דער נייער קאלאסוס

My father arrived in America at the age of 5 from a Displaced Persons camp in Leipheim, established for Holocaust survivors in 1945. My mother’s parents were both Holocaust survivors. In the close-knit Brooklyn Hasidic community where I grew up, everyone I knew—all my friends, classmates, and relatives—were children and grandchildren of survivors. We did not call ourselves immigrants—we were American-born, after all—but an immigrant’s sensibility, the sense that at any moment our freedoms could be taken from us, flowed like blood through our veins. Always, an awareness of how lucky we were.