In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Growing up in Detroit An Immigrant Grocer's Daughter Alixa Naff DETROIT WAS MY hometown for two decades—from 1930 to 1950. No other city in which I have lived since has so legitimate a claim on my reminiscences. I was not born in it. I was not yet an adolescent when I was sent to live in it with my half sister, Nazha, and her husband, Daher Haney. It was that era in that city where the Naffs matured as a family—where my sister, my three brothers, and I developed as individuals. Although reminiscences tend to confuse and distort memory, of one fact I am certain: the 1930s and 1940s were as critical for the Naff family as for the whole country. Who, old enough to remember, can forget the distress inflicted by the Great Depression? Who of the millions of afflicted did not share in the hope of the New Deal and the anxieties of World War II, or wonder at the seismic social and economic changes of the postwar period? As I lookbackthrough the mist ofyears, I am awed at how my immigrant parents pulled us through those difficult times. I marvel at their native survival instincts and the strength they drew from their Syrian-Lebanese traditions and customs. I have always taken my parents for granted. Until I published my study on the immigrant experience of Arabic-speaking people in the United States, I selfcenteredly failed to comprehend their realities-—their fears, failures, frustrations—private as well as familial. Yet, they persevered without my comprehension and because they did, we survived as a family— intact and Americanized, even my mother, in her own way. Detroit was the city where the Americanization process had its greatest impact on the Naff family, especially its immigrant members , my mother and my seven-year-old sister. Since my father had been naturalized in 1907, we ceased to consider him an immigrant, but he was. My three brothers and I are the American-born generation raised in a thoroughly Syrian-Lebanese household right into 107 Work our adolescent years, the incipient period of becoming American. Yet, the Americanization process affected the five of us differently according to the chronological sequence of our births and the degree of erosion in the dominance of my parents' native traditions and customs. Except for their indestructible core values, my parents never really resisted the process. There was nothing in Detroit to impede Americanization except what my parents placed in its path, namely the native traditions they brought with them from Rashayya al-Wadi, their village in the Anti-Lebanon, the western mountain range of what was then Syria. These traditions remained germane to our lives in Spring Valley, Illinois, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Detroit. As long as the native values dominated in our home, or in the Syrian communities for that matter, there was no room for the Americanization process to flourish. In time, however, away from such communities, native traditions and values tended to lose their force. Correspondingly, the process of becoming American in our family gained ground gradually and unevenly until my mother felt comfortable in her Americanization. Americanization is a very complicated process, as we were to learn. Detroit was also the city to which my father, enticed by relatives, brought his family in search of a place to fend off the effects of the Depression, which seemed to be plaguing him. I doubt that he was sufficiently informed about the pitfalls in store for a family that had never lived in a large city. Never, or almost never, did so naive a man walk into such a bee's nest of difficulties. He was ill-prepared to cope, yet by the time he decided to move to Detroit, he had no other place to go where he had relatives and friends he could depend on to help him beat back the dragon of the Depression. Detroit to me now, almost a half-century after we left it, is our house at 57 Tennyson Avenue in Highland Park, a small city completely surrounded by Detroit, whose size and economic power seemed arrogantly to obliterate Highland Park's existence. In my family, we still say we lived in Detroit. It is the image of that house that my memory flashes up to me when I think back, as if there was nothing else worth remembering from those years. Purchased in the late spring of 1942, about the time the Depression had loosened...

Share