I am, as are most Americans, a descendant of immigrants, although from where on my mother's side is a matter of discussion. My father's side is much clearer; his grandparents emigrated from Lithuania to escape the persecution the Jews were experiencing at the turn of the century. I've heard that although all the family memebers made it out somehow, the children's passports were used to allow others to escape. It's a convoluted and confusing story, as most Jews were really just trying to save their skins throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century.
My stepmother's family came from the Netherlands, probably for the oldest reason in the book -- to make a better life in America. My great-grandparents on that side were the first generation of Americans, born in Michigan, and were taught to speak Dutch. But once my great-grandparents began having their own children, they decided not to pass the language on, and my stepmom's family is now ignorant of their original mother tongue.
See, here's the rub. I am fascinated by people's heritage and where they came from, and am a bit envious of those who are much closer than I am to their native lands. Some of the authors of my daily reads are Jewish, and throw various Yiddish words into their entries because sometimes there's nothing like Yiddish to get your point across. Others speak of holidays spent with their families and reminisce of these same holidays as children. Still others remember their grandparents speaking only in their native tongue, or heavily accented English, and eating foods that were popular in their homelands.
But I am of a generation that tried to smooth over all our differences as immigrants and instead focused on being American. My generation has those all-American names, like Michael and Stephanie and Heather and Tiffany and Christopher. It seems like we were all trying to be homogenized into one ethnicity, if you will -- that of being American.
So we lost most of our heritage. I know very little of my Jewish heritage, as my father is a Christian now, and what little I do know is either what I have been taught by my good friend Ben who's Jewish, or what I've gleaned from celebrating holidays with the rest of my father's family that is Jewish. And my stepmom's Dutch heritage was lost long ago when my great-grandparents were young. I'm about as white-bread as they come.
But somewhere between folks my age and kids my brother's age, only ten years my junior, something happened. Now it seems that kids want to be recognized for their ethnic background -- Chinese, Native American, Guatemalan (like my brother), Samoan, what have you. My brother went through a phase where he'd only talk to other Central Americans, and if you were Colombian or Mexican or Puerto Rican, he wanted nothing to do with you, let alone the white kids and the blacks and the Asians.
So I feel kind of lost. I can claim immigrant background as obviously my family came over just a hundred years ago and not on the Mayflower, but I have no real information about it.
Of course, most of it has to do with the fact that three of my four biological grandparents died before I was four, and also that as a military family, I grew up surrounded only by my parents and siblings. It's not like I had a grandmother down the street or living with us that could regale me with stories of her homeland.
But I am an American, a member of the greatest country in the world. And while I don't really enjoy the role of world disciplinarian that we've apparently cast for ourselves, I am damn proud to be an American.
There is no better place to live in all the world.