Before America

"Dadme a vuestros exhaustos, a vuestros pobres, a vuestras masas aglomeradas, afanosas de respirar libremente. A los miserables rechazados de vuestras prolíficas costas. Enviadme a los deshauciados, arrojádmelos. Alzo mi lámpara junto a la puerta dorada"





Así llegamos, exhaustos, tiritando, aglomerados, afanosos de respirar un aire no acondicionado a más de 50ºF. Te meten mucho miedo con la aduana y luego no es para tanto. Si no me llevaron a mí al cuartillo con el tembleque de sospechoso que me dio en la ventanilla, no llevaron a nadie.

En el taxi me vino a la mente uno de los pasajes más emocionantes de mi serie favorita EVER, con Meryl Streep haciendo de rabino:

"She was. . . not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania — and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their children with the goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes — because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home."