A Summer Serenade

Jonathan Rauch | September 4, 1999

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If Sara had stayed in Poland, she and her children would probably have been killed and her grandchildren never born. By leaving Europe in 1910, she fled, unknowingly, the gas and the fire that consumed the Jews, and she chose, unknowingly, to live. She chose life for her grandson Jon, who chose, and was chosen by, Michael.

America is not what America is because of its venturesome entrepreneurs or its efficient retail sector or its family values or its Judeo-Christian heritage or its rule of law or its constitutional government or its idealistic (sometimes) foreign policy or its melting-pot tradition. Such things are no doubt important. They are American things. But they are not what makes America a dream rather than just a place.

America is a dream because it is a country where you become someone new. In merely the time it takes you to grow up or to watch your children grow up, you can traverse a greater distance than the Hebrews and Egyptians and Greeks and Romans traversed over the course of a civilization's rise and decline. America is a place that remakes you, and that in so doing remakes itself. It is a place where two men, from worlds far away and far apart, sit together on the back patio in the summer, listening to the cicadas sing.