Immigration

This week in class I saw an interesting comparison.  In American Literature we see in The Great Gatsby an amazing and extravagant life in New York, full of parties and money.  However in American Studies we talked about immigration at the turn of the century, we talked about sweatshops and the tenements and the lower class right off the boat.  Of course these two situations are twenty years away from each other, but the did coincide. More often than not I find myself thinking of New York in the 1920s, and even now, as the romanticism that is Gatsby's New York (at least in the beginning of the book), and not the horror that was and is still tormenting the lower class.  This is even more strange to me because that is what I come from, Southeastern European Jewish immigrants who came through New York, worked in sweatshops, lived in the tenements and then the projects before they got out and moved south and west.  What's even weirder is that I want to go back, and so do my cousins, we all want to go back to college there, where our parents and grandparents grew up.  I think that means all these immigrants established a community.  They did something important.  Because now we can go back and be accepted and feel at home and intertwined with our history.  But I can't help but wonder if it is fair that, after all the work our previous generations did to get out of there, we would go back and undo some of their hard work.  No one from previous generations of my family live there anymore, just my generation.  And their parents don't like to visit.  But maybe it is a testament to them that we can live in Manhattan, we can get a good education and a good job, and we can make a living.  That we can make it in such a place.