Of course it wasn't the same as one of the forty-eight states; still, when we stepped off the President Taft in Honolulu (where we were to stay a couple of days before going on to San Francisco), we wondered if we could truthfully say we were stepping on American soil. I said no. With these sentences, the narrator isexpressing confusion about the relationship between Honolulu and America. providing useful background information about Honolulu and San Francisco. revealing that she and other passengers may have different points of view about America. asserting that her opinion about America is correct and should be respected by the other passengers.

ear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of

course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I

would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn"t

been president or if I hadn"t been the offspring of Jews.

When the first shock came in June of 1940—the nomination for

the presidency of Charles A. Lindbergh, America"s international

aviation hero, by the Republican Convention at Philadelphia—my

father was thirty-nine, an insurance agent with a grade school education,

earning a little under fifty dollars a week, enough for the

basic bills to be paid on time but for little more. My mother—

who"d wanted to go to teachers" college but couldn"t because of the

expense, who"d lived at home working as an office secretary after

finishing high school, who"d kept us from feeling poor during the

worst of the Depression by budgeting the earnings my father

turned over to her each Friday as efficiently as she ran the household

—was thirty-six. My brother, Sandy, a seventh-grader with a

prodigy"s talent for drawing, was twelve, and I, a third-grader a

term ahead of himself—and an embryonic stamp collector inspired

like millions of kids by the country"s foremost philatelist,

President Roosevelt—was seven.

We lived in the second-floor flat of a small two-and-a-half-family house on a

tree-lined street of frame wooden houses with redbrick

stoops, each stoop topped with a gable roof and fronted by a

tiny yard boxed in with a low-cut hedge. The Weequahic neighborhood

had been built on farm lots at the undeveloped southwest

edge of Newark just after World War One, some half dozen of the

streets named, imperially, for victorious naval commanders in the

Spanish-American War and the local movie house called, after

FDR"s fifth cousin—and the country"s twenty-sixth president—

the Roosevelt. Our street, Summit Avenue, sat at the crest of the

neighborhood hill, an elevation as high as any in a port city that

rarely rises a hundred feet above the level of the tidal salt marsh to

the city"s north and east and the deep bay due east of the airport

that bends around the oil tanks of the Bayonne peninsula and

merges there with New York Bay to flow past the Statue of Liberty

and into the Atlantic. Looking west from our bedroom"s rear window

we could sometimes see inland as far as the dark treeline of

the Watchungs, a low-lying mountain range fringed by great estates

and affluent, sparsely populated suburbs, the extreme edge

of the known world—and about eight miles from our house. A

block to the south was the working-class town of Hillside, whose

population was predominantly Gentile. The boundary with Hillside

marked the beginning of Union County, another New Jersey

entirely.

Explanation:

a main idea dna proper infromation

its c because its his point of view