The Tree Bears Fruit
11
like rodents trailing in the shadows. To a sensitive, idealistic,
religious, immigrant-born youth, the realization was shocking
and disillusioning beyond words. Under Cover was the result
of my labors to expose those who were betraying our democracy.
RESOLVE
THESE were the thoughts that came to me as I faced the
water, oblivious to the rain, and the conflict of the Old and
the New Worlds raged inside me. I saw myself as an individual product of that conflict and America as the mass
product. I saw my adopted country as a treasure house of the
good that is latent in all men. I saw America, too, as a sanctuary for those of us who are its immigrants. Our roots, transplanted from Europe, bear fruit here. On free American soil
we have the opportunity to achieve all the great dreams, all
the great resolves, all the promises of human dignity which
are so often stifled and destroyed in the Old World. Here the
immigrant becomes an American.
The compulsion to stare into the depths of the blackness
offshore held me. Yet the more I gazed, unseeing, the more
swiftly the panorama of my life unfolded, the more calm I was
growing. My restlessness was slowly being replaced by a curious sense of quietude, the turbulence of the inner storm by
the peace of mind that comes from self-understanding. Out
of the rain-swept mists, stretching, it seemed to me, to the
very shores of Europe, came the persuasion, the conviction—
whatever one may call it—that I must leave my adopted country and return to the regions of my childhood; that I must
seek the ancient earth upon which I had been born.
As this decision crystalized, a strange thing happened. I experienced a great serenity, a great inner peace, a clarity of
vision unclouded by doubt and uncertainty. This sense of well-