with strenuously displayed ease. I try to warn people against jumping under heavy weights if they have no previous lifting experience, but for some reason, seeing me lift has prompted some to “test” their strength by attempting to imitate my movement immediately after I finish with a weight or a machine. (I do admit it’s gratifying to see a grown man grab and instantly drop in bewilderment the barbell I just lifted, but I’d hate to be responsible for someone’s injury.)

During some memorable lifting sessions, I have been approached every ten minutes with some sort of question about how I picked up such an odd hobby or a comment about my being lihai (powerful) or how I should keep my elbows closer to my side when doing tricep pushdowns. “Are you planning on entering a bodybuilding competition?” asked one trainer. “You must be familiar with that guy,” said another, gesturing to the pair of posters (front and back) of Mr. Olympia flexing his steroidal physique in briefs.  

The body as temple, or high mass?

If I were only more culturally resilient, I might do as my fellow Chinese gym-goers do and chat happily with the trainers from the warm-up to cool-down. For Westerners, though, a workout is either a functional task (sometimes a chore) or a chance to isolate oneself from the hectic stimuli of work and household and focus on simple physical cultivation. In China, the idea of “working out” is still novel enough that the exercise is not so much practical as it is exhilarating, not an escape hatch from the pressures of Shanghai city life but a chance to participate further in modern consumer culture. Though Shanghai’s blitzkrieg of economic development has enabled the city to import the trappings of a cosmopolitan metropolis, recreational activities that seem mundane in developed nations, like “going to the gym,” still hold a spectacular quality for many of its wealthier residents.

In contrast to other parts of China, years of capitalist transition have acclimated Shanghai to the presence of lao wai (foreigners), Western pop music, and European brand names. Yet more personal aspects of the Western lifestyle — from dimly lit cafes to sweat-pumping aerobics classes — still dazzle even Shanghai’s rising elite, representing sophistication accessible only to the moneyed class.

Some cultural intangibles, however, just can’t be bought. Privacy, for instance. China is not only a mass society, but a society of spectators as well, which might explain why at my gym, people seem much more adept at watching others exercise than doing it themselves.

During a one-day promotional event, visitors were allowed a free trial of the equipment, and the usually empty gym was for an hour or so overrun with young men and women in trousers and dress shoes, positioning themselves backwards on the leg curl machine, yanking various limbs and cables back and forth, and nearly running the wheels off of an exercise bike in a frenzy of freshly discovered aerobic energy — all to the tune of techno and mandopop blasting in the background.

A group of gaunt Chinese men in their twenties made no attempt at subtlety when watching me do a few sets of deadlifts from about 10 feet away.

“Do you have to watch me like that?” I said in my best Chinese approximation of my surly New Yorker tone.

“We just think you’re lihai,” said one.

I tried to explain that it was uncomfortable to be observed this way, particularly when I was trying to focus my energy on dragging an obscenely heavy weight up from the floor. I realized that in China, Western amenities are designed for display, and the idea of private activity, within a seemingly “public” space such as a weight room, remains a foreign concept.

The men ambled off soon after I began glaring at them. I complained about the incident to another American gym patron who was also lifting weights. “Different concept of personal space here,” I remarked.

“Yeah,” he said disdainfully. “None.”

But this culture clash perhaps has a deeper significance than personal annoyance. My watchers considered a stare a complement, my subjection to their scrutiny a testament to my “lihai.” Nonetheless, as an American city girl who doesn’t always appreciate being put on the spot, my flattery is dwarfed by unease. Shanghai’s great irony is that its size and bustle afford both the anonymity of a global metropolis and the claustrophobia of vintage urban China. The surveillance I encounter as a fitness novelty reveals that here, what seems like a personal quest for muscular achievement can quickly turn into a spectator sport.

Click here to read Part One of the series.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS >

THE CHINESE FITNESS TREND >

”Global Fitness Chain to Build First Gyms in Beijing, Shanghai”, published by People’s Daily on March 22, 2002.
URL: http://china.org.cn/english/investment/29295.htm

”China’s Wellness Revolution” by Mark Godfrey, published by China Today. June 22, 2004.
URL: http://china.org.cn/english/2004/Jun/98896.htm

GENDER POLITICS AND POWERLIFTING >

”The Bodybuilding Grotesque: The Female Bodybuilder, Gender Transgression, and Designations of Deviance” by muscle-bound scholar Krista Scott-Dixon of Stumptuous.com.
URL: http://www.stumptuous.com/grotesque.html

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Commentary

“I don’t care that it is not signed by a senator”

Part of Fahrenheit 9/11 moves beyond conspiracy theories and simple Bush-bashing to give African Americans a lesson in race consciousness.

BEST OF ITF COLUMNS (SO FAR)


Hours after seeing Fahrenheit 9/11, I did what hundreds of thousands of other viewers probably did. I picked up the telephone to urge others to see the movie.

My first call went to my sister, a self-described “Yellow Dog Democrat,” teacher, and activist. I didn’t have to tell her to see the film; I know she’d go as soon as the movie came to her town. But I urged her to take my niece and nephews.

There was something in the film they need to see.

It isn’t filmmaker Michael Moore’s theories about the connections between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family. It isn’t the scenes in the second half, when Marine Corps recruiters try to lure young, under-employed African American males into enlisting.

I want my niece and nephews to see a scene at the beginning of the movie, before the credits, when Moore shows the U.S. Senate certifying the election of President George W. Bush.

One by one, African American members of Congress and their allies stood before the senators to oppose the certification of Bush’s election. They presented written petitions noting how Bush’s victory lay on the disenfranchisement of African American voters. When Vice President Al Gore, who was serving as president of the Senate, asked if any senator supported his or her petitions, each member of the House of Representatives gave the same answer.

“No.”

Why should the young people in my family see such a defeat? My sister thought the scene would teach the importance of electing black officials.

Maybe, but I am hoping for a larger lesson; I want my niece and nephews and their peers see what race consciousness really is.

True race consciousness means recognizing your responsibility to stand up for those who have less than you: less education, less access, even less understanding of the machinations that keep the elite in place.

True race consciousness means recognizing your responsibility to stand up to oppression, even though your resistance might be futile.

True race consciousness demands speaking truth to power.

Sadly, I think younger blacks don’t often see this kind of moral leadership.

Older black leaders, like Jesse Jackson, have failed them by not practicing what they preach in an age when one’s indiscretions can appear on a website — and the national news — in an instant.

Then there’s Bill Cosby, who castigates the younger generation, as well as the underclass, with vile and stereotypical language.

Their peers, the new class of young celebrities, concentrate on “bling-bling.” I’ll admit the term is probably outdated. But the lyrics to hip-hop I hear still gleefully celebrate sex, flash, and cash. So young people look up to folks touting P. Diddy race consciousness: folks who think they advance the race by showing others how to live fast, glittering lives.

Where were they when the Republicans stole black votes to put their boy in the White House? Sampling beats?

Who where they talking to? Each other?

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, and the others confronted the white, predominately male senators who sat comfortably on their behinds and approved an election that they knew was illegitimate. These were people who hid their cowardice and cynicism behind rules of order.

It would have only taken one senator to sign a petition that could have stopped the process that made Bush the president of the United States.

Not one came forward.

And the representatives knew that before they came to deliver their petitions. But they came anyway.

They welded the power they had even though they knew the final outcome.

And that’s what I want my niece and nephews to see, so that when their turn comes to speak out —and it will — they will not hesitate.

They will remember those who went before them, and stand strong.

STORY INDEX

FILMS >

Fahrenheit 9/11
URL: http://www.fahrenheit911.com

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
URL: http://www.cbcfinc.org

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Fiction & Poetry

GAY LIT

Best of Imagine (So Far)
2004 Best of Imagine

If you think being a closeted queer is suffocating, just imagine what it’s like to be an imprisoned gay man.


(stock.xchg)

On the Big Yard
Art is everywhere
Etched into the skins
Of former foster care kids
Turned convict

One man walks the yard alone
He wears a shirt that he cannot take off
The ink of a thousand ballpoint pens
Pushed under his skin by the tips of old guitar strings and sewing needles
In group home midnights
Or D Block lockdowns

Across his shoulders; the letters “S O C A L”
And below this
A pictorial history of Los Angeles
The Pachuco Riots, the movie industry, and surf culture
Underneath the left arm
A lifelike rendering of Adolph Hitler
Underneath the right arm
A shamrock with the numbers “666” in the center
Four teardrops from his left eye
A Sistine chapel of convict art
And down the back of two gigantic biceps are the words:
    P
G      R
A      I
Y      D
    E
He is called “Silent”
Because he speaks to no one
And no one speaks to him
No one even speaks of him
Except for an old man who once said in chow line
“There go Ol’ Silent … He don’t talk to nobody …”

I wanted to speak to him
And when he ran past the Woodpile
Where the peckerwoods sat
I said “Good Morning …”

Silent kept running
But the Woods, playing Pinochle with their White Pride tattoos,
Had heard what I said
And one of them said to me: “Don’t fuck with Silent …”

I decided this was good advice
But when we lined up to be searched after our day on the Yard
Silent stood next to me
He knew that I was the one who had spoken to him

You could see it on his arms!
How lonely he was …
I spoke to him, again
“You’ve got some really amazing tattoos, man …”

The room had been a maelstrom of convict clatter and clanging doors
Now it was quiet, as Silent regarded me with a blank stare
too late now
I looked back at him
Silent reached up and lowered the elastic band of his orange convict pants
No one could look away
We saw his tattoos
Black flames reaching down the shaft of an erect penis
A small “happy face” at the very tip

The guard turned
He addressed Silent by his real name
“Miller! What the fuck is you doin’?”
“Man, git yo’ hands up against that wall!”

Silent covered himself slowly
He put his hands on the wall
They shook him down for weapons and other contraband
Then we moved back into the cellblocks
When they called for “Yard” at 11 AM the next day
I stayed in my cell

I left Old Silent
On the Big Yard
But I thought you should know
He was there

Gay Pride, motherfucker ….

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
(Order from Powells.com and a portion of each sale goes to InTheFray)

Books by prison poet Jimmy Santago Baca
URL: http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?kw=jimmy+santiago+baca

PEOPLE >

Prison Poet, Dramatist, Jean Genet
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/books/author/genet/index.shtml

Prison Poet Etheridge Knight
URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/knight/knight.htm

The Prison Poet by S.H. Wintle
URL: http://dreamsis29.tripod.com/PrisonPoet.htm

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Commentary

This is my country

I can’t help but feel at home in Mexico. But that does not mean it is my country.


I flicked my driver’s license casually.

“Citizenship?” asked the border patrol agent.

“American,” I said.

My best friend Cecilia and I were coming back from a fun weekend in Mexico and had just driven up to the U.S. entry gate at the Tijuana/San Diego border. I asked the uniformed man for the best route to northern San Diego, where I lived. He teased me about having to ask for directions. We both laughed.

Cecilia was not so at ease. She paused and was jittery when she answered the agent’s questions, leading him to briefly inspect our trunk before telling me the best way home. I quickly left Mexico without another thought. But next to me, my friend Cecilia started to cry.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I can’t believe it was that easy,” she said.

This was one of Cecilia’s first trips back to Mexico, her homeland. She had spent more than 15 years living as an illegal alien in the United States before finally becoming a legal resident. The first time she had crossed the Mexican border wasn’t so easy. She had climbed into a tire, floated, and then waded across the cold waters of the Rio Grande into Texas. She’d walked overnight before landing in a safe house. Another time she’d hidden for hours inside the tiny secret compartment of a couple’s truck, holding her breath while a border patrol dog sniffed the outside, its damp nose searching for illegal cargo.

Five years ago Cecilia married a U.S. citizen and became a legal resident. Now she can travel to Mexico freely. But she knows she will cry when she crosses the border. She can’t help but think of the hundreds of thousands of people who did as she once did — risk their lives to live in this country.

“I didn’t really think about that just now,” I said. I then hugged her, an embrace for all the immigrants in this country, including my parents.

As a first-generation Mexican American, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, I basically grew up Mexican. My parents are often more traditional than families in Mexico — trapped in time, they are unaware that the country has moved beyond the 1950s and 1960s. While kids my age danced to Michael Jackson, I fell in love with romantic boleros from Mexican idols like Javier Solis. I became an expert on black-and-white film stars like Pedro Infante and Cantinflas.

Some parts of my culture I rejected. I was not allowed to go to sleepovers. I couldn’t talk to boys. English was banned at home, and I ate tacos for lunch while classmates ate sandwiches. Most of all I hated the work. I had to help my parents clean offices at night, falling asleep in the van while they worked until morning. On the weekends, while my friends got to see movies or visit the park, my parents and I sold food out of our home, collected cans, cleaned houses, mass produced paper flowers, packaged gift tissue, sold toys at swap meets, painted apartments, and mowed lawns or buffed floors.

“I don’t belong here,” I’d thought. Only when I visited Mexico did I get the childhood I yearned for. I could hang out on the streets without my parents beckoning me inside. I was free to flirt with boys and walk around the plaza arm-and-arm with my cousins.

Something magical happened to my parents in Mexico. They laughed louder, told funny stories, hugged relatives, enjoyed leisurely meals, and even danced.

“Why don’t we stay here?” I wondered. When we came back stateside, I missed Mexico, with its big mountains and wide beaches, its loud cities and colorful fruit stands. But it always came to an end, and we dutifully headed home to work and to school. At the border, my mother and I would cross by car. My father would always disappear and take another route.

“He has something to buy, “ my mother would say. “He’ll meet us on the other side.”

We prayed while we waited for him to cross. I would absorb my mother’s nervousness. We always felt relieved, and happy when my father walked up to us in Laredo, Texas — safe on the other side.

Today, my mother is a U.S. citizen and my father is a U.S. resident. They make few trips to Mexico now, ensconced by a lively Dallas lifestyle where they tend three small businesses. Mexico lives in my heart, but as I matured I began to embrace being American more.

Some of my relatives are very poor in Mexico, with little hope of getting ahead. Some of them are middle-class and believe keeping up appearances is the most important thing there is. I like it here where I can work hard to get ahead, and where it’s okay to be me — 31 and unmarried, living on my own, working on a career, experiencing other cultures, traveling alone, going without makeup, speaking up when I want to, being unfashionable, hosting martini parties. My family in Mexico would forgive me for my small indiscretions too, I’m sure, though I do get a lot of lectures when I talk to relatives there.

No, I am lucky to live here. As a reporter in San Diego, I often cover stories about undocumented immigrants. I read mail from readers who accuse me of not telling the story of how illegal aliens are crippling California, not to mention the country. I am often told to go back to my country too. I laugh off the most offensive comments because I can.

I am American.

I look at the immigrants here — who stand on the corner looking for work, who live in makeshift shacks in canyons because they lack affordable housing, who pile into cars to go buy groceries, who work 12-hour days for little pay, somehow managing to save thousands to pay back the coyote who brought them — and I’m not afraid of them. They are here illegally, I know. But they are here. There are an estimated 8 to 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States. They are part of our society, and I am honored to tell their stories. Somebody has to. I approach them respectfully and I am glad when they talk to me.

Recently, U.S. border patrol agents began arresting immigrants in San Diego at bus stops, on corners and in grocery stores. I wonder if they will snatch me up if I somehow forget my I.D. — after all, I look so ethnic. It angers me that my civil rights as a U.S. citizen could be so easily violated. But then I return to my comfortable stateside apartment and do not think about immigration issues. I have that luxury.

Back in the car, my friend Cecilia cried. And when I hugged her, I began to cry too. I remembered the struggles my mother and father had gone through for me, the countless times they had risked their lives to cross the border, the dozens of jobs they held, the new language they studied, the hamburgers they learned to cook, the way they encouraged me to go to college, the soft words of love my father murmured when I told him I was moving away. They are proud of me, but I can only aspire to be as courageous.

My parents became American for me, just as millions of immigrants have done for decades and will continue to do so for their families. When Cecilia cried I could almost hear them panting, out of breath in the nearby deserts, walking through the night to reach a safe house somewhere in this country.

And I prayed for them.

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personal stories. global issues.