What my father did, before he went to college and knew much about forks, was eat with his fingers.

My father’s mother, my Grandma Lena, would go to the butcher at closing time and get ends of meats, beef tongue, heart, tripe. No matter, her four sons would not go hungry.

My father, the oldest, got the study spot closest to the cookstove where the pilot light provided some heat. The boys needed to eat and they had to be warm. Education was the path out of poverty, after all, and poverty had been their lot, she working as a tailor, with her husband helping as he was able. Grandma Lena had plans for her boys: they would have to attend the local college and live at home.

Grandpa Harry, Lena’s husband, had no such opportunities. The stories about Grandpa Harry after he came to America are all tragedies. Back in Dvinsk – Russia or Latvia, depending on the year – the Census listed him as “literate, educated, studying Talmud,” a scholarly Jewish text. On the America-bound ship’s log, he was listed as a tailor journeyman, a man learning a trade. At Ellis Island, he had shortened his surname for ease in the new country, the promised land.

After a year as a U.S. soldier in World War I, he was discharged due to “mustard gas.”

Call it combat fatigue, brain injury, chemical exposure, neurotoxicity, my grandfather was no longer chanting prayers to heaven.

There’s a gap in the story when it comes to how Harry met Lena, a recent Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, a full-figured girl. And another gap about how they moved from New York, where immigrants first land, to New Haven. Something to do with a cousin having scouted out Connecticut. Already the memories fade.

A grainy black-and-white photograph shows a serious young couple dressed plainly, he in a simple dark suit, she in what might be a wedding dress, though not by today’s standards, not smiling. Resolute.

Harry and Lena felt proud when my father was accepted into the local university on full scholarship. This was fortunate, given the “limitation of numbers” policy at Yale (the local university) that restricted Jewish enrollment to 10 percent. My father’s three brothers followed in his footsteps.

Back to forks. The family story goes that in those days, Yale men dined together at long wooden tables served by waiters. My father’s suit, sewn by his father, did not look like the other boys’ suits: The plain design, scratchy wool fabric, looked like the suit my father’s father wore in that wedding picture. When my father sat at the long table, not only did he not look like anyone else, either in attire or physical attributes (a small Jewish boy among seemingly all tall men), but the table was set like nothing he had ever seen.

Two forks to the left of the plate, a knife and two spoons to the right, another knife over a small plate in the upper left, a smaller fork and spoon above.

So that no one would notice that he was not one of them, he would need to figure out how to manage these utensils. Imitating, he picked up first the outermost, smaller fork, which he learned was used for salad, the first course. Next, the outer, larger spoon, for soup.

Learning the order of forks felt more monumental than doing integrals in advanced calculus.

At home, my father ate hurriedly with one fork and five fingers. At school, he ate with proper tableware, one course at a time.

He never did learn how to dress, always a waif of a man looking as if he grew up in the ghetto, which was one generation away from true.

Proud of his successes, including mastering cutlery, not to mention graduation with high honors as a physics major, he was most proud of one particular accomplishment. During his freshman year, he participated in his residential college’s intramural football team. How he managed to aim a football with such thick glasses is left to the imagination. Perhaps he warmed the bench. No matter. His team won the season that year. All team members received a Freshman Football award pin, which my father valued beyond his Phi Beta Kappa key. I have inherited them both and treasure them.

Perhaps a football pin marks membership in America, like using a salad fork or changing one’s name in order to get a job. After completing professional training and watching less accomplished classmates receive multiple job offers while they got none, my father and his brothers took the name their father had been given on Ellis Island and Americanized it to Roston. With a new name, there were job offers aplenty.

What my father did was whatever was needed — to be successful, to be secure, to belong.

What my father did, like so many children of immigrants before and since, was pave the way for my three brothers and me, and all our children and our children’s children, to leave my father’s story behind.

Diane Roston lives in New Hampshire. When not writing, Diane is a physician on the faculty of
the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. She has published personal essays, poetry, and
stories in many publications, including JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association).