When Joseph talks about his family, it reminds me of my own, both the Puerto Rican and Jewish sides. My mother’s grandfather fled a shtetl in Poland and worked for ten years to bring his wife and daughter (my grandmother) to be with him in the U.S. My father boarded a ship from Puerto Rico with his mother when he was just 10 years old to make a life in the U.S. Both my parents grew up in the hardscrabble South Bronx and realized their own version of the American Dream.
