Step Across This Line: A Personal Reflection on the Diverse Experience

I have borrowed my title, “Step Across This Line,” from a collection of essays by Salman Rushdie (2002) whose work in both fiction and non-fiction has always spoken to me on an implicit and personal level. Although, he was born and raised in Bombay and I in London, like me, he is an immigrant to the United States. I continually feel an affinity with the personal and cultural confluences and confusions he so eloquently describes. His work is seeped in the sensibilities and consciousness of the immigrant experience. It captures the multiplicity, kaleidoscopic transformation, and emergence that not only characterize immigration, but is also emblematic of our embeddedness in a diverse and changing world. His invitation to us to “step across this line” evokes the particular moment of immigration when the migrant steps into one world and out of another and enters invisibly into a new existence where life and identity are constantly changing. It brings us into the space where interaction with difference is a core feature of all our lives and changes us in many ways, where diversity is a constant and enveloping part of our internal and external worlds.

I was born and raised in Golders Green in the sixties, a suburb in North London that is home to the densest Jewish population in the United Kingdom. The neighborhood seemed so obviously and thoroughly Jewish to me as a youngster that I believed, incorrectly as I later discovered, that the name itself was somehow Jewish—“Golders” seeming like an English pastoral version of “Golda's.” The discovery that the Jewish population never amounted to more than 30% of the local population speaks to one of the