The gift of being first-generation American.

摘要

I am first-generation American. My mother was born in a peasant village in Slovakia. The word Slav means slave and my ancestors were the property of a manor house. My mothers village had neither running water nor electricity, food was scarce, and the less industrious starved to death during die winter. The women plowed the fields by hand, bore and raised the children, hauled the water, tended the animals, and, by age 40, were bald and toothless from overwork and malnutrition. My grandmother and mother immigrated to Queens, New York just as World War II was breaking out. My grandmother cleaned toilets on Long Island and made a fortune in New York City real estate (none of which I thankfully inherited), my mother was the first person in our family to go to college, and I was born to wealth and privilege in Chappaqua, New York.