He brings his mouth to the cross and finally, finally he kisses it. The only explosion is silence. There must have been enormous anger mixed with relief, an anger that kept me from crossing the threshold of any synagogue until the first of my friends was married in one years and years later. His feelings of contempt for religion, any religion, filtered down in strange ways to the rest of us and became inextricably confused in my mind with my grandfather s yarmulke, his gentle stories about life in Eastern Europe, those stories of barnyards and chickens, and of course, his accent. I remember the first time I heard Isaac Bashevis Singer read his stories aloud in almost the exact voice and intonation as my grandfather.
Every immigrant story is different, every one is the same.
To my family s must also be added the fact, referred to in my grandmother's poem, that she, as a young woman, had passionately loved another man. Her feelings towards her husband were certainly more complicated than I understood, though they filtered down to the rest of us in a dust of simple anger and contempt. But the conflict between the longing to preserve, to cherish the old ways, and the wish to assimilate, to become what Gish Jen in her fine novel of Chinese immigrant life calls Typical American, underlies many of our lives. And it is often the energy produced by that conflict itself, the spark that comes from rubbing together the two hard stones of pride and shame, that ignites and fuels and ultimately enriches so much of what we write. There is something quintessentially adolescent, isn't there, in the wish to assimilate, the old wish to be exactly like everybody else.