Music Response

The song that stood out to me of all of them was ӀHome on the RangeԀ by Tori Amos. This song was immediately jarring because it put into perspective a conversation I had a few years ago with my paternal grandmother. My grandmother is a Romanian woman. She only speaks Romanian and has only been out of the country a few times ր not at all, in fact, before the late 1990s. She has come to the United States twice to visit my immediate family, and she has stayed with us for about a year at a time per visit.
During one of these visits, in 2005, I remember asking her if she wouldn't like to just stay in the United States and live with us. I had expected that she would like to, or at least be ambivalent about it, but her answer was a resounding no. I asked her why. In my mind the United States was a much better place to live than in Romania, and this was true until Romania joined the European Union in 2007. The United States had better health care, better sanitation, safer streets, and more food availability than Romania. She only really spoke to her family, so the fact that she couldn't speak English was beside the point. My grandmother admitted all this. So why did she not want to stay in the United States?
Her answer was that she couldn't bear the thought of dying in a place that wasn't her home, where her parents, her husband, several brothers, and all her ancestors had been buried. She felt the same way about Austria, where my uncle now lives.
Both Austria and the United States were seen as pinnacles of civilization to young adults in Romania. Actually, after the opening up of the borders, Romania experienced the loss of a generation of youth who moved to Western Europe and the United States ր my parents, uncles, and aunts were part of this mass migration. The early to mid 1990s were an exciting time for young adults in Eastern Europe. The move to the United States was an exciting one for me, as I experienced it through my parents' eyes, and for a long time I did not question that everyone in Romania felt this way about the United States.
After this conversation with my grandmother, I realized that the idea of moving away to a country that wasn't home was horrifying to older Romanians and even young ones that had already established families in Romania. The song ӀHome on the RangeԀ showed me how attitudes toward home are part of a shared human experience. The same feelings that make my grandmother completely unwilling to live her life out in the United States, no matter how much better the U.S. is than Romania, must have pervaded the Cherokee Nation during the late 1830s, no matter how good the land in Oklahoma could have been.