American Dreams

Tonight, I know, for sure, that the American dream is not what everyone tells me it is.


That it is much more like the version for my great great parents when they were coming across the Atlantic in 1892, huddled on the lowest level of a steamer leaving the Danube for America.


It is not about convenience and money and career and good looks and smelling like roses and knowing that I "deserve it all".


That it is about the freedom just to be who I was created to be, to worship without fear, to buy and sell freely, to not live under the thumb of a harsh dictator. I have always know this was "it", but I always assume that maybe I am not as smart as so many others, and so this time when I said, "yes," to buying a new big, home, I gave in and adapted to the contemporary version of the Dream.


Never again will I confuse lust with love; house with home.


Now that I have lost the house I lusted for, I have rediscovered my home.


When I first moved to the East Coast in 1992, a hundred years exactly after Sarah-Ruth and David-Jakob Borgos moved to the Lower East Side, I demanded that my father take me to New York where he had visited his mother's family several summers as a kid. The first thing I did in New York was to take a picture of my feet on the docks off Ellis Island.

"Now, I am standing in your footsteps," I whispered to my brave grandmother who did more than I could ever be capable of - leaving older children behind to give younger ones a better future, marrying an abusive man twice her age just to satisfy Orthodox parents and eat better than a peasant, moving across the world to live in a land of plenty, but where plenty would only be available to her great great granddaughters one hundred years away.


This was her dream, to bless her offspring with whatever good America had to offer. It had to be better than pogroms and Czars and angry-fisted Kaisers.




As I unwrapped the picture I have of Ellis Island this morning, where my great grandparents stepped off a creaking wooden ship, I stopped and brushed the heavy layer of dust off it, and thought to myself, "Now this is how it is. I have a roof, and a family, and a church whose bells ring loudly across my street three times a day, and a free public library, and education for my children...and I have the freedom to make mistakes without really suffering on the scale so many other citizens of other less compassionate nations do.


I used to display this picture proudly in my kitchen before I moved to a house where there was no room with all the cabinetry. This time, with the slightly crooked slant of the ceiling, as happens in old and long-lived in homes, I hung it up above my baking table, next to my picture of the birch tree forest in spring.


I feel better leaving the snobby neighborhood behind.


I feel better not having to worry anymore about tall grass where snakes wander.


I feel better that there are people on my street who keep an eye on each other.


I feel better not having to drive my children up and down the mountain in so much snow, having to worry about them playing the same forest where coyotes and bear wander freely and frequently.


I feel better now, because I don't live in the house everyone else insisted I must buy in order to be happy.


I was already happy. It was all the others who were not happy, and so they pushed hard for me to finally financially tax myself as much as all of them. They just could not accept my no, and I apparently, did not know how to express it loud enough.


No, I don't need central air.


No, I don't need a giant yard for my children to play in.


No, I don't need wall to wall carpeting, a huge deck, a four car garage (seriously, this is how many cars we have gotten in our garage at one time).


That old twin in town that I had begged for, this one was better.


The house with the really cheap mortgage and fraction of a yard, that was just fine.


The house without the dishwasher, it would have been okay.


What is right for me, is not right for you. I have learned this lesson in the loss of this house.



What is truly right for my children is always right for their mother.


Love you, friends and family, but your house is selling to a very low bidder on Tuesday. Say your goodbyes to the convenience of our central air and our big yard and our country like setting.


Because it is nearly all finished now...


the understanding of that American dream my great great grandmother had for me -the one that can only be created by immigrants who had so much less in the past.


It's amazing the thick film of dust our modern American "needs" can leave on the good sense of our ancestors.

How my great great grandmother worked from home before opening her boarding house and kosher restaurant. This is the original work-at-home American experience - brading rugs and slaving with textiles to sell on the street corner in the Lower East Side.