DISPLACED PERSONS

A memorable, literate work on the immigrant experience in postwar America.

Born in Russia in 1944 to Polish Jews who had fled east to escape the Nazis, Berger (The Young Scientists, 1994) came with his family to New York five years later. The move was a blessing for Berger, who thereafter grew up in a cosmopolitan city full of immigrants from all over the world shedding their languages and manners to start anew. But it was a mixed blessing for his mother, who was more set in her ways and less eager to become an American. “You were foolish,” she complained to her long-suffering husband. “We should have gone to Israel.” Both parents labored endlessly so that Berger and his brother could have a fighting chance in their new home (and fight the boys did, he writes, in a neighborhood full of tough Irish and Italian kids). Academically gifted, Berger went on to become a writer on education and religion for the New York Times. But his true education, to gauge by this memoir, came from his mother, whose diaries he quotes and who emerges from their pages as a sensitive, thoughtful observer of the human condition; her childhood lost to a brutal war, she would fulfill her dreams only late in life, when she entered college and earned a degree. His parents had their difficulties in contending with American realities, but they endured, leaving Berger with a twofold sense of self: on one hand the American (used to high-paying jobs and a nice home) and on the other the immigrant (who “tinges all comfort with a sense of raw peril, terror of imminent poverty, and, sometimes, shame at one’s foreignness”).

A fine addition to the literature of the Holocaust (that “permanent tribal wound, engraved on our souls”) and a good account of recent American history.