Jan 30 2017
An Immigrant’s Tale
Only 19 years old, she came to the United States on a boat, leaving behind a country ravaged by years of war and by a peace that was nearly as awful. Passing by the Statue of Liberty, a symbol that defines the better parts of this great nation’s values and character, I wonder if she pondered the irony that a similar boat had been turned away from America’s shores, only a few years earlier, dooming its desperate refugees to savage, unimaginable fates. She did not yet know enough English to read those ennobling words, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…” In post-war America, she was very different – a member of a religious minority, with virtually no comprehension of English, no understanding of American values, history or culture. In a still insular America, she was a foreigner.
My mother’s parents sent her to the USA on a student visa to spend time with family in Youngstown, Ohio. Post-war Europe was dangerous and desperate. Vigilante justice was admixed with a healthy ration of persistent antisemitism. Having spent four years in hiding during the war, my mother’s very existence, to say nothing of her full potential, was in danger.
Youngstown was not then (and is not now) anybody’s idea of paradise, but after years of hell, it was a godsend for my mother. While there, her cousin Sally used her visit as a pretext to visit the big city – Pittsburgh – so they could go to a party with college students on the eve of the Penn State – University of Pittsburgh annual football game. My father, a Penn State student and World War II veteran, was at that party, and they hit it off. The rest of the story is, in a very real way, my history.
They had a whirlwind courtship, but when the six-month visa was up my mom had to return to Belgium for two years before she could return to marry my father. She returned, they married and started a family. The INS officers assigned to shadow her as a resident alien during the McCarthy era actually were very helpful; one of them used to help my mother hoist my baby carriage up the stairs from the street to our apartment. In my suburban Philadelphia elementary school my brother and I were the only children with an exotic, foreign-born mother. Hard to believe…
But times change. A few years later she got a letter from the INS wondering why she had not yet applied for citizenship. The United States was asking her to become an American citizen! So she did, and my brother and I were forced to don hideous seersucker suits to be with her and my father as she proudly took the oath as a citizen of this wonderful nation.
The America I love accepted that young foreigner. Because of that act, I exist, as does any of the good I have done in my life. Because of that act, my children and grandchildren have had the gift of life with the attendant freedom to dream big and make this world a better place. The America I love made this happen.
I have had the great privilege of working with countless talented physicians, scientists and staff here at Georgetown and elsewhere during the course of my career. Many of these wonderful people have been foreign nationals. Just this past week I found myself at my lab meeting, marveling at our remarkable ethnic, cultural and religious diversity – with everyone working to together with a shared focus on defeating cancer – the ultimate terrorist. I am proud to work with each one of them, and with all of my colleagues from around the world. I intend to continue working with them, always hearing my mother’s voice, silenced by death but living within me, reminding me, “Louis, what’s right is right.”
Let’s keep that in mind as we go about our work and our lives.
In other news, members of the Ruesch Center for the Cure of Gastrointestinal Cancers made the most of this year’s ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium held January 19-21 in San Francisco. Mohamed E. Salem, MD, gave an oral presentation, “Molecular variances between rectal and left-sided colon cancers“, which was written about here. Salem was also quoted in Healio Gastroenterology and appeared in this video. Two poster presentations featured research from summer student groups led by A. Ruth He, MD, PhD, and Keith Unger, MD. The Ruesch Center also organized successful meetings with GI Cancer Alliance Network, the GI Cancers Alliance and the PARP working group.
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