the Japan Letter

When my mother was a sophomore in college, she wrote a letter to her father, away on a six-week business trip in Japan. The letter said that even though my mother was planning to major in math and economics, she was excited about an anthropology course she'd planned for the coming semester. It was something she'd never studied before, a class chosen on a whim and curiosity. After all, wasn't college the place to expand your mind and grow as a person?

My grandfather's reply was so legendary that it now is referred to as "the Japan Letter" and is used as a synonym for a stern lecture. In it, he scolded her, and told her she was in college "to learn a trade." College, as he saw it, was not for frivolous academic pursuits, but as a strategic move in an upwardly mobile path.

By the time I got to college, his views had changed. When I teasingly asked him if I'd be receiving a "Japan Letter" of my own, he chuckled and rubbed the top of my head with his knuckles. "No," he said, smiling, "I believe that you should do whatever you want, motek."

I read this as: "I've successfully planted our family firmly in an upper middle class existence. While we were getting there, everyone had to contribute - not monetarily, but in status, and personal gain. It had to look like each successive family member was doing better than the one before her. But you, my granddaughter, you've grown up in the world of riches we dreamed about when we were on the boat to Israel. There isn't a threat to our security as the upper middle class."

I wonder: does he really feel no threats? How could a man who grew up on a prosperous farm that was completely obliterated during the war ever feel that kind of security again?