The Mayflower Hotel, Part I

I once heard an immigration lawyer, in an address to one of my law school classes, ask what exactly we've got in this country.  Meaning, what have we had in our history that has made us worth anything to the world.  After all, he pointed out, that history is pretty short, and frankly quite shameful in spots.  All of our arts and architecture are just offshoots of European traditions.  Ok, we've got some pretty nice weather, he admitted, in the mountains and on the coasts, for example.  But mostly what we've had is openness.  A codified flexibility that has allowed us (or perhaps forced us) to incorporate into our culture and institutions all the strengths of all the people who've ever arrived here from anywhere in the world.

One such refuge seeker, we learned last night at a dinner in honor of Lithuania's declaration of independence from Russia in 1918, was the grandmother of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois.  Senator Durbin, one of the evening's several honored guests, informed the crowd of nearly 400, gathered in the stunning baroque ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., that his grandmother had come here from Lithuania early in the 20th century to escape Russian persecution.  She had with her, in Durbin's telling, little more than her three children (including Durbin's own mother, a young girl at the time) and a Roman missal printed in the Lithuanian language, the use of which language, for printing, had been banned by Czarist authorities.  Speaking no English and having virtually no money, this petrified woman somehow made her way from Baltimore to northern Illinois to meet with her husband, who had preceded her in leaving Lithuania and had begun to establish an American home near Chicago.

Nearly 100 years later, Senator Durbin, a strong supporter of and frequent visitor to Lithuania during its painful process of separation from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, took his grandmother's Lithuanian missal to Vilnius and shared his family's story with the triumphant Seimas (parliament) of a newly independent Lithuania.

Now, I'm aware of how perfect this story sounds, and I'm aware as well that it's very loveliness is a likely indicator of exaggeration or embellishment in its telling.  But I don't care.

I don't care because the exaggeration, though perhaps crass (perhaps not--who knows what's in the Senator's heart), is nevertheless an exaggeration in the right direction.  The exaggeration is what tells us that however mired we might be in antipathy or self-congratulation, however much we may either doubt or overstate our ability to live up to our own ideals, this is still at least what we want to believe: that the people we welcome will make us better, that the world will redeem us by asking us for help.