My Family

Artist Statement

My family was primarily one of immigrants from the Ukraine, part of the Pale of Settlement, the area where Jews were permitted to live, in the Russian Empire. I, however, grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, a safe suburban community with excellent schools. It was far from the dangers of the homeland where my grandparents on both sides, and my father were born. They all loved the United States, the country that had saved their lives, and never thought of its flaws because they paled in comparison with those they had experienced before. For the American Jews with whom I grew up in the 1950s, the pogroms my father and grandparents went through, and the Holocaust of World War II, the biggest of the pogroms, were being relegated to the past. We were all taking a welcome breathe of relief.