My mom was born in Romania just as the communists took over. Though our family was Jewish, that was just one of the many religions that communism, at best, ignored, and at worst, tried to erase. I've heard conflicting reports about how religious the family was, but clearly not too much. They raised a pig and ate it one winter. In any case, it would be hard to judge a family of 4 living together in a single room in a communal building with a single bathroom. When it was time for my mother to go to college the family decided to accept emigration to Israel-- the only catch was that they had to leave all their belongings in Romania as property of the state. Of course that is an easy proposition when you have nothing. They spent a month in Naples, Italy where my mom quickly learned to speak the language and enjoy all the ripe fruit that didn't exist in her home country. If you've ever eaten an Italian nectarine, you know what I mean. In Israel my mom spent just ten years, enough to get a degree, get married to my father who was born in Iraq, and give birth to my older brother. Living through so many wars in a bitterly divided country my mom and dad thought to emigrate again. It was becoming a pattern. One day my father called back home from the war and my brother answered the phone. "It's dad!" he said. My brother told him that there was no dad home and hung up. It was time to leave. They came to America in 1974, first to New York where my father got a job in a hospital, and eventually to California where they have lived for almost 30 years now. It's strange to think that this is where they have spent the majority of their lives. My parents, it seems, are the children of many countries. The only thing that links them together is a need to finally feel at home.