My father's death revealed unspoken memories from an unsettled American story

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I just learned that my father, a Los Angeles attorney distinguished in his field of law, long kept thousands of dollars' worth of gold coins in a safe, deep in the dark recesses of his closet. Tucked next to an old hunting knife and essential government documents, it was the kind of stash one might maintain if war were looming or if my father were a fugitive in hiding.

It was a discovery I associated with survivalists, who orient their lives to ensure that were aliens – or Russians – to strike Oregon, their bunker would have sufficient water and food (and ammunition) to defy the apocalypse. My father was not a survivalist; he didn’t own a generator. He didn’t even like beef jerky. He was a refugee.

His parents were Jews who fled Poland and the Holocaust before the Nazis' arrival. They toiled in a Siberian labor camp for years. In their desperation, they migrated to Uzbekistan. And then just after they returned to their home country in 1945, antisemitic violence erupted in Kielce, a town mere miles away. Yet again, they fled, this time to a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany, and two years later to Ellis Island by boat. They had no money, no English and no idea what awaited them.

A case study of the American dream

My father was a case study of the American dream. In the South Bronx, he slept on a fire escape when his family’s tenement roasted on hot summer nights. He would walk home from school with his latchkey swinging from a string necklace. When his parents couldn't make ends meet in the city, they moved to a small chicken farm in southern New Jersey. He leveraged America's meritocracy to eventually own a home and a business and raise a stable family.

And yet he had a lingering sense that it could all be taken away.

He's leaving. On a college visit with my son, it hit me: He's ready. And I'm not.

This story – that feeling – was not unique to my father. It's not even unique to Holocaust survivors. It is the story of Central Americans who flee gang violence and extortion today. Earlier, it was the story of Chinese Americans who fled poverty and later communist oppression. But even further back, it was the story of the Irish who fled eviction by their British overlords and the Great Famine.

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Irish American novelist Peter Quinn once reflected, "The Irish in America – at least the Irish I grew up with – were still in the defensive crouch they'd arrived in during the Famine, still sensitive to the distrust and dislike of a real America, to the suspicions about our loyalty and supposed proclivity to raucous behavior. We were forever reminding ourselves – and the rest of America – of how many Irish fought with Washington, how many died at Antietam, and how many won the Congressional Medal of Honor, a litany of self-justification that implicitly accepted it wasn't enough we'd been here for over a century."

America's common heritage

Edward Conlon, a retired Irish American New York Police Department detective and author, recently told me, "Even if you go five generations as a free citizen, there are 100 generations of being legally second class and dirt poor. We are people who come from peasantry."

That some Irish Americans today still pass down a legacy of baseless anxiety, self-justification and sensitivity to exclusion is something not just connected to refugees or immigrants. It is quintessentially American.

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Lately, I have been one of the alarmists wringing their hands about how to unify a polarized multiethnic democracy lacking a common heritage. But this is our common heritage. Despite the continued salience of our ethnic identities and religious traditions, many of our origins begin with the baptism of our families’ arrivals. The sense of violation, relief, disorientation, novelty and exclusion. But eventually, the sense of possibility.

The oral histories of these arrivals have forged a society acutely conscious of our ancestors' struggles, sensitive to the trampling of our freedom and so protective of our gains. Unlike any other country, we sacralize dreams, underdogs and comebacks. And seemingly independent of our time on American soil, there is a pervasive concern with status.

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This concern is part of the reason we remain wary of redistributive policies, skeptical of government intrusion and so quick to assert and argue over our grievances. We still crave recognition. We are still not settled. To some small extent, maybe we are all survivalists.

My father died in March. His death allowed me to access his safe for the first time, but also drawers where he kept the artifacts of his life – old photographs, faded letters, fraying mementos. My father endured so much he never wished to share, a string of unspoken tragedies, but also secret triumphs, that he kept to himself. A certificate revealed that my grandmother earned an American high school diploma in her 50s. A collection of postcards detailed his memories during a national park road trip from Yosemite to Yellowstone to Canada's Banff.

When you first arrive in almost any country, it feels so fully formed. National traditions and historical monuments give new arrivals the sense that they are entering a finished society, static and rooted.

No doubt, this sense will be felt by the newest generation of Eastern Europeans who, thanks to recent moves by the Biden administration, will soon arrive in the United States after escaping the latest story of conquest and execution lines.

But it is immigrants’ struggle to integrate – to harmonize this otherworldly place with where they come from – that drives the improvisation that sustains our country. It is actually in their struggle to belong that we, descendants, can so closely relate. For in their baptism, in their private stories, America is renewed.

Justin Gest (@_JustinGest) is an associate professor at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government. He is the author of six books about immigration and demographic change, including "Majority Minority," which was released in March. His father, Max Gest, was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1945 and died March 25 in Los Angeles.