"Home Is Where You Are Happy"

By Henry Grunwald The author, Time Inc.''s editor in chief, came to America from Austria at the age of 17 with his family. His father was a noted Viennese librettist.

Every immigrant leads a double life. Every immigrant has a double identity and a double vision, being suspended between an old and a new home, an old and a new self.

The very notion of a new home, of course, is in a sense as impossible as the notion of new parents. Parents are who they are; home is what it is. Home is the wallpaper above the bed, the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the bruised shins of the playground, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute one's first universe. Home is one's birthplace, ratified by memory.

Yet home, like parentage, must be legitimized through love; otherwise, it is only a fact of geography or biology. Most immigrants to America found their love of their old homes betrayed. Whether Ireland starved them, or Nazi Germany persecuted them, or Viet Nam drove them into the sea, they did not really abandon their countries; their countries abandoned them. In America, they found the possibility of a new love, the chance to nurture new selves.

Not uniformly, not without exceptions. Every generation has its Know-Nothing movement, its fear -- often understandable -- and hatred of alien invasion. That is as true today as it always was. In spite of all this, the American attitude remains unique. Throughout history, exile has been a calamity; America turned it into a triumph and placed its immigrants in the center of a national epic. It is still symbolized by that old copper-plated cliche, the Statue of Liberty, notwithstanding the condescension and the awful poetry of the famous Emma Lazarus lines ("the wretched refuse of your teeming shore").

The epic is possible because America is an idea as much as it is a country. America has nothing to do with allegiance to a dynasty and very little to do with allegiance to a particular place, but everything to do with allegiance to a set of principles. To immigrants, those principles are especially real because so often they were absent or violated in their native lands. It was no accident in the '60s and '70s, when alienation was in flower, that it often seemed to be "native" Americans who felt alienated, while aliens or the children of aliens upheld the native values. The immigrant's double vision results in a special, somewhat skewed perspective on America that can mislead but that can also find revelation in the things that to native Americans are obvious. Psychiatrist Robert Coles speaks of those "who straddle worlds and make of that very experience a new world."

It is not easy. Successive waves of immigration differ, of course, and a refugee from wartime Europe does not have the same experiences as a refugee from postwar Viet Nam 40 years later. But all immigrants have certain things in common, and all know the classic, opposite impulses: to draw together in protective enclaves where through churches, clubs, cafes, newspapers, the old culture is fiercely maintained; and on the other hand to rush headlong into the American mainstream, seeking to adopt indiscriminately new manners, clothes, technology and sometimes names.

Inevitably, the immigrant is a student, and his more or less permanent occupation is learning. That is a nervous business ("Have I got it right?"); depending on one's temperament, it is also a series of joyful discoveries. For younger immigrants, those discoveries begin in school, and the initial, most amazing one is the openness, the absence of the compulsion and petty tyranny that characterize the classroom almost everywhere else in the world. But if that openness is indeed joyful and liberating to young minds, the accompanying lack of discipline is also frightening and destructive: the heart of the perennial American conflict between freedom and order.

The immigrant's education continues everywhere. He must master not only a new history but a whole new imagination. The process goes on at various speeds, and odd gaps can appear. The immigrant carries different nursery rhymes in his head, different fairy tales. He may have just graduated from college Phi Beta Kappa but not know who Mary Poppins is. He may be taking the bar examination and be rather dim about Popeye. Prince Eugene of Savoy lodges stubbornly in the mind (song learned at the age of seven: "Prince Eugene, the noble knight . . ."), while Patrick Henry appears as a stranger, an image full of gaps, like an unfinished sketch.

A continuing part of the immigrant's education is the comparison between the anticipated or imagined America and the real country. The anticipation depends on time and place, but the reality is always startling. If the vision of America was formed by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing atop glittering skyscrapers, how to accept the slums? If the vision was noise and materialist chaos, how to account for a Quaker meeting house or the daily, relentless idealism of legions of American do-gooders? If the vision was a childhood fantasy of the Wild West, how can one grasp the fact that Sitting Bull was a real man fighting a real Government and dying a real death?

A new language: nagging impediment to some, liberation to others. There is the constant struggle to achieve the proper accent, like trying to sing one's % way into some strange and maddeningly elusive music. There is the pain and bother of trying as an adult or near adult to learn new words and meanings. But these words and meanings have a certain innocence, a certain freshness, free of the constraint, the boredom, the touches of shame that are imposed on one's native language in the classroom or the nursery.

English is illogical and headily free compared, for example, with the grammatical rigidities of French or German. Some newcomers are lost in this malleable structure; others fall upon English with an instinctive sense of recognition, as one might discover a hitherto unknown brother. Shakespeare and Melville gradually replace Goethe and Racine, though drilled-in passages never quite fade; the experience can begin as vague disloyalty and end in passion. Immigrants who know English as one of the great unifiers of America will never be reconciled to those others -- many Hispanics, for instance -- who refuse to accept English fully, thus creating an ominous dual culture in many parts of the U.S. Language is life. For many immigrants, the true act of naturalization occurs when they start having dreams in English.

More puzzling and complicated than language is the American social syntax. The first impression is one of dazzling and rather unsettling informality, an indiscriminate camaraderie. But one learns that going to the opera in shirt- sleeves (an outrage, surely!) does not mean contempt for culture or even necessarily a lack of rules. Calling the boss by his first name, which takes some effort, does not mean that he and the office boy are equals. Indeed, equality is both the great illusion and the great reality of America. The immigrant is slow to understand that below the egalitarian surface there are hierarchies and tribes, proper and improper addresses, great names and lowly names, old money looking down on new money, older immigrants looking down on newer -- a topography to which there are very few maps.

But after this discovery there gradually comes yet another insight that whipsaws the immigrant back toward the original perception: there really is no fixed social structure after all. There is above everything else that much vaunted mobility -- from place to place, career to career, status to status -- which turns so many native-born Americans into immigrants in their own country.

In philosophical terms, Europe (or Asia or Africa) is the world of being; America is the world of becoming. In Europe, one is what one is; in America, one is what one does. To the immigrant this is a discovery of high excitement and also of some anxiety. Opportunity is not just opportunity but an imperative and a reproach. If anyone can make it in America, why haven't you? If anyone can be what he wants to be, why aren't you more?

There follows the suspicion that making it is the only American morality. But no -- it can't be that simple. The first tangible hint of American moral attitudes comes on the immigration form: the solemn requirement to swear that you are not a Communist, or not a prostitute, or whatever. To those coming from older and more cynical societies, this is the utmost sort of naivete. For the immigrant, it foreshadows the American conviction that one can mandate, even legislate morality. That conviction represents an amalgam of Puritanism, with its belief in a permanently flawed human nature, and the Enlightenment tradition, with its belief in the perfectibility of man. Cotton Mather, meet Thomas Jefferson. This contradictory combination bespeaks the sheer and sometimes hopelessly unrealistic determination to overcome any evil that cannot be ignored, the refusal to accept the status quo in the universe.

The moral landscape the immigrant left behind was usually dominated by the spires of one church or perhaps of two churches living in uneasy peace after centuries of bloody contest. He is therefore overwhelmed by the dizzying variety of religion in America, by the churches, sects, subsects and cults that proliferate in a sort of spiritual shopping mall. But he learns to appreciate the fact that a country that can create God in so many images, no matter how eccentric, has never used fire and sword to impose a faith on its citizens.

The most awesome thing to learn about America is the land itself. No newcomer is ever prepared for its size: the vastness of a country that is a continent. The quintessential American landscape is not found in the mountains or on the shore but in the Great Plains. Space (terrestrial space, not space out there) is the true metaphor for the American condition. Speed can conquer it, but nothing built by man can dominate it. That is perhaps one reason why even the most imposing American skylines can look strangely impermanent and fragile. America does not build for the ages. There are no American palaces and no (convincing) American cathedrals.

But the beauty of America is not in its buildings, not in its artifacts or its arts. Its greatest beauty is in its ideas. Freedom is the ultimate value, whether aesthetic or political. Sooner or later most immigrants learn that freedom is not about what one wants but about what one can do and, ultimately, must do. Freedom won't let one be. It pursues one relentlessly, like a secular hound of heaven, challenging, provoking, driving.

The absence of orthodoxy, the lack of any fixed intellectual system is sometimes hard to bear, especially for many older immigrants; it is easier for the young. And it is often the children who truly lead the elders into America, the sons who take their fathers to their first baseball game or shepherd them to their first rock concert or give them a real sense that they have a stake in America's future.

The hardest situation for the immigrant comes when the future seems in doubt and when America seems about to default on its promise. It happened during the Great Depression, and it happened again during Viet Nam. It happens today whenever one contemplates the dark and yet quite visible underside of American life: the New York City subway or the filth of a roadside service station, the American infernos of drugs and crime and sexual decadence, the dregs of the cities -- "wretched refuse" indeed. At such moments it sometimes seems that many of the lands the immigrants left behind are actually doing better than America, that they have in a sense "won." Of course, it is not so. It would be dishonest and thus disloyal to ignore the dreadful scars and blemishes of America, but they are themselves to a large extent the result of freedom -- sometimes an excess of freedom. For freedom can be dangerous. Yet freedom also holds within it the means to correct its defects, for it allows, indeed encourages, people to criticize their society, to tinker with it, to improve it.

Ultimately, the education of every immigrant is personal, individual. No immigrant can speak for all others. But a Viennese librettist, Alfred Grunwald, who came to America in 1940 and sought to continue practicing his art, wrote some lyrics that sum up much of the immigrant experience in America: "Deine Heimat ist wo das Gluck dich grusst . . ." Roughly translated, "Home is where you are happy." Sentimental, perhaps, and certainly not conventionally patriotic, but appropriate for a country that wrote the pursuit of happiness into its founding document.

That pursuit continues for the immigrant in America, and it never stops. But it comes to rest at a certain moment. The moment is hard to pin down, but it occurs perhaps when the immigrant's double life and double vision converge toward a single state of mind. When the old life, the old home fade into a certain unreality: places one merely visits, in fact or in the mind, practicing the tourism of memory. It occurs when the immigrant learns his ultimate lesson: above all countries, America, if loved, returns love.