That’s exactly what my great-grandparents did when they came through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. They made a deliberate effort to assimilate into American culture. Their children spoke only broken Czech, and by the next generation—my father—Czech wasn’t spoken at all. Learning English and becoming American was intentional. That expectation of assimilation used to be understood, and it’s something we shouldn’t have abandoned.
That’s exactly what my great-grandparents did when they came through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. They made a deliberate effort to assimilate into American culture. Their children spoke only broken Czech, and by the next generation—my father—Czech wasn’t spoken at all. Learning English and becoming American was intentional. That expectation of assimilation used to be understood, and it’s something we shouldn’t have abandoned.