Like most people in the First World, I live at many removes from the world in which my grandparents were born: Lithuania in the 1870s. I was born in 1944 in the United States. My parents and I were English-speaking Jews in a prosperous, democratic, tolerant society. My grandparents and their parents were Yiddish-speaking Jews in an autocratic, hostile empire. I imagine that the provincial towns and villages where they were born were like some cities today: full of mud and garbage, dark, insalubrious, and dangerous.
My grandparents, until they emigrated to the United States, were entirely Jewish in culture, language, and ethnic identity. They remained deeply and conspicuously different from the non-Jews around them. I was (and partially remain, though I have lived in Israel for more than 40 years) deeply American in culture and language, not outwardly different from other Americans in any immediately recognizable way, but Jewish in ethnic identity. My parents and I assimilated without repudiating Judaism, whereas my grandparents could only have assimilated into the dominant Russian culture by converting to Christianity. Our assimilation was quite easy, and I never thought very much about what we lost by it until I was a young adult, which was when I decided to live in Israel.
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