Brooklyn, In Memory Most Green
The courageous immigrants of the elder generations cast the shards of their hopes and dreams across the landscape of this continent as prophecy. They worked hard and long for their visions. These people included my Lebanese maternal grandparents with their first-born children. They arrived in New York in 1897 on a boat from Syria. They petitioned for citizenship in 1925. Included also was my Turkish father who arrived here alone in 1919. He was just seventeen, eager to make good and to earn dowries for his four older sisters. The distaff side eventually settled in Brooklyn. That's where they were when I was born and that's where I was raised.
These were people who came to America in “the days of sail,” as the great New York writer, Irish-American Pete Hamill, would say. Today's
