I entered her house, where a typically transatlantic group had gathered: distant relatives with Irish roots, a neighbour who grew up in Munich and a Finnish lady. It dawned on me while we were having sponge cake with cream and jelly beans that all these first- or second-generation immigrants had become American by fate or by choice. America is a country of descendants of immigrants: people who felt, for whatever reason, the need to leave behind the places and people they had formerly known, and who had the luck, resolve and inner strength to do so. 

Assimilation poses moral questions — to society in general and, above all, to the individual. In public debates however, immigration is all about facts, laws, politics — the values, interests and expectations of individuals hardly matter.

Immigration in our time is a serious matter, leaving little room for sentimental stories. And yet, I wondered on my way back to the city — the train rattling through Queens, full of people chatting away in Chinese and Bengali — whether we shouldn't treat assimilation not as a taboo subject, but as an opportunity. Isn't that what my aunt's Americanisation stood for? Is the "new type of immigrant" really that different from the notion of a woman from the Eastern shore of the Baltic finding some kind of self-fulfilment in what must have looked like a promised land in the West? America still holds this place today.

In literary approaches to the subject, melancholy is often the main emotion an immigrant feels (two recent examples: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz and Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn). Relief, too. "The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories," wrote George Eliot. Often, it's not simply a question of leaving a country behind: it can be self-sought too, a departure to a different self. This was true for my great-aunt when she came to America as a young woman — and it is, I realised on my way back to Manhattan, for me too.