ELIZABETH G. STERN
The pathos of the readjustment of the foreign-born to the new life in America has nowhere been more touchingly presented than in the story, “My Mother and I,” by Mrs. E. G. Stern, who was born in Russian Poland.
Anyone who has gone on a long journey to make his home far from friends and relatives knows something of the pain of separating from loved ones; but the pain of such a separation cannot compare with the travail of taking a far spiritual journey. That one may still have deep reverence for the past, though breaking away from it, is the conviction of the author, who says: “And I shall always remember that, though my life is now part of my land’s, yet, if I am truly part of America, it was mother, she who does not understand America, who made me so. I wonder if, as the American mother I strive to be, I can find a finer example than my own mother!”
THE PATHOS OF READJUSTMENT
AUTHOR’S PURPOSE IN WRITING
The mere writing of this account is a chain, slight, but never to be broken; one that will always bind me to that from which I had thought myself forever cut off. For I am writing not only of myself. In myself I see one hundred thousand young men and women with dark eyes aflame with enthusiasm, or blue eyes alight with hope. In myself, as I write this record, I see the young girl whose father plucked oranges in Italian gardens, the maiden whose mother worked on still mornings in the wide fields of Poland, the young man whose grandmother toiled in the peat bogs of Ireland. I am writing this for myself and for those who, like me, are America’s foster children, to remind us of them, through whose pioneer courage the bright gates of this beautiful land of freedom were opened to us, and upon whose tumuli of gray and weary years of struggle we, their children, rose to our opportunities. I am writing to those sons and daughters of immigrant fathers and mothers who are now in America, and to those who will come after this devastating war to America, and to those who will receive them.
MARRIAGE AND AFTER
My friends are now my husband’s friends. My home is that kind of a home in which he has always lived. With my marriage I entered into a new avenue. We have traveled. We have worked at tasks we believed in and loved. We have our little son. I have not written much to mother about my life. My letters have been—just letters. Her own letters have been growing briefer these last years. She never came to see me in my home.
It was our little son who was the real cause of her coming finally. I thought of his birth as the tearing down of that barrier that had come between us. Mother was intoxicated with the delight of her first grandchild, the first child of her first child. “Now we understand each other better, now that we both are mothers, my daughter,” she wrote to me, not knowing how much more than she meant to say her letters told. I, too, felt that in my own motherhood I saw the explanation now for mother’s unquestioning, unceasing striving and toiling and hoping and planning and achieving for her children. “Now I can find the joy of all mothers again. I can find my lost young motherhood in your child,” she wrote. “I am coming to my grandson.”