It is the cross that the first and second generations must bear, an involuntary sacrifice for the sake of the future generations.

These are the pains of adjustment, as racking as the pains of birth.

And as the mother forgets her agonies in the bliss of clasping her babe to her breast, so the bent and heart-sore immigrant forgets exile and homesickness and ridicule and loss and estrangement, when he beholds his sons and daughters moving as Americans among Americans.
On Wheeler Street there were no real homes.

There were miserable flats of three or four rooms, or fewer, in which families that did not practise race suicide cooked, washed, and ate; slept from two to four in a bed, in windowless bedrooms; quarrelled in the gray morning, and made up in the smoky evening; tormented each other, supported each other, saved each other, drove each other out of the house.

But there was no common life in any form that means life.