Immigrant childhoods

I love the Mediterranean Bakery first and foremost for its hummus and baba ganoush, which are both out of this world-- and I mean heavenly. Their other stuff is good and hard to find elsewhere-- bulk olives and feta; bulghur, buckwheat, etc. But there's something more the that place than its products-- it's its essence. It's an international food store like the ones I grew up going to, and like the ones I still go to with my parents when I'm in Boston. Those are Russian stores, and there are no good Russian stores, to my knowledge, in northern Virginia (I maintain that the Russian Gourmet is a joke). I've heard there are some not bad ones in Rockville and other Maryland suburbs, but getting there tends to be too much of a hassle. But I digress.

Going to the Mediterranean Bakery feels like coming home, in a good way, even though "home" comprises the mixed experiences of an immigrant childhood. It feels like I'm activating a latent part of me that I often forget is there. I mean, you wouldn't, unless you were especially perceptive and maybe even if you were, see me in the street and think, "immigrant." Actually, some people do, and they're also immigrants. They just know. Other people don't believe it-- I don't fit their concept of immigrant. And it's not something that I prioritize as a factor in my identity; I actually learned not to, a long time ago, as a survival mechanism. It's something I now draw on when I feel like it, but it's something that, in my efforts to hide it from the outside world, I've managed to put out of my own field of vision, to the extent that I, myself, often forget about it.

But that doesn't mean that it's not there, or that it doesn't influence who I am. As a contributor to today's Times puts it:

Like school, “Thirtysomething” felt urgently essential and yet confusing — always the signs that a given issue had to do with America and the fact that I was an immigrant — and every week I tuned in hoping to learn how to talk the adult talk and maybe soon walk the adult walk.

and

Even after 27 years of being American, the last 8 as a true citizen, I was once again filled with a foreigner’s panic and reverence at the show’s slice of American life. But the reasons were different this time. I was drawn to “Thirtysomething” not for what it could teach me about life as an American adult, but because of its very distance from the American adults I am and know. I was watching not to emulate their lives, but because theirs are lives I just don’t see, period.

BTW, that contributor teaches creative writing at Bucknell. If you see her, tell her I loved her article.

I've recommended David Bezmozgis' "Natasha and Other Stories," written that more than anything else I've ever read, it made me feel my childhood in my bones. His upbringing among immigrants was in Toronto, mine in Boston, a friend's--with whom I shared that book-- elsewhere, but I bet it would resonate just as powerfully for the vast majority of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who came here as children. It may resonate almost as much to immigrants from elsewhere--there are definitely common threads in the immigrant experience.

My family got to Boston before the massive waves of Russian immigration, so assimilation wasn't so much a conscious choice as the way forward. That didn't make it easy or seamless... it just made it inevitable. That's why I still marvel at the fact that I can pass for American-born. Everyone's experience is different--everyone to some extent picks and chooses how Americanized they become and also accepts a greater or lesser level of assimilation that is beyond their control. Like an accent, if you moved late enough to keep a foreign one.

I don't want to romanticize the experience--like I said, it wasn't seamless--but I think it was easier here than in other places where I've lived, even Britain (Zadie Smith's "White Teeth" covers that well). You'll recall the press' taking note that other countries, like France, couldn't have come up with a Barack Obama (although that one did come up with a Sarkozy--which begs the question of whether you then have to be a Bobby Jindhal: so conservative as to be non-threatening).

What I'm getting at is, even though growing up foreign in America in the 1980s wasn't painless, it was doable. I hope that's not changed and not changing for the worse, for the more xenophobic. The yellers at the town halls scare me, even though I'd never doubted they were there. Now that they're coming out of the woodwork, people are asking whether they represent the vestiges of a more homogeneous society. Maybe it is all about health care and not at all about racism; maybe they're not channeling health care reform as a proxy for fear of a demographically changing country. Maybe it's some of both and even they can't tell the difference. What do you think?