My son’s middle school was having a “culture fair” recently, so he asked me for some guidance. His task was to create a display that described his Jewish heritage.
“When is it due?” I asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“When did your teacher first assign it?”
“Oh, a couple of months ago.”
This answer filled me with pride. Though I had failed to provide him with a grounding in his Jewish birthright, no one could argue that I had stinted in his training as a procrastinator—a skill that my own parents had painstakingly drilled into me from an early age.
“Ask your mother,” I suggested.
“But she’s Japanese.”
“Yes, but she makes a delicious kugel.”
But my wife, a non-procrastinator, had already completed her day’s duties and was sound asleep. So instead, my son suggested that we go online to ellisisland.org and look for records of our ancestors’ arrivals. This got me...
