It wasn't easy, but it was the lot of so many of us, and even in the house where I was growing up, my aunt and uncle were looking after my cousins whose mother was in Canada, and another cousin whose father was in the Dominican Republic. And our parents had made this choice so that we could have a better life. You know, they could have either stayed with us and struggled and tried to make a living, or they thought that they could carve out a future for us by going abroad and leaving us behind, and then later sending for us…

What did I learn in my travels? In whatever foreign country I visited I met dreamers who longed to reach America and its promise of an enriched life so I knew we had a country rich in opportunity, but I also met those brilliant Jews already in America who had been denied that promise.

I'd like to start by telling you about my wife Melinda's Aunt Myra. We see her a few times a year. Aunt Myra worked for many years taking reservations for Delta Airlines. She lived in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina, and then she moved to Dallas, Melinda's hometown. She loves to see our kids. When we all get together, she'll sit down on the floor and play games with them. Aunt Myra also has polio. She's in braces, and she has been ever since she was a little girl. Our children only know what polio is because of their aunt. Otherwise, the disease would just be another historical fact they learn about in school. In fact, even though I was born just three years after one of the worst polio epidemics in American history, I didn't know anyone with polio when I was growing up. That's how far we've come.

And so I went with her to the Tambov province. She stayed with the prince's sister, who became very fond of her and took her abroad where they lived for long periods, particularly in Italy. Little by little, under the influence of the prince's sister and the prince himself, she grew interested in their ideas, which soon became an integral part of her essence. She began to work on herself in earnest, and anyone who met her, even if only once, could feel the result of that work.

It was developed out of a lot of different family friends I knew about who were living two different lives: a life in America and a life in Nigeria,” she said. “ I was thinking about these dual identities and these dual cultures. During that time, I read tons of immigrant literature from different genres. I started to look more closely at their experiences, and think about what was unique about their experiences.”

Today when an immigrant comes to America he finds a Jewish world already established here. It is full of strange sights but it is nevertheless Jewish. The earlier arrival, the "ungreen" Russian, Pole, Galician or Rumanian, is still a Jew, the same as the greenhorn. Quickly, the newcomer grows accustomed to his "ungreen" friends and thus to America. Today's Jewish immigrant has become familiar with American Jewish words and habits from the letters and newspapers from America that he received at home. But we found few Jews and only a small Jewish world on our arrival. The strangeness we felt was much deeper, the loneliness much sharper. America was, in a literal sense, a new world, a strange world, a disagreeable world, but also a challenging world that strengthened me with a strong, healthy odor like that of a freshly plowed field. America intrigued me, puzzled me. It seemed to me that America lives more in one day than Russia does in ten. The cat I had spied on the Philadelphia pier was living proof that America was part of the same world that included Vilna, Petersburg, Lemberg and Berlin. But in the first months, as I came to know America, I had the opposite impression. It was a new, different kind of a world. It was a pleasant world that tantalized me. All around me was astounding wealth, activity and enterprise. I had not yet heard the expression "the land of unlimited possibilities." But I felt all around me the sense of opportunity. Slowly, I began to perceive a change in myself. Every minute, it seemed, I savored some new experience. I examined all, I listened to everything, I observed everywhere. I was repelled and attracted, possessed and homesick and excited by expectations. My success as a speaker, the stimulating taste of applause, the stunning feeling that thousands knew me, intoxicated me. But they did not overcome my homesickness. I was torn between the pleasure of new achievement and the longing for home. Sometimes, in my restlessness, I didn't recognize my old self. (p 244)

For my grandmother, Esther Makatini, who washed white people's clothes so that I could learn to write.

She didn't have much to say. Since I left Somalia, I've been in control of my own life. I was raised by my mother and grandmother. They were very beautiful and hard-working. They were also always in favor of women's emancipation. My mother was with me on my first trip in 2007. She didn't know anything about archaeology, but she was very helpful.

“I wanted to be in a place where I can start a new life, I needed to start a new life in a place where I’ve never experienced what I’ve experienced. At that time, it was for me to start a new life, through a journey of healing. Leaving Rwanda was easy for me because of the trauma experiences I have had. So I felt like I needed to be in a different place. It happened to be that I came to America because my cousin was here.

When I went to America, her message had so sunk into my ears that I became a radical. I went to America to study at the University of California, where a jurist of international law was teaching. I wanted to take my degree in international law. And that was the period of McCarthyism, of the communist witch hunts—my choices were laid out. To get away from Sunset Boulevard, from the girls with red nail polish, I ran off to Maxwell Street and lived among the Negroes. A week, a month. I felt good with them—they were real, they knew how to laugh. And the day in San Diego when I wasn’t able to get a hotel room because I have olive skin and looked like a Mexican ... well, that helped.

From then on, Matilda would visit the library only once a week in order to take out new books and return the old ones. Her own small bedroom now became her reading-room and there she would sit and read most afternoons, often with a mug of hot chocolate beside her. She was not quite tall enough to reach things around in the kitchen, but she kept a small box in the outhouse which she brought in and stood on in order to get whatever she wanted. Mostly it was hot chocolate she made, warming the milk in a saucepan on the stove before mixing it. Occasionally she made Bovril or Ovaltine. It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She traveled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about; Anna Pávlovna observed these greetings with mournful and solemn interest and silent approval. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own, and the health of Her Majesty, "who, thank God, was better today." And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.

I felt quite miserable at the beginning of my university tenure but my aunt, Idah Okunga, with her husband helped me a great deal.

And there is such a difference in the stories that came from when they were in Africa and the ones they told in America, where their lives were so much rougher. And they keep going back and forth between these two worlds, until finally they get to the dawn, and they are somewhat strengthened so that they can keep going…