An American, Told
Jean Hannah Edelstein
1.
I was six the first and only time I watched An American Tail. (Who would choose to feel such pain more than once?) I remember viewing it a little too close to the television, sitting on the brown-and-orange shag carpet of the family room in our raised ranch in upstate New York. An American Tail is an animated film about Fievel Mousekewitz, a Jewish mouse who flees Ukraine with his family for America when the shtetl they live in is destroyed by Cossacks and the mice lose their home to the Cossacks’ murderous cats.
On the ship to the new country the mice dance and sing their way through the horrors of steerage with a cheerful tune about how “there are no cats in America / and the streets are paved with cheese.” It all seems so promising, but then Fievel is swept overboard in a storm. He survives—of course he survives, he is the mouse protagonist of an animated children’s movie; the filmmakers were not monsters—but the rest of the film follows his trials as he finds his way through early-twentieth-century New York City on a plaintive search for his family.
My father had only just recently added a VCR to our very basic home entertainment system, and for the most part we didn’t watch very much television, but I suppose my mother had other things to do that afternoon when she settled me in front of the set and put the video in.
I was the middle of three children: she had a seven-year-old and a newborn on her hands as well. I don’t remember how much awareness I had of the stories of Jewish immigrants coming to America, if I related so much to Fievel’s plight because I knew my father’s family had taken a similarly choppy route. Or maybe, like most children of a certain age, the thought of losing my parents was just my idea of hell on earth.
I cried as soon as Fievel was swept away from his parents in the storm and I cried as he looked for them and I cried as he and his mouse sister sang their signature plaintive song, “Somewhere Out There,” which became a Top 40 hit. It was a romantic ballad, which was quite weird since it was sung by a mouse brother and sister, but it was the mid-eighties.
At some point my mother came into the room to investigate my crying—which was, I’ll note, on a different floor from the kitchen where she was making dinner, so I must have been crying at top volume—and suggested that if I didn’t stop crying she would have to turn the movie off. I begged her not to: I had to find out what happened to poor Fievel, how he overcame the terrible fate of leaving the only home he’d ever known and becoming separated from his family in the process.
I did not consider, through my tears, that my mother and Fievel had something in common: that she’d left her home, her country, and her family to come to America. That maybe my mother could better tell me how it felt. For though my mother’s transition across the ocean had been rather more comfortable than Fievel’s, she too had left a great deal behind: her blood family, her friends, her career.
My mother came to the United States from Scotland in 1980. She wasn’t pushed out of the country where she’d spent her whole life; she was pulled, by love. My mother met my father in the mid-seventies, when he was an American postdoctoral fellow at the University of Glasgow. They lived in the same apartment building near the campus: a grand terrace turned into a stack of bedsits.
My father’s family had come to America like the Mousekewitzes, as I mentioned, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, having left because of the persecution of Jews in Russia and the surrounding states, and landed on Ellis Island, the immigration inspection station where transatlantic immigrants of that era arrived and were processed and welcomed in (or turned back). Standard. The American Dream had worked out for the Edelsteins, at least to an extent: each generation became more affluent and better educated. My father, a second-generation American, remembered his grandmother speaking Yiddish and Russian but didn’t speak them himself. His grandparents were not educated, but his father had gone to a state university to become an optometrist, and my father got a PhD from Harvard in nuclear physics.
Like any family, my father’s family endured its fair share of real sadness, even trauma: one great-grandfather left his wife and children in such abject poverty for a period of years that the kids had to be sent to live with relatives. (The couple reunited, lived together to the end of their lives, but, according to my father, never again shared a bed; divorce was not an option for immigrants like them.) My grandmother, my father’s mother, died from cancer in her early forties, and a few years later her sister became very ill too. There were arguments, estrangements, judgments. But my father’s family achieved a kind of middle-class stability that was probably beyond what my great-grandparents imagined when they were refugees boarding boats in the Baltic. But it might have been something like what they’d hoped for, in the abstract: safety, homes, health care, no hunger. When my father left America, it was because he was following a job and had a sense of adventure, not because he didn’t have a firm sense of home.
My mother did not have an American Dream, or at least not one that burned long and hard in her heart. She was thirty-three when she left her country, and she left because my father had lost his job and was struggling to find another good one in the United Kingdom—he was a medical physicist—though he’d tried very hard. By the time An American Tail was released to teach children like me the basics of immigration, she was raising three children in a country she wasn’t from, in a small town where people never stopped asking her where she was from. Many of them were people whose families had come from the Old Country like my father: through Ellis Island, in kerchiefs, generations working their way up from the slums of New York and Newark to the relative gentility of an upstate postindustrial small town. These were people who understood the American Dream and who—perhaps—did not understand why my mother did not dream it. My father did not really dream it either: far from it. He had a family he adored and work he was interested in. He also had the confidence that comes from being born in a country where your parents were born too: the comfort that comes from first-generation parents smoothing out the wrinkles their immigrant parents could never quite iron.
My mother could have become a US citizen, but she chose not to; she loved the country she was from. “In Britain” she tended to say when something happened in America that she didn’t like. “In this country” she tended to say, before talking about something in America that didn’t please her. “Your mother is so nice,” American women would say to me from time to time, enough times that it was notable as a thing women would say about my mother. It was notable because they said it in a way that sometimes felt to me like they were not just expressing a fact; it was something of a surprise.
2.
I was also six when I joined the Girl Scouts at school. I joined because it was inexpensive and convenient, meeting in the elementary school library or at the troop leader’s local home. I joined, I’m sure, because my mother had fond memories of her own time as a Girl Guide. I’m not sure my parents considered the military underpinnings of the organization, or the patriotic ones, but I learned to swear to serve “God and my country,” despite the fact that God was not a man my two-faith family followed with any vigor, though if I named him in vain, my mother would say, “Let’s leave God out of it.” She had moved away from the Church of Scotland she had been raised in when she married my Jewish father; we were raised celebrating holidays from both traditions but with no specific religion. Still, some habits stuck with my mother, as they do with us all.
Being a Girl Scout was, of course, about fitting in: literally wearing a uniform and achieving a hierarchy of skills that had been deemed useful and appropriate by a body of overseers. When my mother was in Girl Guides, she told me, she completed a badge demonstrating her ability to make a cup of tea. In America, we got patches for being able to roller-skate. Maybe that’s part of the reason why my friends A and B, also the daughters of immigrants, joined as well. Even then it was made clear in the Girl Scout bylaws that Girl Scouts did not discriminate against those who did not quite fit in. Maybe it was evident to our parents that being Girl Scouts would help us to understand how to do certain things in ways our parents—learning themselves as they went along—could not teach us.
A’s family was from China by way of Canada; B’s, from Iran. One night at a gathering of mothers and daughters—I believe it was a potluck dinner—I noticed that my mother and B’s stood during the Pledge of Allegiance but didn’t speak the words. I asked my mother why not, afterward.
“We’re not American,” she said.
I nodded. I’d never thought about it that way before, but that was what my mother, B’s mother, and A’s mother had in common. It even kind of made sense, that some people might not want to be American, though everything beyond the limits of my immediate family seemed to tell me otherwise. I had seen that the lives of my relatives in the UK were not necessarily better or worse than our lives, that unlike Fievel Mousekewitz they did not have a burning longing in their hearts to leave their country behind to come to ours. I wasn’t quite sure how to square that with the fervency of the Pledge of Allegiance, of the “sweet land of liberty” and so forth.
A and I remain close friends, thirty years later, but she still gives me a hard time about the Girl Scout meeting when I was tasked with introducing her to the group. Quite often when we’re together, especially if someone asks how we know each other, A tells them how upset she was when it was my turn to share an interesting fact about her.
“A is Chinese!” I exclaimed, beaming. I thought this was a thing we had in common. We were both children of people from other countries. We both knew what it was to have a parent with an accent, to go red with embarrassment when other kids noticed that the foods we brought in for lunch were not the same foods other kids had. At seven, I did not understand the privilege granted to me by my whiteness: I didn’t realize that the color of my skin gave me an advantage because it was the same as the skin of the kids whose families believe they have owned America forever. I didn’t realize how much I could get away with.
“I was so embarrassed that Jean said I was Chinese,” A always says when she tells the story. At seven, she already had been aware that some things marked her as different and might not be regarded by everyone as good, might be held against her in a country that was less free than our teachers and Scout leaders had us think.
3.
I was twelve the first time I attended a swearing in of new citizens. As I recall, the citizenship ceremony became a school assembly because my friend J and her family were becoming US citizens, and some well-meaning teacher decided it could be elevated into a teachable experience for five hundred adolescents. J and her parents and her sister were from India. I don’t remember what brought them to our town; quite a few Indian families had ended up there because they were following careers in engineering or medicine. J was in the grade above mine, but we played in the school orchestra together and struck up a friendship. I’d heard J was not cool, but then neither was I.
Immigration was big on our social studies curriculum that year, which is to say that we learned about Ellis Island but not about any of the other ways people came to America, or the people who came after Ellis Island shut down. We didn’t really learn much at all about any immigrants who didn’t fit the mold of Fievel Mousekewitz or my great-grandparents.
When we were told to bring in photographs of our immigrant ancestors to post on a bulletin board, I brought in a photograph of my mother and brother. So did the other kids who were first generation, or immigrants themselves. But we didn’t learn much else about these close relatives: where they arrived, why they came to America, whether they’d want to go back (of course no one would ever want to go back…).
On the day of the ceremony, the school cafeteria, which doubled as an auditorium, was bedecked with red, white, and blue. Each class was assigned an immigrant, which even then struck me as a little strange; ours were a pair of children from East Asia, too young to understand what was going on. The small kids with their adoptive parents and their sibling stood awkwardly at the front of our classroom. The children wore tidy tailored clothes in the style of American churchgoing children. They held American flags in chubby fists. I’m sure we ate cookies or cupcakes frosted with red, white, and blue frosting.
At some point in the afternoon the whole school filed into the auditorium to watch the new Americans pledge their allegiances and really mean it (J had been doing it for some time, I’m sure, to be polite). Some weeks earlier we’d gathered on the same chairs to hear a salesman pitch us on selling magazines to our parents to raise money for school dances, which in its own way felt very American. The top sellers received prizes, of which the most desired was a toy cell phone the size and shape of a brick. My mother did not allow me to participate.
“In Britain,” my mother said, “schoolchildren aren’t made to sell magazines to raise funds for the PTA. Not like in this country.”
This felt like something to file in my list of things that I wasn’t allowed to do because my mother was not American: wear fashionable American-flag-motif clothing, spend the summer at sleep-away camp, eat sugared cereal with toast and orange juice and call it a “complete breakfast.”
On stage at the citizenship ceremony, J and her sister and parents stood among the adoptees, whose parents said the oath on their behalf if they were too small to speak for themselves. The school cafeteria was decorated with bunting, and there was something in the air more than patriotism: a sense of transformation, or of something being corrected.
The next day on the school bus J sat next to me, as had become our habit. “I have news,” she said. “I’m moving to Australia.”
I laughed. What a hilarious joke to tell the day after the whole school had gathered to watch her become a real American.
“No,” she said, “really. My parents wanted to make sure we became citizens before we left so that if we wanted to, we could come back.”
“But,” I said, “the assembly—”
J shrugged.
By the time I went to my second citizenship ceremony, nearly a decade later, I understood there were reasons to become a US citizen besides a deep yearning to say the Pledge of Allegiance and mean it. My mother agreed to become a citizen at last because the family lawyer recommended it, because she’d been living in America for twenty-odd years, because the laws had shifted and she’d not be compelled to give up her British citizenship for a US one.
My mother took the ceremony seriously, raised her hand to agree to the things the government demanded. But when she was told that she must bear arms if called upon, those of us in the seats who were there to support her failed to stifle our giggles.
4.
I became an immigrant when I was twenty-two, but when you’re a white woman from the United States and you go to live indefinitely in London, people call you an expat. That’s just one of your many privileges, the things you get away with. People also ask you when you’re going home. That they ask, and don’t tell you to go, is a crucial distinction in the way many white British people regard you as opposed to other immigrants. Another advantage. British people are very polite to you, but many of them still can’t help but make it clear that you should be thinking about leaving. You make friends with other people from other places, then, because they won’t ask you when you’re going. Their silence grants you permission to stay.
There are many reasons why I went to Britain: I was in love with a man who held an Irish passport but couldn’t easily live in the United States. I was entitled to a British passport. I didn’t especially feel proud to live in a country ruled by George W. Bush; I had long ago stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance (a high school teacher had tried to get me disciplined for this and expressed disappointment when she found out it was my constitutional right to refuse). But I think the biggest reason of all was the belief that I would belong there, that maybe the not-quiteness of my American girlhood would be resolved if I immersed myself in the British culture my mother still cleaved to and that lay just out of my grasp.
Or, at least, if I went to a country where I didn’t fit in for obvious reasons, it would be better than living in a land where I seemed to not fit in for reasons sometimes too subtle for me to detect.
What are the things that I did to make myself fit in? I dressed like my British girlfriends, which meant buying a lot of pairs of black tights from Marks & Spencer. I drank a lot: pints, gin. I worked for an MP, and I worked in various cultural industries. I dated British men and listened to their anecdotes about where they went to school. I kept a stiff upper lip when they broke up with me (I didn’t, not really; I cried a lot, and no doubt that was very un-British). Sometimes they ended it because they just weren’t that into me. Sometimes, I think, because I was interesting but I just wasn’t British. Sometimes they replaced me with women who looked like English roses, which of course was well within their rights, even though I had learned to say “tomahto.”
“I’m as British as you,” I’d say to the people who questioned it, who were never people whose Britishness was questioned. They were not my Jewish friends, not my friends who were people of color, not my friends who had EU passports, and not my friends who had found their way to London with the aid of a British parent. The people who questioned how British I was were secure in their belief in where they belonged, what belonged to them.
And yet I could never change the minds of the people who denied I was as qualified a Brit as they were. Nor the minds of the people who remarked on how I’d failed to lose my accent, as if losing an accent was a thing a person should do. Nor the minds of the people, when interviewing me for jobs they would never give me, who suggested I would do better in America, smiling, because they weren’t being racist. The people who asked me when I was leaving were people who could never fathom why I was there in the first place; they couldn’t fathom me. But then I couldn’t fathom what it was like to have always lived in the same country, to have two parents who had always lived in that country.
I knew I could never change their minds on the nights in East End pubs when the Smiths would come on the sound system and my Essex-born boyfriend and his home county friends would rise to their feet and dance and sing as if there was nothing more hypnotic in the world than Morrissey’s voice. Just the first few bars of the songs would make my heart sink, because I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be recognized as one of them. I could never fully share their preoccupations or discomforts. I also wasn’t sure that I wanted to. Perhaps this was another thing I inherited from my mother: a resistance to fully taking on the conventions of a country I didn’t grow up in.
Maybe there’s a country in the world where you’re accepted, you belong, no matter where your life started.
Maybe there isn’t.
5.
I became an immigrant again at thirty-two, if you consider the strict definition of the word: a person who migrates to a different country. I moved back to America after ten years in Europe because I wanted to be closer to my parents. I didn’t want to move back, not really, not then, but it felt like the right thing to do.
I moved before Trump: when it still felt like America was a place that welcomed people, or at least had some intention of doing so. I moved just before the president emboldened the worst of Americans to be open in their hatred of immigrants. I moved just before this hatred began to be enshrined, more and more, into law.
It had been a long time since I had lived in America, and I realized that fitting in was no longer so much of a problem. No one asked me when I was going home.
Actually, I’d say sometimes, “Until recently I was living in Europe!” because that was such an important part of my identity, or had been for so long: an American Who Chose to Leave.
But no one I said that to seemed to think it was very interesting or significant. In New York, no one has ever told me—with my white skin, my curly brown hair, my slightly Jewish nose—to go home. And maybe that’s all my ancestors could have hoped to achieve for their descendants when, like Fievel, they got on a big boat to leave a country they would absolutely never see again.
Maybe that’s what my mother longed for sometimes, during those years of parenting, when she was made to feel just a little bit alien. Maybe that’s all anyone can wish for when they decide to make their life in another country. Maybe that’s the true American Dream, not gold- or cheese-paved streets. Maybe we all just dream of what it would be like to live in America, allowed to just be.