My grandmother is ninety-eight years old.

She was born here, in America, on the lower East side of New York City. But two of her older sisters were born in the old country -Russia - on a farm in a small town. She was given the biblical name Rebecca, though her family called her Bekeleh (little Becky). I only knew her as Betty, the name she took in honor of Betty Grable, the American actress, who had long American legs and blonde American hair.

When my grandmother was old enough, she would dye her hair to be blonder than Betty Grable’s, as blonde as Jean Harlow’s. And she’d name her dog Harlow as well. My grandmother was always Betty, to everyone who met her, never Grandma, and never unglamorous. But in her wedding picture, she has brown hair, because her traditional immigrant parents wanted her to look traditional as well. She didn’t want anything to do with the old country. Though her parents barely learned English, she had no accent and no interest in ever going back to Europe. When I spent a summer traveling overseas, she asked “Why do you want to go back there? We came from there.” For her, America was the goal, the finish line, the promised land. Why go anywhere else? She wasn’t religious. For her, the promised land was a place where she could buy a pocketbook on sale, sell it at a mark-up at the local senior center, and then spend the dollar on new mascara or a package of false eyelashes. My grandmother was a true capitalist. And that’s exactly how she wanted it. 

In the 1970’s, when her neighborhood in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, started to be known as Little Odessa, because so many Russian immigrants were settling there, it was confusing for her. Were they like her or not? She was American. They weren’t. But they understood some Yiddish, like she did. They dyed their hair blonde and wore furs and high heels and loved the gourmet food shops that were now springing up all along Neptune Avenue. Just like she did. But they were refugees, escape artists, runaways from repression and dictatorship. She wasn’t running away from anything. She was American. 

For the first time, though, she began to look back. These new arrivals sounded like her mother, who had passed away decades before. But they didn’t look like her mother. They drove shiny cars, they polished their long fingernails. They looked good. And they cared that they looked good. But they had been through something. Made sacrifices. For this. For the future. So that they and their children could become or be born American. Her parents had done exactly the same thing – everything they did was for her, so she could be Betty. American. And she was. And she was grateful.

-Dana Leslie Goldstein, Book Writer/Lyricist