“If you or your parents are immigrants, know that you are part of a proud American tradition — the infusion of new cultures, talents and ideas, generation after generation, that has made us the greatest country on earth.” -Michelle Obama

Ed Ryterband didn’t wonder much about the lives of Jimmy and Mildred Ryterband before he existed. He was a Queens kid in the Fifties. They were strict but loving parents who supported him through school, all the way to a Ph. D. in psychology and a successful career as a corporate consultant. In middle age, he realized that he could use his skills as an interviewer to learn more about their early lives. When he did that, interviewing them over the next several years, he discovered that his roots were deeper and more different than he ever imagined. Jimmy and Mildred were, as children in their own lives, actually Yachiel ben Zion and Malka Saladar, part of the Ashkenazi diaspora, migrating from Poland and Czarist Russia in the early twentieth century to start a new life in the new World. They suffered abandonment, privation, living in a cave during a world war, losing loved ones in the worldwide flu epidemic, all on the way to meeting and building their life together that allowed their sons to be middle-class Queens kids in the Fifties.

In chronicling how its author became the American he is, Who They Were is a worm’s eye view of the immigrant experience, an important piece of the puzzle that shows how this nation of immigrants became America.