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On Oct. 23, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of our arrival in the United States as immigrants.
My mother, my sister and my two nephews met in my sister's home in Queens. My mother had come over that afternoon to help prepare dinner. She worked on the soup; the young men baked ziti. In Salt Lake City, my wife purchased Genoa salami and Granny Smith apples, because she learned that our first meal in this country was salami and apples (the only foods my mother craved).
Our salami was tasty, and we raised our glasses to my parents and grandmother, who had brought my sister and me here, but it would be a stretch to call our meal a celebration. This was, in fact, our first halting attempt to remember, to give shape and meaning to a moment that redefined our lives, and so it was somewhat awkward.
It was awkward, in part, because during the years my sister and I were growing up in the Bronx, we never paused on Oct. 23 to reflect on the decision to leave Israel, travel to the United States and begin our lives anew.
There were many reasons we did not pause. For one, my father worked long and hard in the jewelry business and usually brought work home. For two, we did not need to remember being immigrants, arriving in a foreign place and learning to navigate there. We were immigrants, even my sister who was 3 years old when we disembarked, and all of our efforts were devoted to learning to be Americans.
In addition, being an
My father studied for weeks. I was 11 or 12, and I helped him. He passed the exam, never drove, but struggled all his life to acquire fluency in English. He never achieved it, and he paid an obvious and secret price (secret to us; he knew what it was) for the failure.
My mother struggled in her own right, baby-sitting other immigrant children to supplement my father's income, and looking after her mother, who had moved into the Daughters of Israel home for the aged in Manhattan.
Our connected lives were complex, stressful, challenging, and it took our combined efforts to turn, even modestly, from the people we had been, just a moment ago, it seemed, in Israel, and, before that, in Hungary, in order to become -- because it was a becoming -- Americans.
So I was startled when, a week before Oct. 23, 2009, my mother said to me, "Our 50th anniversary is coming up." It was as if she had suddenly opened a new passageway into the past. "Friday will be 50 years from the day we landed in Manhattan," she said. I was taken aback. I did not recall the day, or who waited for us on shore in Manhattan and drove us to my uncle's apartment.
Over a two-day period, my mother shared her recollections. We were met on the pier by one of my father's maternal uncles and his wife. And we landed on a Sunday, because "The Israel" would not dock on the Sabbath.
I did remember entering my uncle's apartment and learning of their journey. My father's oldest brother and his family fled Hungary during the 1956 revolution. They crossed the Austrian border on foot, evading land mines, and were later accepted into the U.S. as refugees.
It was a relief to remember -- to salvage -- this moment, among the many moments a family sets aside as revelatory of its history and identity. It was gratifying, yet uncomfortable as well. After 50 years, we are no longer the immigrant family that arrived on these shores. For all intents and purposes, we are Americans, and our children know little of our long and fervent acculturation.
May my mother's simple and direct words help us continue to remember.
"On Friday, it will be 50 years that we are in the United States."
Leslie Kelen is the executive director of the Center for Documentary Arts in Salt Lake City. He was born in Budapest, Hungary, and emigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1959.
