With admirable foresight, my parents had applied for U.S. visas before leaving Europe, but because they were born in different countries, they came under different quotas. My mother, who was under the Polish quota, received a U.S. immigrant visa in early1941. My father, whose home town of Czernowitz had become part of Romania after World War I, fell under the Romanian quota, which was much smaller than the Polish quota. He remained in Cuba (as a traveling salesman working out of Havana) while my mother came to New York to live with relatives. Showing considerable pluck for a rather shy new immigrant, she made two trips to Washington by herself to plead with State Department officials to grant my father a visa. She eventually succeeded and he was admitted to the U.S. in November 1941. Soon thereafter, they moved to Chicago, where I was born in December 1942.