East Meets West

This August, my mother's family will celebrate the 100-year anniversary of our arrival in America. I never knew my great-grandfather, the man who boarded a ship in Naples and headed west, nor have I heard many stories about him. One story I have heard was that when he passed gas, he would blame his squeaky chair. Another was his inability to ever gain a firm grasp of English: He told his grandchildren that he arrived in the New World in "nineteen-oh-ten."

So this summer, in the Year of Our Lord Twenty-Oh-Ten, my mother and I will host a centennial party. A beloved uncle, my mother's youngest brother, suggested we hold it on a cruise around Liberty Harbor—a return to the boat, so to speak.

This past weekend, mom and I drafted a guest list (of over 70 A-Listers) and the wording for the invitation. It began with a brief narrative about the man who arrived in Ellis Island, and it ended with party details, but I couldn't fill in the middle. It hadn't occurred to me before that I knew almost nothing about the man responsible for bringing us to America.

I stared at the half a dozen blank lines in the middle of the page, and I blinked repeatedly. In those few moments when my eyes were closed, my mind's eye evoked images from East of Eden, Steinbeck's semiautobiographical retelling of Genesis. I yearned to know, and I yearned to tell, our origin and how we headed west.