Lost in the Melting Pot

I'm in the receiving line with my mother at my aunt's wake. The stifling funeral parlor is crowded with mourners, and I recognize former neighbors from my aunt's all-Italian neighborhood. My mother tenses as an elderly man approaches, murmurs his condolences, and moves on. She hisses under her breath, and sixty years drop away: "He wouldn't speak Italian to me on the playground." I've heard the story many times: the eight-year-old immigrant humiliated by being put with fiveyear-olds until she could learn English; frozen out by her peers who didn't want to be seen talking to anyone fresh off the boat; having to translate for her parents, who never learned the new tongue. "Why didn't they learn?" I'd always ask. "They didn't need to," she'd explain, "and they were working all the time. It's the second generation that learns." As new waves from other countries crossed our borders, she had no patience for bilingual classes and dual-language signs. She had suffered, she had assimilated. They could, too.