Summarize in one sentence This is a nation founded on a conundrum, what Mario Cuomo has characterized as
"community added to individualism." These two are our defining ideals; they are also in constant
conflict. Historians today bemoan the ascendancy of a kind of prideful apartheid in America, saying
that the clinging to ethnicity, in background and custom, has undermined the concept of unity.
These historians must have forgotten the past, or have gilded it. The New York of my children is no
more Balkanized, probably less so, than the Philadelphia of my father, in which Jewish boys would
walk several blocks out of their way to avoid the Irish divide on Chester Avenue. (I was the product
of a mixed marriage, across barely bridgeable lines; an Italian girl, an Irish boy. How quaint it seems
now, how incendiary then.) The Brooklyn of Francie Nolan's famous tree, the Neward of which
Portnoy complained, even the uninflected WASP suburbs of Cheever's characters: they are ghettos,
pure and simple. Do the Cambodians and the Mexicans in California coexist less easily today than
did the Irish and Italians of Massachusetts a century ago? You know the answer.