Americans, Can You Answer These Questions?

In 1938, a month after Kristallnacht, my father’s family left Berlin for the United States. As Jews, their time as Germans had come to an end, to put it charitably. The family went first to Washington Heights in New York City, to acclimate with relatives, and then the four of them — my 11-year-old father, his older sister and his middle-aged parents — made their way across the country to settle in Oregon, a distant corner of a foreign land.

There, they set out to become Americans. “Schybilski” became “Shipley,” the closest approximation they could find in the Salem, Oregon, phone book. My grandfather wanted a name that would help the family fit in. The switch happened so quickly that my father couldn’t remember his new name when he showed up at school the next day.

Their relentless desire to become Americans, to join up with the country that had saved their lives, was brought home to me recently when I stumbled on a worn sheaf of carefully typed papers, annotated and bound with string. It was my grandfather’s study guide for his citizenship exam, and it had been tucked away in a manila file in my father’s office.

As I thumbed the pages, I imagined my grandfather, Julian, thinking: This is what I have to know to be an American. The past doesn’t matter. You could have fought for the Kaiser, earned an Iron Cross in the cavalry, been a patriotic German, built a clothing business in Berlin, but if you came to understand the material on these pages, then you could be an American. So could anyone else. These were the ideas that bound a nation across its geography and differences, a country’s not-so-secret handshake.

At a moment when American divisions often seem beyond repair, when foundational facts are in dispute, these old pages carry an extra weight, at least for me. But they hold a glimmer of hope, too — that we can again find a way to come together around a shared ethic.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that the United States put in place a standardized citizenship exam. Before then, applicants went before a judge, who quizzed them. Though trick questions were forbidden (how high is the Bunker Hill Monument?), pretty much everything else was fair game, as the expansiveness of the study guide attests.

Evidently, Julian Shipley knew enough to pass. He became a citizen in 1944 at the age of 59. (There were still a few gaps in his knowledge. When he went to register to vote, he asked the woman in the registrar’s office which party he should choose. She told him that this was America, and she couldn’t advise him, but that Oregon was a good Republican state. He voted GOP for the rest of his life.) My father was tested, too, in Portland’s federal courthouse when he was 16. His memory is that the judge went easy on him — being a newly minted Eagle Scout was enough.

I had the privilege of not having to take this test. Citizenship was my birthright. And perhaps there’s a tendency, with things that are bestowed on us, to take them for granted.

So I took the test. Or to put it more accurately, I tried to see if I knew what my grandfather had learned, giving myself a pass on Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet and Oregon’s congressional delegation from the ’40s. I’m sure timing had something to do with it — the fact that these pages fell into my life at the end of a hard year, one in which our ability to govern ourselves and to call ourselves united regularly seemed in doubt — but the exercise felt, well, meaningful. Present was the genius of the system of government whose birth we celebrate this weekend but also its gaps and flaws, the manifest truth that the circle of rights has never been fully inclusive. Between the lines was sacrifice — with my grandfather as a proxy for what generations have been willing to undergo to call themselves Americans.

Anyway, that’s what I saw. In the questions that follow, maybe you will, too.