I do a great deal of mentoring of students these days. Yesterday, I saw a medical student who told me that his parents came to this country from India when he was two years old. They've succeeded. He's now at Harvard Medical School, and he's surely en route to success. A common story about the United States, a place that has welcomed people from all over the world for a couple of centuries, and I mention that particularly because I feel that we're much less welcoming with our present administration, but enough of the political commentary.

My father came to this country when he was 15 years... not yet 15 years old, alone, from Eastern Europe, and went to the home of one of the two relatives he had in this country, a maternal uncle who lived in Southern Illinois. He worked in a coal mine until they knew enough English to take on other activities, and he then left. He subsequently joined the army in the First World War, was in the army until the war was over, and settled in the second place where he had a relative, in Worcester, Massachusetts where his paternal aunt lived. There he met my mother, a girl of just 18 years old. They were married before her 19th birthday and I was born before her 20th.

I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts where my father... had a small business. His goal was... his goals were two, one to earn enough money to bring as many of his family to this country as wanted to come, and the second, to see his children educated. He was third of nine children, third in the line of five boys and then four girls. He brought three of his brothers here. The other brothers and all of his sisters chose to remain and were victims of the Holocaust. In fact, there was one surviving sister who lost her husband and child in a concentration camp and when she survived the camp and went back to the village where she had grown up and where my father had grown up in Lithuania, she learned that her family had been murdered, not by the Nazis, they hadn't yet arrived, the townspeople had killed them.