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Tuesday Morning Epistles Welcome to "Tuesday Morning"—an
encouraging word for Christians everywhere, on whatever day
of the week it is read. "This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose." For nearly all of our history as a nation, America has extended a hand of friendship to people of all faiths and national backgrounds, welcoming them to our shores. Millions have sought that friendship in return. This week's "Tuesday Morning" is about one man who pursued freedom here more than a century ago. He came from a Polish Jewish family and emigrated to the United States in 1899. Three years later he became a naturalized citizen. His name was Szmuel Gelbfisz. In time he changed his name to Samuel Goldwyn. You will enjoy reading the story of an emigrant that became one of the early leaders in America's motion-picture industry. The essay is entitled, "Thoughts of a Naturalized American." Open it whenever you are ready, and prepare to be proud of the freedoms this Nation guarantees its citizens.
Tom Barnard
A Proud American __________________________________________________________________
Thoughts of a Naturalized American
n the three decades between 1920 and 1960 few motion-picture film producers enjoyed more success in their chosen careers than Samuel Goldwyn. He produced dozens of successful motion pictures during those years—some of which earned Oscar nominations as Best Pictures of the year. And in 1946 Goldwyn’s classic drama, The Best Years of Our Lives, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. That was the same year Goldwyn was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award—the industry’s most prestigious award for film production in the United States. Other recipients of the Thalberg Award include Walt Disney, Darryl F. Zanuck, Cecil B. DeMille, and David O. Selznick—all famous names in the film industry. Of the several dozen award recipients from 1938 to the present, most were citizens of the United States by birth. Samuel Goldwyn was not. Samuel Goldwyn was born Szmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw, Poland, to Polish Jewish parents, around 1879. As a boy of twelve he made his way to Birmingham, England, where he lived with relatives until he emigrated to the United States through Canada in 1899. He became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1902. Eventually he had his name Anglicized and legally changed to Samuel Goldwyn. Early in the twentieth century the young film industry was changing rapidly, and Goldwyn was in it from its earliest years. He helped establish several of the industry’s most recognized film studios and enjoyed the reputation of being gifted in filmmaking and discovering some of the best talent in the industry. This essay is not about the American Motion Picture Industry and the films it produces. This is about a man who desperately wanted to become an American citizen, and who paid the price to make it happen. As a boy of twelve, living in England, Goldwyn came across a quote by Benjamin Franklin that was in a “reader” from which he was studying English. Franklin’s quote included these words:
“…America, where people do not inquire of a stranger, Those words were to become the theme of Samuel Goldwyn’s life. Years later he wrote, “There has never been a day in my life since then that the eternal truth of that statement has not been borne into me.” In an essay he wrote that appeared in This Week magazine and later in Words to Live By, edited by William Nichols, Goldwyn said, “It is perhaps sentimentality to confess that on my first day in America, I literally kissed the welcoming earth of the land to which I had come. But it is a sentimentality of which I am not ashamed, for as long as I live I shall never cease to give thanks that there exists on the troubled globe one country where freedom and opportunity are denied to no man.” Is it too sentimental for us to pause and say or sing the words of the prayer that every American loves?
God Bless America, *Copyright renewed in 1966 and assigned to the Trustees of the God Bless America Fund (permission to use pending) |