This has happened a couple of times in this, the city of immigrants--I tell someone my name and they kind of consider me German. It's been at least a hundred years since anyone I'm descended from thought of themselves as German. My Grandma Thora was born in Sweden, but she was adamant that she not be called Swedish, she was an American, dammit, and even Swedish-American an insult.

Anyway, the gentleman who asked me who my German relatives were today lived there as a child, when his father was stationed there with the Red Army. (I didn't ask if dad was rewarded for his service with a stint in the gulag as so many soldiers were.) He liked Germany, but it was complicated, and he was happy to get back to "simple Russia". Flash forward and somehow he has come to live in very un-simple Brooklyn. That's a heck of a life.