I am a grandchild - or perhaps victim is as good a term - of the great assimilation push of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That is, six of my eight great-grandparents were immigrants, from England (2), Germany (2), Ireland and France. (The Brooks family immigrated in the 1640s.) However, none of my grandparents grew up knowing anything in particular about the countries of their ancestry, and certainly nothing they thought worthy of being passed along to my parents (who were born in the 1920s). No language or dialect, no tidbits of culture, no food, nothing.

My wife is much better off, since her grandparents were the immigrants (one set from England and one from Russia) rather than her greats. Being one generation "newer" makes a big difference. She grew up with stories told by her greatuncle Arthur, who was supposed to have been in the orchestra on the Titanic until the last minute and by her grandmother, who spoke three languages (broken English, broken Russian and broken Yiddish). She cooks both hamentashen and Yorkshire pudding.

We tried to raise our two daughters to at least recognize that they had a cultural heritage other than American, and we do have some hopes. One has red hair and green eyes, and won a "most Irish looking" competition in Milwaukee once. She married a red-haired, blue-eyed Panamanian, and we have a 10-day-old granddaughter who will, at a minimum, be raised bilingual.