Not long after the end of World War II, my maternal grandmother Nina Grodzensky made the first of what would become annual visits to the U.S. Consulate in Genoa, Italy. As a child, she had been forced to flee the Bolsheviks in Moscow, then, in her 20s, the Nazis in Berlin. As a Jewish refugee in Italy, she hoped to get a U.S. visa for her and my mother, Xenia, then 5 years old. Each time, the answer was: Maybe next year.

In 1950, their luck changed. That fall they boarded a ship for New York, arriving on Nov. 13 as "stateless" persons of no recognized national citizenship, only a dreamed-of destination.

Though my young mother didn't know it at the time, they owed their good fortune to President Harry Truman. In 1948, he had reluctantly signed into law the Displaced Persons Act,........

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