In one week my father, Ernst Hochstadt, will turn 85. I never know what to get him for his birthday, since his needs are modest. Here in Germany, I think about him and my family’s history all the time.

My father was born in Vienna. His family was well-off and highly cultured. Members of the Vienna Philharmonic came to their apartment to play. Just as he was about to finish high school, the Nazis took over Austria in 1938. He was thrown out of his school and forced to take his final year at a Jewish school.

My grandfather was put in jail. While hundreds of thousands of Jews were trying desperately to get out of the Third Reich, the governments of the United States, England and other western democracies were closing their borders to undesirable immigrants. My father was one of the lucky ones. Through a distant relative of my grandparents in New York, he was able to get a visa to come to the United States. Somewhat later, my grandparents were able to escape to Shanghai.

He arrived in New York with little more than the ring on his finger and a winning smile. His curly blond hair and blue eyes did not fit the Nazi image of the Jew, but most of Nazi ideology was nonsense, anyway. On his first visit to the generous relative who helped him come over, he met the man’s 16-year old niece. They say it was love at first sight.

Although my mother’s relatives were not sure that her interest in this penniless refugee was such a good idea, my father found in America a society that was wide open to immigrants. He was able to get jobs, buy a car, go to Army Officer Candidate School and get married. Hardly anyone cared that he was Jewish.

My father became an American. Ernst became Ernie. My parents had a couple of boys and bought a house in the suburbs. He got rid of his accent and learned about baseball, although he could never throw a ball as well as my mother. He started his own business in New York City. Every day, he joined the masses of men who took the Long Island Railroad into New York, and then came back in the evening.

I remember meeting the train as it pulled into the station. As the years went by, the trains got more crowded, and he came home later and later. Without much education, without any capital, he had to keep working harder to support our family. Every day he filled out forms, carried papers around lower Manhattan, moved boxes of goods for import and export.

He never complained that he never got a chance to go to college, that two to three hours on the train and subway were wasted time, that his job was repetitive and would remain so. Maybe he was happy to be alive.

My father was an American, but he also was European. On the weekend, he listened to the opera on radio. Our house was filled with books in German, French and English. He was a big fan of the soccer league that began in New York in the 1960s, and then collapsed for lack of public support. He never cared about football. When my parents went out, they went to French restaurants in Manhattan.

Unlike many Europeans and some Americans, my father took America and American values seriously. Racial discrimination made no sense to my parents, and we were raised to reject racism, at a time when American society was still thoroughly racist. Stuck in the lower middle-class, he paid no attention to class differences up or down. Immigrants or natives, Jews or Christians, white or black, rich or poor, what mattered was character, not birth. My brother and I learned to respect everyone and fear nobody.

My father never said a word about this that I can remember. He never told us how to act, although he did keep asking if we had done our schoolwork. He never criticized the way we played sports or told us who our friends should be. I can’t say exactly how I learned these things from him and from my mother, but I know that it came from them, because my brother is just like me, only more ornery.

America is a fine country. Tens of thousands of Jews from Europe, and millions of others, found a home where the narrow rules, the social taboos and the encrusted formalities no longer applied. America isn’t quite the land of unlimited opportunities, but the opportunities it did provide could be found nowhere else in the world.

We can’t take America and its promise for granted. Only in my lifetime has anti-Semitism virtually disappeared from daily life, but other forms of racism persist. There are always people who try to restrict other people’s liberties.

Politicians, liberal and conservative, are made uncomfortable by open criticism. Immigrants always look and sound out of place. The wind of fear is blowing against our open doors. But America opened up enough to let my father in. The rest he did himself, with my mother at his side. If he had stayed in Europe, he wouldn’t have reached 25.

Happy 85th birthday, Dad.

Steve Hochstadt lives in Lewiston and teaches history at Bates College. He is temporarily teaching in Germany and can be reached at [email protected].