book club....

ok, so we had a record crowd at book club..to discuss the namesake......quite a feat for a group that included no one less than 2 generations from immigration.......we talked briefly about the naming part.....and then about the gogol part...nobody had read the original short story...i know that we own it...but could not locate it in our vast shelving arrangement.....(gentle readers....we own enough books to cause gravity to drag our home down the hill into the lake....)...and mostly we talked of the immigrant experience and how hard it is to shake one's past even when one desires to do so.....the closest experience is my grandfather broughton telling me as he was dying that his mothe tolkd him he could either speak german, or speak english and be an american....what choice did he have?.......easy for us who don't look foreign to say......