“I wanted nothing to do with that. I saw being a Jew as a stigma, a disability,” said Golinkin.
But as he grew up, Golinkin’s opinion changed. “I think it is interesting that the Israelites stayed in the desert and didn’t start over until that generation had passed away. They needed a clean slate, they needed people whose memories are formed in the new land with the new traditions,” he said.
Joe Berry of Stoneham, Maine, was born in Berlin in 1948 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1954. He said that when he arrived in the U.S. his native language was German, but at that time it was “not very popular to be a foreigner and I was very embarrassed speaking German in public.”
Berry started speaking to his parents only in English, losing his German after a short time. He also recalled that people made fun of his German last name, “Be’er,” pronounced like the alcoholic beverage. When the family became citizens, they changed their name to Berry,