My Family, My America

By Jack Waitz

My family, my America, was the name of the 7th grade project this summer. In essence, this project was about your family, America, and the correlation between the two. What does it mean to your family to be American? At first I was confused. I had never paused to think about this question before in my life. I thought that was an obvious question- to be an American means to be a citizen of America. However, after much thought I decided what I think being an American means to my family and to me. I think that being an American means to believe in the Freedoms of the First Amendment (religion, speech, expression) and in the spirit of a flexible government that can change based on the values of the people. It says so in the Constitution, which is the most definitive document as to what it means to be an American. As you will see in this essay, my family didnt have these freedoms. Two different governments invaded my familys country with force, and my family didnt have anything close to religious freedom when this happened. Thats why my family came to the U.S.A, and thats why I think that having the freedoms of the 1st Amendment is a big part of being American.

One of the main sources in this essay is my Grandma Eva Gould. She is my moms mom. During our interview, she told me her tale of living in a ghetto through the Holocaust, of being liberated from the Nazis by the Russians, of escaping Russian control of Hungary, of being an Austrian refugee, of being a Rhodesian, and finally

escaping to the U.S.A. From her, I learned that her family had been oppressed for several years, but they came to America because they thought (and not incorrectly) that in America they could escape government oppression of freedoms. Since my interviewee has been in two opposite governments- the democratic U.S.A. Government, and the communist U.S.S.R. Government, I think I learned a lot about America from her. She is living proof that America is a center of freedom worldwide, and that democracy usually includes the most freedoms. For instance, in Budapest, Hungary where she born, she never knew her dad because he was taken three years after she was born, her mom was put in a concentration camp, my grandma was put in a yellow star house, and her country had sided with the Nazis. There was no freedom of religion there. The Nazis had killed based on religion. Even two years after the U.S.S.R. took over, my grandma and some of her family changed their last name from Shwartz to Bard, so that people wouldnt look at her name and have bias against her just because she was a Jew. She called it having a clean slate. This was after the Nazis, but yet people still judged her by her religion. In America and Rhodesia however, there was much less judgment upon her based on her religion. With the religious judgments she had in Europe, it would have been infinitely harder to get a job as a lab chemist, but she did just that in America. Another interesting thing is that when my grandma came to the U.S.A. she came at a time in which the U.S.A. was still fighting to get rid of bias based on race. One connection my family has to America is two years after my grandma came to the U.S MLK jr. was shot. In Europe, she had faced judgment based on religion, and in America, black people were being discriminated against based on their race. However,

the black people werent having mass genocide being committed against them. Why was America fighting against religious bias in Europe, but not in America? Another thing about the time that my grandma came to the U.S.A. is that during that time there were many immigrants to the U.S.A. America, even through the troubles it had with immigrants. It has always accepted immigrants. However, most immigrants take jobs with lesser pay, whereas my grandma got a job with as a chemist. As you have seen, I have used two types of evidence in this project- factual evidence such as my grandmothers passports and political documents and opinionated evidence like the interview with my grandma. Some advantages to factual evidence are that they are untouched, pure information about a person(s), place and/or time in history. Opinion evidence is best for telling what person(s) were or are feeling. It is also particularly good if the person was one who lived through a particular event such as the Holocaust, or if they saw the Pearl Harbor bombing. However, the two types of evidence are best together because you can compare them with each other to find out particular information. For instance, my Grandma Eva told us she hated the U.S.S.R. (opinion) while we were looking at a photo of her in Russian occupied Hungary (factual evidence). My project might be of value to a historian because it shows both types of evidence mentioned above. In addition, my interview could be of use to an organization that collected the stories of Holocaust survivors, such as the Shoah Foundation. The limitations of my project are that it is only about one family and it is also about a family who immigrated, which would be of less use to a historian wanting to write about families from who have lived here since the Revolutionary War. My project is different from other people's projects because it talks about a family who immigrated to the

U.S.A, whereas a person whose family has lived here for generations might say that they think being American means having a long-standing American heritage. This was my familys America and once again, I think my familys definition of what it means to be American is: I think that being American means that you believe in the First Amendment above all, and that you dont judge based on religion, race or anything else. My family is living proof. They came to America to be free, and they wound up getting the freedoms they needed and wanted.