The First Stories

by Amy Friedman, Anita Hollander, Samina Ali, and Charles Marina

Introduction and Origin Story by Amy Friedman, Music by Roland Tec, Co-Producer

Following The Origin Story (below), click on the title find three more stories. Share the World, a song by Anita Hollander; Muslims Have Always Been Part of America’s Story by Samina Ali; and Whiplash by Charles Marina.

Each piece is available in both written and recorded form.

You can also listen and see the YouTube recording of Share the World, with the Villlage Temple Children's Choir

The Origin Story

by Amy Friedman

Amy Friedman is an author, editor, ghostwriter, writing teacher and founding producer of All-American Story.

Amy Friedman

Click above to listen to Amy reading The Origin Story

All-American Story was born in June 2025, the day I read about a woman named Carol just released from ICE custody after two months.

Carol was a popular waitress at a local Pancake and Waffle House in Kennett, Missouri. She fled Hong Kong 20 years ago, but one day in April this year, Carol went to the US Citizenship and Immigration Service office in Missouri for a routine appointment. Routine changed that day when ICE officers shackled her and transported her 200 miles away from home and her three young children to County Jail in Rolla, Missouri. One month later, ICE shipped her again—this time to Springfield, 250 miles from home.

Carol had lived in Kennett for all those 20 years. More than 80% of Kennett’s population support the Trump Administration’s immigration policies, but Kennett citizens noted that that policy was supposed to be to deport the “worst of the worst.” Carol is not a criminal. Carol is a mom, a neighbor, a friend, a favorite waitress. Protesters raised money to hire a lawyer to help her, and they also made enough noise to garner national media coverage.

As I read the story, I thought of immigrants in Los Angeles where I live—of so many who had already been rounded up, roughed up, detained, and deported. Like Carol, many of these people have complex immigration stories; also, like Carol, many have for decades been here raising and providing for families, working legally, paying taxes, complying with Citizenship and Immigration authorities to maintain and obtain and update their legal status. Like Carol, so many of those detained and deported are admired and loved and respected by and connected to family, friends, neighbors, customers, clients. They have long been integral, vital, beloved members of our communities.

In Kennett, people interviewed by journalists spoke affectionately and proudly of “their Carol.” They knew her story. And they wanted to help her, not run her out of the country.

As the weeks wore on, more stories like Carol’s surfaced and made clear that a vast majority of us do not want our friends, families, neighbors, teachers, truck drivers, waiters and waitresses, nannies and valets, farmworkers and handymen, nurses and painters, artists and writers, journalists and musicians and activists chased down, locked up, and shipped away. And a vast majority of us have either been Carol or have family members and friends who are.

One day in Culver City, just a few blocks from where I live, people stood on the streets staring helplessly at the abandoned ice cream truck on the sidewalk. Enrique, a 20+-year resident, Culver City’s beloved paletero, had just been detained by ICE—as he was selling his ice cream.

A picture of that abandoned cart and interviews with family, friends and neighbors were in newspapers, on the radio, on TV. The Community Self-Defense Coalition of Culver City helped his family locate him and gathered his belongings and raised money to support his legal costs and to help the family in the aftermath of Enrique’s detention.

Enrique, too, came home after months, even as ICE kidnappings kept happening everywhere across my city, and across the country.

Enrique’s Ice Cream Truck

And I kept thinking about my dad.

Dad died in 2017, but all his life, as a lawyer, he fought for peoples’ rights. But what I kept thinking about was the day in the 2000s when he shared an email he had just received from a stranger. The subject line: Were you a World War II POW?

From there a story more complicated than the one I’d known about how my dad survived World War II as a Jewish POW in a German prison camp began to emerge.

I suspect Dad hadn’t told us this part of the story because people often are silent about traumatic memories, and this part began in the bitter cold of December 19, 1944 when my dad was a 19-year-old soldier who was captured by Nazi soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge.

(r) Skip Friedman, the author’s Dad, 1945

The email was from Chris Edmonds, a man looking to learn more about his own dad’s time in the war. The short version of the story goes like this: Roddy Edmonds died in the mid-1980s having never shared his war stories with his son, Chris. Turns out, when my dad’s army division, the 106, was captured, Roddy was their senior ranking officer.

When the men of the 106 Division reached Stalag IX-A in Ziegenhain, Germany, the German Commandant ordered Roddy, as the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer, to direct the Jewish soldiers of the 106 to present themselves at the next morning’s assembly.

The 1929 Geneva Conventions stipulated that POWs need only reveal their name, rank, and serial number if captured, but Axis powers were infamous for violating those Conventions. And many Jewish Allied soldiers died in work camps.

But at Stalag IX-A, instead of ordering the Jewish soldiers to separate themselves from their fellow soldiers, Roddy Edmonds ordered all 1275 men under his command to walk outside the barracks that morning, and when the German Commandant saw this, he placed his pistol against Roddy’s head. He demanded loudly that he identify the Jews.

Roddy was a 25-year-old Methodist from rural Tennessee who, before the war, had likely never met a single Jewish person. Still, he said, “We are all Jews here.”

He bravely added that if the Commandant wanted to shoot the Jews, he would have to shoot everyone. After the war, he would be prosecuted for war crimes.

The Commandant backed down.

My dad and the other Jewish men of the 106 survived the war.

I adored my dad for his intellect and empathy long before I understood that not everyone combines these traits. He was a glass-half-full, this-egg-sandwich-is-the-best-sandwich-ever-made, the-Indians/Browns/Cavs-will-make-it-to-the-Playoffs kind of guy, and prior to Chris’s email, when he did talk about World War II, he spoke mostly of his joy and gratitude on the day of his release. At 6 feet tall, weighing 85 pounds, he made his way back to the States to his fiancé, my mom, and to his dad and mom whose family all died in concentration camps. My grandmother endured the terror of her younger son being, first, MIA and then a Jewish prisoner of war in Germany.

Chris Edmonds’ email opened a new understanding of who and what and how my dad became the man he was and also reminded me that knowing people the way Roddy got to know my dad and the other Jews in his division, creates bonds that make people kinder, more empathic, and more courageous.

And that led me to thinking about the importance of knowing each other’s true stories.

And so, I called one of the finest curators of stories I know, Jessica Tuck, and asked her to help me collect and showcase stories of American immigrants and 1^st- and 2^nd-gen Americans. With Jess, and then Brandy Lewis, Samina Ali, Rena Semertzidis, Roland Tec, and John Ciccolini, for months we have been inviting people across this country to share their immigration stories.

I am honored and astonished when people share their often harrowing and heart-wrenching memories, their sorrows and their joys, their questions and their concerns.

And I understand this:

Simply sharing our true stories can be healing.

Sharing our true stories reminds each of us of who we actually are.

Sharing our true stories reminds us of how much more alike than different from each other we are.

Sharing our true stories is heart- and mind-expanding.

Sharing our true stories allows us to understand who and what America is.

And as people write and call and sit and talk with us, we all become more determined to do everything we can to share these stories with everyone, in every way we can.

With All-American Story we seek to flood the zone with the true stories of people like Carol and Enrique and my dad, and so many more

We invite you to join us, to read, listen, share…

SHARE THE WORLD

Anita Hollander’s song

Anita Hollander

I strongly resemble my Grandma Celeste, who died 6 years before I was born. She was a Vaudeville dancer, and I came out ready to continue her untimely-ended career, literally jumping out of my crib at one year old. True Story. At three years old, Celeste was brought to America with her family to escape the pogroms of Russian Cossacks in 1904. Had they not fled, my family & I would not exist.

As a performer, composer, director, playwright and “anything I can get paid for” kind of artist, for 28 years I conducted the Village Temple Children’s Choir of New York City. Choir members were ages 5 to 21 and included kids from all backgrounds, races, and disabilities. Our motto: “We Support Each Other.”

We wrote songs together about making a better world (Tikkun Olam, Repair the World, is a mission of Judaism).

In 2015, all of us were very concerned about the immigrant children being torn from their families at our own borders, children separated from their parents and no matter their age, stuck into cages. The choir wanted to write a song about it, and we began to talk about where each of our families were from. At home, these young people discovered they had 20 ancestral countries, and they decided they wished to add, in the middle of our song, a “Welcome” in the language of each of their countries.

The members also created the title SHARE THE WORLD, and the lyric reflect not only my own grandmother’s story but also the story of the Kindertransport the rescue efforts that saved the lives of thousands of children, the vast majority of them Jewish, by transporting them to Great Britain from Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1940.

Thanks to the wonderful kids of our choir, a song was born, which we had the chance to sing in downtown Manhattan, facing the Statue of Liberty, the vision of Freedom which our ancestors came here seeking. We also sang our song for Ukrainians who recently arrived on these shores at Interfaith Thanksgiving celebrations, and just a few weeks ago, some of the kids and I sang it again for a Fall of Freedom event in New York City where we joined other artists performing their own expressions of what freedom means.

Muslims Have Always Been Part of America’s Story

Samina Ali, Co-producer, immigrant, brown, woman, Muslim, writer.

Samina Ali

In the early 1970s, when I was two years old, my parents immigrated from the twin cities of Hyderabad–Secunderabad to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis–St. Paul. Something about that detail has always stayed with me, and growing up, I told myself that geography itself promised symmetry, balance—a layering of one life onto another.

But that version is a child’s imagining. The truth is, our arrival wasn’t just personal or poetic. It was political, historical, and newly possible. My family was among the first Indians legally allowed to immigrate to the United States after a profound shift in American law: the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Before this landmark legislation, U.S. immigration policy had effectively shut the door to most people from India and much of Asia. In 1923, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court ruled that people of Indian descent were not considered “white” and therefore were ineligible for naturalized citizenship. Thind, a Sikh immigrant who had served in the U.S. military during World War I, had previously been granted citizenship—only to have it revoked. His case triggered the denaturalization of dozens of Indian Americans and helped cement policies that, for decades, made Indian immigration nearly impossible.

The changes that came in 1965 grew out of the broader civil-rights era and dismantled a system that had long favored northern Europeans. The doors were finally opened to immigrants from countries like India—but not without conditions. Preference was given to immigrants with higher education and specialized skills. America, facing rising global competition and an urgent demand for scientific, medical, and technical talent, was actively recruiting expertise.

My dad fit that need perfectly. He had graduated with honors in engineering from the prestigious Osmania University in Hyderabad. Like thousands of other South Asians of his generation, he arrived in the United States in the early 1970s with training, ambition, and a willingness to begin again. Their migration helped fuel key industries—medicine, engineering, technology—that would reshape the modern American economy.

This first wave of immigrants also helped give rise to what would later be called the “model minority” myth: the idea that Indians are all successful, hyper-achieving professionals. But that image was not accidental—it was the product of policy. In those early decades, only those with certain credentials were legally allowed to enter.

As naïve as it might sound now, my parents were mostly unaware of the civil-rights movement that had helped make their arrival possible. They only knew that they had come to America dreaming of building a life for their children—not because it represented “American capitalism” or even the “American Dream,” but because it was simply the life they wanted for us, one that wasn’t available to them in India, especially not as Muslims.

The first Minnesotans we encountered were equally unprepared for us. Many assumed we were Mexican or light-skinned Black. Because of our last name, some asked if we were related to Muhammad Ali, the boxer. Not one of my classmates could locate India on a map. When I explained for the hundredth time where it was, they asked if people lived in mud huts and rode elephants. They complained that the curry on my clothes was “stinky.” And not a single adult or child had ever heard of Islam.

Yet there was something about that earlier innocence in America that allowed us, for a time, to be everything at once—both Indian and American, both Urdu and English, both saris and jeans, both chicken curry and hamburgers. My parents could leave India without giving up being Indian. Every summer, we returned to Hyderabad for long months. I did some of my schooling there and spoke fluent Urdu. I knew my cousins in India as intimately as my best friends in Minneapolis. My parents even kept a house in Hyderabad, imagining they might retire there someday. For them, birth and death belonged to India—just not their lives.

Then came September 11th.

In the days and weeks that followed, I felt the country’s gaze shift. The faith no one had heard of now filled every television screen. My last name, Ali, was no longer associated with the beloved boxer, but with terror. I was stopped at every airport. Questioned. Scrutinized. Suspect.

Suspicion of Muslims came with a demand that we remain silent to our mistreatment. There was an expectation that I should apologize for existing, prove my loyalty, make myself smaller. The dominant narratives about Muslims—that we were all threats, that Muslim women were oppressed, that Islam itself was incompatible with Western values—marked the first time I felt America reject me.

Photo Credit: The Independent

I refused to accept that I didn’t belong here. Not wanting to be naïve like my parents about American history, I began researching Muslim immigration. What I found was startling.

Muslims have never been newcomers to America.

Long before my family arrived, Muslims were already part of this nation’s story—a few as mapmakers and guides in early European expeditions in the 1500s, but most tragically through the transatlantic slave trade. Historians estimate that between 10 and 20 percent of the millions of Africans forced into bondage were Muslim. Many were literate in Arabic. Some came from scholarly or elite families before being captured, brutalized, and stripped of their identities. Their faith survived in fragments of prayer, memory, rebellion, and quiet endurance.

Muslims were also present in the imagination of the nation’s founders. As the new republic debated religious freedom, Islam was not an abstraction—it was a real test case. The historian Denise Spellberg has shown that Muslims served as a “litmus test” for whether America’s promise of religious liberty would truly extend to everyone.

Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the Qur’an and argued that religious freedom must include “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan.” When the Constitution was ratified, Article VI declared that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” From the beginning, the idea that a Muslim could one day hold public office—even the presidency—was not unthinkable. It was anticipated.

Photo Credit: Al Jazeera

Even the Supreme Court bears this history in stone. On its north wall, a bas-relief depicts the Prophet Muhammad among history’s great lawgivers—alongside Moses and Confucius—not as a religious symbol, but as a figure of legal tradition. The irony is impossible to miss.

So what does it actually mean to be an American Muslim? Are the two identities as contradictory as post-9/11 rhetoric insists?

History tells a different story. Muslims are not foreign to this country. We have arrived in chains and with college degrees, in invisibility and in full view. We have been America’s forced labor and its legal test case, its erased presence and its newly visible one.

Even without knowing this long history in detail, my parents understood its truth instinctively. They didn’t see a contradiction between building a life in Minnesota and remaining rooted in Hyderabad. They didn’t believe becoming American meant erasing who they were. They traveled back and forth seamlessly, carrying two homes within them. They raised children who belonged to both worlds. That was the promise they believed in—that America had room for all of who we are.

This is my American story. It is a story of dislocation and belonging, of silence and voice, of learning that home is not only a place you leave or arrive at, but something you carry and continually remake. It is a story shared by millions of immigrants and children of immigrants who are asked, again and again, to choose between their histories and their futures.

We are told to pick one thing at a time: one country, one culture, one loyalty. But our country was built from the refusal of that choice. The American experiment was founded on the premise that its citizens could hold multiple identities at once, bound not by sameness of origin or faith or skin color or even language, but by shared civic ideals. It is the truest form of belonging this country has ever known.

Whiplash

From Refugee to “White on Paper”—My Lebanese American Story

Charles Marina is a Lebanese-American actor and storyteller known for his sharp wit, expressive performances, and cross-cultural humor. Blending Middle Eastern roots with American experiences, he brings authenticity and comedic insight to every role, exploring identity, absurdity, and human connection through film, theater, and sketch comedy.

Charles Marina

In 2006, I came to Los Angeles from Lebanon to attend a one-month workshop—or at least that’s what I thought. Halfway into the workshop, war broke out in Lebanon, and I was suddenly stuck in the United States. Overnight, I went from being a student-tourist to a refugee.

It wasn’t my first time being displaced.

In Lebanon, I had already lost three homes and moved several times during the civil war. But this time, it wasn’t just another move; it was a complete uprooting of who I thought I was and where I belonged.

Within a month of being in Los Angeles, I found an American acting agent who sponsored me. To my surprise, she actually knew about Lebanon—not only could she point it out on a map, but she had visited three times and even studied the Lebanese dialect at the American University of Beirut. To me, that felt like a good omen. With ten years of acting experience back home, including a stint on the Lebanese version of Saturday Night Live, I thought breaking into Hollywood might be straightforward, I would fit right in.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The biggest shock wasn’t rejection—it was transformation. Back home, I was white. But in America, almost overnight, I became brown. It’s identity whiplash.

What? How? When?

These questions consumed me. My accent didn’t help: English, fluent but flavored with French and Italian, marked me as “foreign.” In Lebanon, people judged you by your religion. In the U.S., I learned what it meant to be judged by race.

Because of my unusual accent and ambiguous features, people didn’t know what to make of me. I looked “white-ish,” but the moment I spoke, their uncertainty grew. Then came the guessing game, as if I were some puzzle they had to solve.

One day, while waiting in line, I struck up a conversation with an older man. When he asked my name, I said “Charles.” His face twisted in confusion. “Carlos? Mexican?”
No.
“Carlo, Italiano? Si?”
Still no.
I explained it was French, “Sharle.”

He smiled.
“Ah, French, I love France.”
To save time, I finally said, “I’m Lebanese.”
“Oh Lebanese? So, what’s your REAL Arabic name—Mohammad?”

Mind you, we were standing in line to enter a church, and he still called me Mohammad.

In less than five minutes, I had gone through five different identities.

At first, I fought it. I did my best to “pass.” I drank white wine, did yoga and Pilates, bubbled my emotions like a good WASP. I spent thousands of dollars on accent reduction classes.

But at some point, I stopped fighting. I gave up trying to be white and accepted my new reality: I was brown. Down to be brown. Even if that meant playing the clown.

And then came the biggest irony.

When I applied for U.S. citizenship, I discovered that on paper, Lebanese are classified as white. So now, not only was I juggling an identity crisis—Am I American? Am I Lebanese?

I was having a racial crisis. Am I white? Am I brown? What box do I check?

I’m clearly not African American. I’m not Asian…well, actually, Lebanon is in Asia, so technically I’m Asian. But not Asian enough to be in the same box as Margaret Cho or George Takei.

I wanted to know why Lebanese people are considered white on paper but brown in society. Turns out it all started in California in 1909 with a Lebanese policeman named George Shishim. George arrested the son of a fancy lawyer for disturbing the peace in Venice, California. The man argued that George had no right to arrest him because he wasn’t—couldn’t be—an American citizen. Why? Because he was born in Lebanon, which technically made him “Chinese-Mongolian.”

George took the case to court. Lawyers brought out maps, history, and race theories to prove Lebanese and Syrians were Caucasian.

But the real mic-drop moment came from George himself:
“If I am Mongolian, then so was Jesus, because we came from the same land.”

Case closed. George won. And just like that, I became “white.” Thank you, Jesus! Literally!

Lebanese history in America is full of these contradictions. The first big wave came in the late 1800s. They arrived in the Jim Crow South, where being foreign was almost as bad as being Black. Back in those days, you didn’t want to be foreign, Catholic, or Black—and Lebanese people checked two of those boxes. Newspapers called Lebanese filthy, congressmen called them cursed, “the spawn of the Phoenician curse.” And in 1929, Nou’la Romey was lynched in Florida for being Lebanese and Catholic.

The community fought back. Leaders defended their honor in newspapers. Then came another big case: George Dow, from Batroun, Lebanon. In 1913, his citizenship was denied because he wasn’t a “free white person.” After a long appeal, the courts finally ruled Lebanese were officially white under U.S. law.

That legal whitening gave us rights, but it didn’t erase prejudice. On paper, we were white. In daily life, we were “not quite.”

And the paradox remains today. The U.S. Census still lumps Arabs into the white category, which means when it comes to health, data, and funding, we’re invisible. Too brown to be white, too white to be brown.

It’s hard to live with duality. Sometimes I feel like a hypocrite. I say one thing in front of my white friends and another in front of my brown friends. Sometimes I think I’m losing my essence.

But over time, I realized this duality isn’t unique to me. It’s part of every immigrant story. It’s the whiplash we carry—back and forth between who we are on paper, who we are in society, and who we are in spirit. Lebanese immigrants have been juggling the same contradictions for over a century.

So, what’s the solution?

Stop playing the category game. Don’t obsess over white, brown, or Mongolian Jesus. See beyond that. Every immigrant has their whiplash. The important thing is not to lose your essence.

At the end of the day, identity is contradictions.

On paper, I’m white. In society, I’m brown. In spirit, I’m Lebanese-American.

And somehow, all of it is true.

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