Immigrants I Love
So many of my relatives crossed borders to start new lives. Here’s a story about two of them.
My father-in-law, Julian, is an endocrinologist who ran his own practice for 40 years. Now 85, he still attends yearly conferences and reads all the current medical journals. At an age when most men have long since traded their daily grind for a relaxing retirement, Julian commutes an hour each way to his part-time job as a doctor at a New York state prison.
My mother-in-law, Sima, ran the family’s private practice. She managed everything from accounting and billing to maintenance and supplies. Sima’s motto in life is simple: Know how to do everything. Then, you can decide which things you don’t want to do. Guided by this adage, 75-year-old Sima replaces rotten shingles, fixes faulty wiring, lays new linoleum and cooks every meal from scratch.
My in-laws live just outside of Manhattan, in the same house where they raised two boys (one of whom is my husband). Julian, an accomplished musician who speaks eight languages, plays jazz piano in the living room on his beloved baby grand. Both my in-laws are voracious readers, opting for dense, complicated books about history, politics and science, with an occasional mystery thrown in for good measure. They have traveled the world, visiting cathedrals and museums as enthusiastically as they’ve explored the Amazon and the Alps (all of them). They could teach seminars about art and art history. They are crossword-puzzle whizzes.
Julian and Sima visited us a few weeks ago. They defrosted from their New York winter, basking in my sun-soaked backyard as it dried out from the recent rain. We had a few things planned for the weekend — maybe visit a gallery, see a play, go out for dinner. I quickly realized that what my in-laws really wanted was to feel the California sun caress their skin while we read, talked, ate and tackled a crossword puzzle or two. (Along the way, Sima also repaired the upholstery on a chair that had burst a seam more than two years ago. She pulled homemade butter cookies from her suitcase. And she folded my unwieldy King-sized fitted sheet into an impossibly smooth rectangle with precise ninety-degree corners.)
Julian and Sima are Jewish immigrants from Romania and Poland. They survived — barely — the horrors of World War II and have both known far too much discrimination, tragedy and loss. In 1962, they left their families in Israel and Europe and made the long trip to the United States. They had no idea what adventures, challenges, setbacks and successes lay ahead. Over time, they built a business — and a life — from scratch, and taught their sons to value hard work, education, determination, family and freedom.
Fifty-five years later, during our last dinner together before my in-laws headed home to ice and snow, we sat around the table and told jokes. Three generations of us, spanning from 1931 to 2004, laughed at jokes that were variously dumb, rude and genuinely funny. (I told the only one I ever remember: What did the blonde say when she found out she was pregnant? I hope it’s mine!) As we giggled and groaned, it struck me that a lot of our laughter stemmed simply from the joy of sharing a meal, and this precious time, all of us, together.
And I thought, I’m just so grateful they were able to make the trip.
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Willow Older is a nationally and internationally published writer and a professional editor. She lives in Northern California where she runs her own editorial services business and publishes a weekly newsletter called Newsy!.
