A recent study by Gerhard Sonnert and Gerald Holton examines the “second wave” of refugees from Nazi Germany, the individuals who were under 18 years of age when they arrived in the United States during the years between 1933 and the beginning of the Second World War. Sonnert and Holton's point of departure is the finding that a disproportionate number of these émigrés achieved a measure of “success” in professional—and above all, in academic—pursuits. Among the examples they cite, to illuminate their statistics, are a number of very famous scientists and scholars, but inevitably the great majority of the individuals they classify as finding a place in the careers they single out have been journeymen in their various fields. This is where I can situate myself as a detail in their story, a refugee arrival in 1940 at age 9 and a reasonably productive faculty member of assorted colleges and universities since 1955.

In a rather commonplace naïve response to good social science research, I was almost chagrined to learn how little originality there has been in my life. Even an ambivalent attitude I expressed to one of my daughters at the end of an autobiographical letter I wrote to her when she was ten proves to have been a commonplace in my cohort. I wrote at the time: