We the People: The Immigrant in All of Us

I love Paul Simon’s 1968 hit, “America.” It captures the soul of a wandering, wondering young man in search of his identity and the role he’s to play now that he’s an adult. After she’s dozed off, he confides to his friend Cathy that he’s lost. I identify with that state of mind. At eighteen, I too was lost, and now in my ripened age, at times it feels as if I’ve come full circle.

I sometimes wonder if this is still the land I came of age in, the one Jay and the Americans rhapsodized about in their 1966 pop hit, “Only in America.” My deep love for America says yes, that it’s only a matter of her temporarily losing her way. But I also admit to an occasional foreboding, troubled that she’s changing and the America of my lifetime is morphing into something I cannot put my finger on. And if that were the case, I wouldn’t like what I’d discover.

In his song, Paul has a limited view of America. He’s hitchhiked from Saginaw to meet Cathy in Pittsburgh where they hop a bus and head eastward across Pennsylvania to the New Jersey Turnpike. That was the part I found disconcerting. I felt they were heading in the wrong direction. From my earliest days, I sensed west was the way to go. Regardless, Paul gets at a strain in the American psyche: the urge to pick up and go and to explore new terrain. We’re a nomadic people even if it’s only in our daydreams.  

Packing up and heading to a new place causes conflicting emotions to rise within a wayfarer. On the one hand, there’s the thrill and excitement about the adventure, discovering what’s out there and testing your mettle first in surviving then thriving in your new land. On the other hand, you realize you’re leaving all you’ve known and intuitively sense, even if you haven’t read Tom Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, that you’ll never be able to return. Oh, you certainly could go back to visit and reminisce, but the life you leave will invariably change in ways that you won’t be part of as you will in ways alien to your kith and kin. In a sense, you’ll become a stranger in the land of your birth.

I wonder how my grandparents might’ve felt after leaving their rural native lands in Eastern Europe and being thrust into the blast furnaces of Braddock, Pennsylvania and the factories in nearby towns where they scratched out a living under sub-human conditions. Did they yearn to return to Europe? Did they rue the choice they made? Or did they simply steel up and did what they could do so they could endow their children with the opportunity for a better life than what they would’ve had in the Old Country. A form of self-sacrifice perhaps?

I like to think it was the latter. Coming from those beaten-down, impoverished lands, they had already learned that life can be brutal. Thus, they likely neither regretted their decision to emigrate nor dwelled in a self-pitying, woe-is-me cesspool. Plus, they’d die knowing they put their children and grandchildren in a better place. And that place was and is America.

I will never give up on America when she gets off kilter. The reason is she remains far greater than the specs of what’s currently being played out. As I wrote before, America is an idea, a most fantastic one. It’s still the land of opportunity for those who choose hope over despair. It’s on the faces of the beaten-down who each day pick themselves up and struggle onward to make a better life for themselves and their kith and kin. It’s on the faces of immigrants yearning to become part of America’s story. Despite the calumny raining down on them, they’re personifications of what America is about.

In his rendition of “America,” Neil Diamond captures that sensibility. He wrote the lyrics in tribute to his grandparents who fled czarist Russia and, like my grandparents, found a new start in America. In an interview, Neil said his song was also about the “immigrant in all of us.”

Thanks to the courage and steeliness of their immigrant ancestors, most Americans have likely found their place in America. Interestingly, for many, most from what I can ascertain, it’s the place of or relatively close to the place of their birth. For the rest who didn’t and don’t just daydream, it’s somewhere else in America, not only between Saginaw and New Jersey.