On History

Stirring the risotto really is the toughest part, the rest of it is child's play. We brought the wine and the food into the living room and sat down on the floor. She brought out a video cassette, and an old PBS documentary on New York sprang to life. For hours we sat enthralled, as images of Old New York swept past: panoramas of a town where the Brooklyn Bridge towers were the highest point in the city, wide uptown avenues where carriages could turn and cramped Lower East Side tenements of a hundred ragged children. We saw buildings go up and immigrants arrive. Everyone building their American Dream, their vision of a Life in New York. And I heard the voices of new New Yorkers so many generations ago echo my own.

What is a New Yorker? A Jew? An Italian? You come here and start over. You are a New Yorker. Slough off your old, begin anew. Run, work, fight, hurry, this is what New York life is. You have to make this life better than the one you left. You have to make this change worth your while.

This was always the city they ran to, stars in their eyes and dreams of a better life. They left dying crops, religious persecution, death, and disease, one suitcase and one ticket to the golden gates. They ended up in cramped houses of vermin and squalor, and they had only so much time to thicken their skin and wipe that hope from their eyes. New York kicks you. You have to stay standing.

But you do.

Because if you just run, and work, and fight, and hurry, if you keep up with the City and survive its beating, then the pearl of the oyster is yours. If you can make it here, they say, you've made it everywhere.

When you are tossed into the cauldron of New York,
you are born again.