When I was a child, I was proud and grateful to be an American.

I participated in Girl Scouts, took piano lessons and ballet yet despite it all I always saw myself as different from the average student in my Brooklyn, NY elementary school.

My parents had accents.

English was their third or fourth language.

And then there were their nationalities.

A few years before I had been born my then 19 year old Romanian mother had been in Auschwitz and my 23 year old Polish father had been a chauffeur for the First Secretary of the Communist party of Tajjikistan, Dmitrii Protopovov. (I didn’t find out about my dad’s wartime experiences until my own children were in college. He apparently didn’t want me raising my hand in Show & Tell during the height of the Cold War and saying that he had been in the Soviet Union.)

So, I was extra-patriotic. I stood tall during the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, sang the National Anthem with fervor.

Behind it all was the knowledge that I was a member of another community, the Jewish........

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