When I was ten, just old enough for familial truths, my mother began telling me about the time she spent in displaced-persons camps across Germany. The horrors of the previous few years were so immense that her mother would fall asleep imagining a transplanted life in Brazil, where the bulk of her surviving relatives had wisely fled before the war. But all her pleasing fantasies about starting over in the tropics were ruined by a xenophobic reality. My grandparents had picked one of the worst moments in Brazilian history to file an immigration application. Quotas shut them out. They settled on a more plausible destination: Washington, D.C.
-New Republic
