The American Dream, My Father, and Me

The idea of the “American Dream” is something that holds such enormous cultural weight in the United States and the world at large. Arguably, the way it holds weight elsewhere in the world is a way that those of us who were born and raised in the United States are just unable to fully comprehend. Those who come here from other countries often have their own thoughts on and ideas of the American dream and understand it far differently than born-and-raised Americans, who in a sense have never had to consider it nearly as much, because we were simply born into it. A bit different of an idea, but still just as important, is thinking about how immigrants’ sense of the American dream and their understanding of the United States in general differs from that of their children born here. In a way, these second generation children are often caught between the way their non American parents understand the United States and the American dream and the way they themselves truly experience it.

For my part, I was born and raised in this country, a were both of my parents. For any uniqueness of how I did grow up in the United States, and there certainly were unique aspects of my childhood, I certainly never had any sense that I was anything other than American; being from the United States was never something I ever much had to consider at all. For this anthropological analysis of the idea of the American dream, I wanted to attempt to parse the idea of how differing notions of the American dream play out among both first generation immigrants and their second generation children, and so for this study, I talked to my father. He was born in the United States and has never lived anywhere else. However, his mother, who died before I was born, was born in Belgium and lived there until moving to the United States with her parents at the age of nine. In a conversation that ended up being far more wide reaching than I expected it to, I talked to him about how he felt his mother thought of, was affected by and pursued her idea of the American dream, how her ideas changed and affected him as a child, and how they play into how he decided to parent his own children as an adult. Out of this conversation, I ended up getting a better idea of how my own family history has been driven and changed by the idea of the American dream, allowing me to have a very personal understanding of a very complex subject.

Before asking about my father’s own experiences and how he felt his mother’s experience as an immigrant shaped his own understanding of the American dream, I first wanted to ask how he felt she herself thought of it. Although this is somewhat difficult, as she is no longer alive and can not speak for herself, my father seemed to make sure to not speak for her and instead just gave the history of her life and family and how he experienced her beliefs on the American dream. I asked directly how he felt his mother thought of the American dream, and his answer took up the bulk of the interview, something that I found fortunate given how important it is to understand the perspective of people who were not born in the United States themselves. However, he is of course more of an expert on himself and his own personal views, so in this anthropological study, and the conversation it was based on, his answers on how his mother’s views affected him were of particular value as well.

“I don’t ever remember having a conversation with her where we talked directly or exactly about that,” my father specified when I first asked him about how his mother viewed the idea of the American dream, “but in a way you could put a lot of her life and her ambition for herself and for me, and her life experience, in some context of the American dream,” he added. “I can answer it more by talking about her background of her life experiences when she was younger and how some of the ambitions she had were really based on the idea of opportunity in America,” he said, beginning by first giving background on her early life and her coming to the United States. “She was born in Belgium in 1940, and she was in hiding during the war, because her parents were Jewish from Poland, and she was separated from them for four years during the war and lived in hiding in convents and with families, and her parents, my grandparents, were also in hiding in various places and they were reunited after the war. I think that was a very formative experience for her, obviously.” It clearly was, as he then said that his mother said her first memory was “being carried away in the night, in the middle of the night people coming to get all the kids at the convent…and in the middle of the night carrying them away to some other place to hide…that was a completely challenging experience, and I think it shaped a lot in her life.”

“They [his mother and her parents] came here in 1949, and they moved to Chicago. Her parents only spoke Yiddish, they didn’t have much English, and they worked as garment workers in a factory. They lived in the South Side of Chicago, which at that time had a fairly high crime rate and was not a particularly safe place to live, and she went to public school there. So she had all these disadvantages, you could say, in her background, and all the unresolved psychological trauma of being in hiding when you’re really young and you don’t know why, and all the socioeconomic disadvantages of where she’s living. I don’t think her parents were making too much money, I don’t known how good the schools were. She adapted well to the new country she was in, and in many ways tried to take advantage of the opportunities there. This is probably a kind of typical first generation immigrant story, where the parents are more from the old country and they’re older when they get here so they’re more set in their ways or it’s harder to adapt…she adapted really well to America, she learned the language and was helping them do household things like paying the bills and just navigating being in America.”

Indeed, hearing her story made me feels very much like it is such a typical immigrant story, that of knowing nothing of the language and culture here and moving to a bad neighborhood in a city while having to adapt to and navigate a foreign environment, with the children adapting much quicker than the parents and often needing to help their parents with that navigation. However, the fact that that typical story was set against the backdrop of having survived the Holocaust makes it feel like it is perhaps a much more extreme version of the typical immigrant story, one that is especially impossible to imagine and that would likely especially affect the second generation that came after.

Going further into his mother’s story, my father then recounted how she was able to take advantage of the opportunities she had, while still being held back by limitations. “She got a full scholarship to the University of Chicago from Hyde Park high school, which I think is pretty unusual. That was a pretty huge first step of her changing her trajectory and taking advantage of the opportunities she had here. She was very focused and driven by the first generation idea of success in America. I think the Chicago Jewish community that she was a part of very strongly emphasized education and emphasized assimilating very strongly. There was an emphasis on doing what it took to be successful in America. She was only able to go to college because she had her academic scholarship, and then she went to graduate school at the University of California in Berkeley. She got a masters degree in history there, and that’s where she met my dad, who was a masters student in chemical engineering there. At that time she was really pursuing this idea of the American dream as it was defined by the Jewish immigrant community of that generation,” he further added. I find this idea fascinating, as it shows how there is never really one way that immigrants pursue the American dream, but what is considered part of that idea varies by community and can change at different times.

Still, my father said, she was somewhat held back by societal the limitations of the era. “I still don’t think she really envisioned a life for herself outside of the traditional roles for women,” he said. My father got into the PhD program at Johns Hopkins, so they moved to Baltimore and she worked at that time as a school history teacher, so she was still in one of the few jobs that women at that time could get easily. She was a homemaker and a mother when she had me, and then my sister in 1968. At that point she had kind of achieved some idea of the American dream, but she was also living in a pretty traditional gender role for that time.” In many ways, it feels to me that at that point his mother had been able to experience both the definite advantages and opportunities of America, but the limitations of it as well. Soon however, that would change and she would reach even greater heights.

“She had successfully assimilated and had a family and some financial security. If you consider her background it’s kind of incredible” he said. But soon, she had ambitions for more. “I think something happened around the early 70’s, that era, where the feminist movement became very prominent, and I think it changed my mom’s idea of what success is and what she could accomplish. It raised the ceiling. When I was seven, she decided to go to law school and decided she wanted to be a lawyer. I think she kind of changed her idea of what level of ambition she wanted to have. It was an ambitious thing to pursue at that time. When she graduated from Rutgers Law in 1976 there were only three women in the graduating class, so she was really a trailblazer and unafraid to take advantage of opportunity even when there were a lot of challenges. When she opened a firm after she graduated it was with another woman who had graduated Rutgers Law one or two years earlier, and the two of them were the only firm in the county that only had women lawyers.” She had been a supremely ambitious person, clearly, and when I asked my father about how his mother’s idea of the American dream affected him, it was clear that those ambitions extended to him as well.

Speaking of his mother’s ambitions for him, he said “I think in particular for myself as the firstborn and the son…I think my being a boy had to do with it because her norms were that men got more opportunities. But I think a lot more so was that I was just the first born child, and I think it was important for her for me to succeed in a way that matched her idea of American success. So again, academic success was very important. They were always pretty frustrated with the public schools in the town I lived in in New Jersey. It was pretty working class, middle class, a lot of Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans who were part of the working class economy that was much bigger then, and so the schools were alright, but the culture of the town didn’t place much value on education. There happened to be a prestigious private school in the town called Lawrenceville, and I went there in high school as a day student; it was a boarding school and almost all of the kids were boarding students, but there were some day students and it was much less expensive if you went as a day student. This was a real, in her mind, pinnacle of achievement in terms of American success because it is a very prestigious private school, which in this case means that the academics were good and it was very expensive.” Although the prestigious, old-money private school was the true pinnacle of American achievement in the mind of his mother, his own experience there was far less idealized, showing how the immigrant parent’s idea of the United States can sometimes clash with their American child’s lived experience.

“My experiences were very negative there,” my father said of his time at the school. “They genuinely told us that we were elite because we were there. I found the kids to be really mean spirited and there was a lot of bullying. I thought it was a really toxic and negative culture and it was amplified by the fact that [at the time] it was all boys. They didn’t need to be seen as being on good behavior, as being civil, really, to try and impress the girls. It led even more to the way to have the biggest social status was to be the biggest alpha bully. I told them [his parents] that I thought it was a really toxic and negative place, and their response, and my mom’s response in particular, was that I should be grateful that I’m able to go there, that it’s an incredible opportunity. You could also put that in the light of this idea she had of success in America was actually given more credence than my own perceptions of the place itself. I was a kid but I wasn’t a young child, I was in high school, I think I was certainly old enough to have perceptions that should have been taken into account, and they were dismissed because they clashed with this idea she had.”

His mother’s ambitions for him clashed with my father’s own ideas of his life after high school too. “To some degree I think, if you look at how my mom’s life started with this incredible degree of instability and existential fear of being killed for who you are, I think a lot of her life was driven by insecurity that we would achieve some sense of of security and accomplishment. She was so concerned that we wouldn’t achieve that. My own preferences were less important than making sure we were safe, you could almost say. A lot of first generation immigrant parents and second generation children have these kinds of clashes, and of course it’s some variation of ‘we came here to succeed in America, and so you have to succeed in America by what our understanding was of how to succeed in America when we got here.’ I think there’s also this additional factor of her being a Holocaust survivor and so there’s this much stronger fear for your kids to succeed that was probably never resolved by her.” I don’t doubt any of this analysis, and I found it fascinating to think about the duality of my father being from the United States and understanding it better than his mother, but his mother both having the fears of an immigrant and knowing to a lesser extent what it is like to have a better understanding of the United States than her parents did. I do also wonder myself if part of her feeling this way, and my father not, was a cultural difference of my father having grown up in the more individualistic American culture, so he perhaps felt more of a kind of entitlement to be able to pursue what he wanted that his mother could not fully understand from a cultural standpoint.

To finish the interview, I finally asked about the part of this story that is most personal to me, that of whether my father’s experiences with his mother affected how he decided to be a parent to his children. “You like to think you’re not living in reaction to your parents, but I think a lot of what you do ends up being that. I think I made different choices because I had different values; I don’t think what’s driving me is some idea of American success. I think it’s some idea of ethics. I think the way we approached parenting was much more driven by trying to understand you and your sister and what your goals are and talents are and ambitions are and trying to support you in trying to figure out what kind of life you want to lead and finding opportunities, but not trying to push you towards some externally defined goal of American success. We’ve only had kind of middling success you could say, financially at least, but we just value other things more, like being true to yourself individually more…it’s a luxury, if you’re not coming from the beginning of your life my mom had, the fear of having nothing or being killed, or still the almost existential fear of coming here with nothing and needing to figure everything out to survive. If that’s your formative experiences…of course you’re probably going to have different emphasis and different values. Because they gave me the life I had here where I could take so much for granted…I’ve never really feared for anything. It’s been a privilege to give you guys [my sister and I] the life where you can kind of see the world primarily that way too.”

My father grew up in essentially the stereotypical white-picket fence idea of the American dream; new-built suburban house, dual income from professional parents, elite private school education. It feels incredibly different, when I really consider it, compared to how he raised me. I grew up in an apartment building from the 1920s in a mostly working class, immigrant-heavy part of Brooklyn, a city that in my young childhood especially was quickly gentrifying, but was still not the nicest place to live. I attended public schools that were sometimes underfunded and less than ideal places to learn, with children of backgrounds that were often harder than I had. A real American experience, certainly, but not the stereotypical one. Yet, by virtue of my father’s mother having been an immigrant, and naturally having her perception of the United States colored by that experience, culturally speaking I have to say that my childhood was probably far more typical for the United States.

My parents, both born and raised here, had no alternative idea of America that clashed with my own, as they had no reason to have that. They never pressured me to follow in any footsteps or to do anything other than what I had an interest in. I am a senior in college now, and I hope to pursue writing as a professional career; not exactly something that guarantees the kind of success that his mother strove for herself and her children, but my parents have no problem in my plan to struggle in pursuit of this creative endeavor. What I understand far better now after conducting this anthropological study is that while my father’s childhood might have looked more stereotypically American from the outside, the values that his mother tried to instill in him, values that came directly from her immigrant experience, was something that the average born-and-raised American could simply never understand.

It is clear to me now, more than ever, that the American dream is far from one notion. the American dream is something that changes based on how exactly one is able to understand the country it comes from, whether understanding it somewhat unquestionably through being born here, or understanding it perhaps even more deeply through moving here from another country. Those different ideas meet together every day through the experiences of first generation immigrants and their second generation children, both contributing to this great nation through their own understanding of what the American dream is and what it takes to achieve it.