From: Allan Brownfeld <abrownfeld@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Nov 22, 2023
Date: Wed, Nov 22, 2023
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
In an era when the uniqueness of America is often misunderstood—-and immigrants are coming under attack—-it is important to remember a bit of our history. Sadly, we are not properly transmitting this history and many who now hold high office, or are seeking it, seem innocent of any real understanding of the American story.
Visiting New Amsterdam in 1643, the French Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues was surprised to discover that in this town of 8,000 people, 18 languages were spoken.
In his “Letters From an American Farmer,” J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur wrote in 1782: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”
During the radicalism of the 1960s, when many young critics of America denounced their own country, although they understood little of its history, author Mario Puzo wrote: “America…may deserve the hatred of its revolutionary young. But what a miracle it once was! What has happened here has never happened in any other country in any other time. The poor who had been poor for centuries…whose children had inherited their poverty, their illiteracy, their hopelessness, achieved some economic dignity and freedom. You didn’t get it for nothing, you had to pay a price in tears, in suffering, why not? And some even became artists.”
As a young man growing up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Puzo was asked by his mother, an Italian immigrant, what he wanted to be when he grew up. When he said he wanted to be a writer, she responded that, “For a thousand years in Italy no one in our family was even able to read.” But in America everything was possible in a single generation.
Puzo writes: “It was hard for my mother to believe that her son could become an artist. After all, her own dream in coming to America had been to earn her daily bread, a wild dream in itself, and looking back she was dead right. Her son an artist? To this day, she shakes her head. I shake mine with her.”
In the 1840s, Herman Melville wrote that, “We are the heirs of all time and with all nations we divide our inheritance.” If you kill an American, he said, “you shed the blood of the entire world.”
(The Thanksgiving Turkey shown here was drawn by my grandson Lorenzo when he was five. Last month, he celebrated his tenth birthday).
Allan Brownfeld