Changing the world with purpose

Grandpa Moe never had the opportunity to care much about art or politics. He did the crossword puzzles in the South Florida Sun Sentinel, but he didn’t read The New York Times. He was a plumber, and plumbing was his passion. When he and Grandma Lila took my sister and me to see “Aida” on Broadway, he spent all of intermission looking at the ceiling. “I built this plumbing system,” he said. He was very proud of himself. We might have teased him about it, because “plumber” seemed to us a very silly job. Coming from Westport, Conn., “plumber” was the kind of thing you’d be in the Game of Life. The grown-ups we knew had jobs we couldn’t understand; Dad had a job we couldn’t understand.

My mom called her father the embodiment of the American Dream. If that’s true, she’s his heir, an entrepreneurial woman who put herself through State University of New York by selling bagels and nuts at 6 a.m., followed by a stint as a successful headhunter on Wall Street before raising two kids in the suburbs.

Nathaniel Hawthorne said that American families are always rising and falling — their prominence rises until the excess becomes too much to handle and wealth turns into largesse. This is one version of the American dream — the opportunity to advance, to accumulate and to pass it on to the next generation, to allow them to make more until it shatters under the weight of its excess. The cycle is almost always framed in financial terms, and it begins in abject poverty until it ends in financial stability and suburban normalcy — at least before it teeters over the edge into financial ruin.

For my family, the story begins in the Jewish shtetls of Czarist Russia. My grandfather’s mother, Pauline Piatoff, arrived at Ellis Island alone, less than 10 years old, her parents and siblings left to die in the pogroms. She raised her three children wherever relatives would take them in, living most of the time in Aunt Celia’s rat-infested Brooklyn basement. As Grandpa Moe used to say, “Everyone was poor during the Depression, but we were poorer than everyone.”

Grandpa made it out all right, and in 1963, he moved with his wife and three kids from Brooklyn to Queens. When Great-Grandma Pauline visited Grandpa Moe’s duplex there, she called it a palace. “Could you imagine what she would have called your house?” Grandpa Moe said one day on our back porch in Connecticut, with a view of our pool but no neighbors. Pauline wouldn’t have had the vocabulary to describe our kind of comfort.

The dream that began in trans-Atlantic steerage ends on a campus tour of Princeton on a slushy January day in 2007, where Mom starts to tear up at the thought that her son could possibly attend a university of such high esteem. This was a university where students don’t have to sell bagels to pay for tuition, a launch pad for me to reach new heights.

Grandpa Moe passed away seven months before I graduated high school and five months before I was accepted to college. “Can you believe it?” my grandma wrote on her graduation card. “Moe Feldman’s grandson going to Princeton University!” It was a dizzying opportunity, not just for me but for my family, to accumulate and to advance. To make the world a little better for me and for my family.

That’s not so hard to do once you reach Princeton. Most of us come here without any real idea of what we want to do after graduation, but we fall into a path that leads to a well-paid job in corporate America. “Business,” “consulting,” “finance” — we find ourselves in fields whose scopes and missions are just as vague as our skill sets. To achieve the kind of success Grandpa Moe talked about, I would only need to do what I had always done, what everyone in my family had always done: be polite, follow the rules, work hard, never give up. As one friend likes to joke, “Go outside the box, but just enough so that people will think you’re interesting.”

It’s true that my Princeton education often feels like little more than a stepping stone to a comfortable lifestyle, a continuation of Hawthorne’s “rise” of the American family. Most of my time here is spent learning esoteric theories and knowledge, inapplicable to anything except maybe a law school essay or an internship application. The routine leaves little room for questioning, and — much like the corporate world — my actions have no consequence except as a reflection of my performance and competence.

But every once in a while, I’m jolted out of my comfort and reminded of the profound relevance of all of this — that seminar on Plato, that history class on deforestation — to wider problems in the world and our role in them. At a lecture by Arundhati Roy a few weeks ago, she connected the destructive effects of a new industrialization project in India with the actions of the ubiquitous McKinsey & Company consulting firm — one of the many businesses recruiting top Princeton students, one of those places Grandpa Moe would encourage me to work, to “change the world for myself and my family.”

I do not know enough about this specific project to criticize or applaud it, but I recognize that these corporations to which we are recruited, this economic and political system we are subtly taught to manage, are not neutral forces. As we take these positions of power, we not only change the world for ourselves and our families but also the world around us. Everyone’s actions have consequences, and if we are not automatically seduced by luxury we are in a very unique position to choose what those consequences will be.

Hawthorne’s bubble bursts.

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But instead of largesse, I’m left with the realization that as we “rise” our actions have greater effects on the people around us, people we cannot even see. As we change the world for ourselves, we inevitably change the world for others as well, but we can choose what that change will be. Armed with my Princeton degree, I stand in solidarity with the 21st-century Pauline Piatoffs enduring 21st-century pogroms, and I say to them: “How can I help you change the world for yourselves and your families?”

Brandon Davis is a anthropology major from Westport, Conn. He can be reached at bsdavis@princeton.edu.