Excerpt from Her First American, 1986

When [Ilka] got back, the phone was ringing. Would Fishgoppel collect for the United Negro College Fund?

                  “I will collect. I am the cousin from Fishgoppel,” said Ilka. Ilka wanted to see the inside of an American home.

                  The nameplate outside the apartment 6-A said, “Wolfgang Placzek.” He handed her fifty cents through the cracked door. While 6-B went to look for change, Ilka put her head inside the foyer and saw the little green marble boy extracting the same splinter from his foot, on the same tree stump, on the same round lace doily on which he had sat in Ilka’s mother’s foyer in Vienna. The woman came back. “Nix! Nothing,” she said. It did her grief but her man as not to house. Six-C was Fishgoppel, and 6-D would not open; the voice through the peephole came from Berlin. It did her grief but her sister had a stroke had and was to bed.

                  “How?” Ilka asked the woman at the employment agency, who told Ilka to come back when she had practiced her English. “With whom shall I praxis? You are the only American I met in New York? The onlies other I met are in my English class, which are yet other outlanders, which know only other outlanders, which know yet lesser English as I!”

                  The woman on the other side of the desk drew her head back from Ilka’s complaining. She was a stout woman with a lot of useless bosom and looked as if there was some complaining she might do, give her a chance. “New York,” she said to Ilka, “is not America, like all you people always think.”

                  When Fishgoppel came to town to see how Ilka was getting on, Ilka complained that New York was not America. Fishgoppel frowned, did some mental arithmetic, and offered Ilka a week’s trip West.