Immigrant's Story

What one gives, in order to get is the familiar. Trees, landscapes and childhood haunts, rituals and celebrations, and also enemies, misery and deep misfortune, all have a familiar resonance that is lost when one takes up a new residence in a new land. As the familiar recedes into the past, all these things become part of a nostalgic fog, a romance, lost to chance remembrance, of each following generation. And even as you try to tell how it was, and what brought you to your new land, to your grandchildren or to friends, you realize how faulty, how selective is memory, and how, indeed, you have changed.