Had my grandparents not emigrated when they did, I might have been born Jewish in Eastern Europe during World War II, or I might not have been born at all. Instead, I was born in 1942 in New York City.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was born in New York City, but I was raised in New Jersey, part of the great Jewish emigration of 1963.
My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s.
My grandmother - my mother's mother - was a German Jewish refugee, an only child who came here from Berlin in 1936 at the age of 17.
As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.
I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the early -wentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs.
My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.
My parents came to the United States in the early years of this century as part of a wave of Russian Jewish immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity in the New World.
My grandfather was from outside of Moscow, and my grandmother, although some of her family were French, was from Odessa. They met as immigrants in New York in the early '20s. My mother's family came over from Ireland generations ago.
I was born in Israel. My parents came in 1925.
I was born in New York City in 1926, four years after my parents and my brother migrated to the United States from the city of Odessa in Russia.