Opinion Inviting the stranger in

With a grandchild about to be born in Atlanta,another on the way in Ho Chi Minh City,I have been thinking about the beginning of the family odyssey; of my great-grandfather,Isaac Michel,and his decision to leave the shtetl in northern Lithuania and head south from Russian pogroms towards the sun,the ostrich feathers,the gold and the promise of South Africa. I imagine his first sight of Africa in 1896 after the two-week crossing: the teeming dock at Cape Town; the bundles borne all the way from Lithuania; a sea of people — black and white and brown — moving between crates piled on the quayside. Table Mountain traces a line so flat it seems an apparition. In the shtetl everything was circumscribed. Wonders had to be willed from the trance of religious devotion. Here the very earth is exuberant. There are peaks that reach to

the heavens.

In the first volume of Jewish Migration to South Africa: Passenger Lists from the UK 1890-1905,I find a reference to I. Michel from Siauliai (Shavel to the Jews) in Lithuania. He travelled,aged 19,on the Doune Castle,departing from England on August 16,1896. He listed his occupation as “prospector”. Michel,arriving penniless,started out as a peddler. He became a retail magnate. He died on an urban estate in Johannesburg with its arboretum and fish pond and aviary,surrounded by African houseboys and gold-inlaid bibelots,his black,fish-tailed Cadillac parked in the beautiful curving driveway.

Immigration is reinvention. Lands of immigrants excise the anguish of the motherland. They invite the incomer to the selective forgetfulness of new identity. Michel,my mother’s grandfather,would not have been surprised by the idea of far-flung descendants,even if Vietnam might have raised an eyebrow. This prospector understood opportunity,chance encounter — life as action and risk. Like millions of Jews around the dawn of the 20th century he embraced emancipation to plunge from shtetl and ritual immemorial into the Sturm und Drang of the modern world. The upheaval would prove cataclysmic in Europe. My family skirted the horror.

New opportunity is only one side of the immigrant story,its bright star. The other side,its black sun,is displacement and loss. Among Michel’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren,in each uprooted generation on the move to Britain and Israel and the US,there have been sufferers from manic-depression unable to come to terms with the immense struggle involved in burying the past,losing an identity and embracing a new life — as if bipolarity were just that,a double existence attempting to bridge the unbridgeable. If you dig into people who are depressed you often find that their distress at some level is linked to a sense of not fitting in,an anxiety about where they belong: displacement anguish.

Give thanks in this holiday season for belonging,for community (that lovely word). Invite the stranger in. Make friends a garden,my mother liked to say,

and let it bloom.