Whenever my family comes to visit me in Chicago, I have to remember that and take them to the appropriate restaurants. Places that aren't too fancy or expensive, or have what they would consider "weird food" on the menu, or anyplace where I'd have to translate the menu for them.

This is my family. The problem is that I don't normally eat at any restaurants that fit that bill.

My mother has always been very defensive about class and education issues. Her mother left school in the fifth grade in order to take care of her siblings after her mother died of tuberculosis. Her father quit school to work on the railroad, partly because he didn't like school. He had no use for higher education, so my mother didn't go to college even though she had a scholarship.

My father's father was a self-made son of immigrants who valued education, and my dad went to college and his friends from college were from higher classes. Mother has always been convinced that anyone with a college degree is looking down on her. This is a woman who was the salutatorian of her class, editor of the yearbook and a champion debater. When I got to college, a lot of my fellow students were from worlds I couldn't imagine. Hell, Bunker Hunt's daughter was on my freshman hall.

You people should send your families to visit me! Once my parents came to visit, and we basically only went to diners all weekend. Some more upscale diners, but still. I did not plan it -- those are just the places I like and that were convenient!

NB: My parents like "weird" food.

I've mentioned this before, but there was very little class issues where I grew up. Both my parents came from farming families. My mom had two years of college, and my dad had none.

ION, the neighborhood that shrift and I live in was determined to be the most diverse in Chicago.

How diverse is your ’hood?

Uptown was No. 1 in a DePaul University study released this month that ranked Chicago's community areas based on their ethnic, income and age diversity.

Uptown and other traditionally diverse neighborhoods, including Rogers Park, Hyde Park and Edgewater, are remarkable because they've managed to thrive as diverse communities for decades, becoming neither slums nor totally gentrified as others have, said Mike Maly, chair of the Sociology Department at Roosevelt University.

From the print version of the article, Uptown is 39% white, 23% Hispanic, 22% black, 14% Asian and 16% other. 52% are low income, 37% are middle income and 16% high income.

I grew up pretty solidly middle class, although my father grew up poor and my mother came from a fairly genteel once-wealthy family. I hit college and ran into some really rich kids, many of whom could be unconsciously obnoxious about finances (i.e., YOU might be able to afford a special charge for something, but for the kids on scholarship who have to work at campus jobs, that's two weeks' pay). I've held jobs since I was 16, except for the summer after I turned 19 and was recovering from a dislocated kneecap.

Allyson, may I join the group in advising you to start looking for another job. It sounds like your boss has decided that you're not competent enough for the job, based on very little evidence. In situations like that (and I've been in them), it's just about impossible to change someone's mind. It's sad, given your history together, but do you need the emotional pain it's causing you?

And then the Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe, who mostly came over escaping pogroms

These were the first big waves of immigration to Israel (around the last 25 years or so of the 19th century), and they indeed came here due to those difficult conditions in their home lands. Basically, immigrating here or to the USA was, in a way, a flip of a coin.

Do you know the stories of Shalom Aleichem? His last book (he actually didn't complete it) was about immigrants like you described, from the little Eastern-European village to the land-of-all-dreams America.

My mom's family spoke Yiddish. My dad's family spoke German. When they got married, there were several comments from both sides of the family along the lines of, "Well, at least s/he's Jewish."

The grandmother of a very dear friend, whose family immigrated from Poland, doesn't speak to me (as in, outright ignoring me, for example, in the brit of my friend's son), because I'm Sepharadi, and, apparently, dragging down her family by befriending her grand-daughter.

I worked a few summers in high school, but that was mostly because my mom figured that we had to do SOMETHING during the summer, so if I wasn't at camp or some summer program, then I needed to find a job.

Basically, immigrating here or to the USA was, in a way, a flip of a coin.

I have a few distant cousins in Israel. That branch of the family started in Poland, then some moved to Israel, some to the US, and my grandfather's family went to Vienna, and then my grandfather came to the US.

My grandfather's family in Vienna was solidly upper-middle class. He was studying to be a lawyer. In Austria at the time, becoming a lawyer required passing a series of six exams. He passed five of them before the Nazis said that Jews couldn't go to the universities anymore. When he came to the US, he couldn't apply any of that training, since the US laws were so different from the Austrian laws, and he didn't have the time or money to go through law school again. He ended up going through a series of sales and manufacturing jobs -- for a while he worked sewing handbags, and for a while he sold cameras, and a whole bunch of other jobs like that. In the late seventies, he wrote to the Austrian government to see if they'd grant him his law degree, just because he wanted the piece of paper acknowledging his work. They told him that he had to pass that last exam first.

The grandmother of a very dear friend, whose family immigrated from Poland, doesn't speak to me (as in, outright ignoring me, for example, in the brit of my friend's son), because I'm Sepharadi, and, apparently, dragging down her family by befriending her grand-daughter.

Yikes! I assume your friend married a sufficiently upscale person.

I find it hard to pin down what class I used to be. I guess I get to define myself now, and even then...

My parents grew up poor, but my father went on to often be the most theoretically highly-ranked man in the room (an ambassadorial perk, to rank you with heads of state). My mother's pissed she achieved nothing more than tenure.

I make more than either of them ever did--perhaps more than both added together by the time my working days are done. But unless I marry into it, I can't see myself exceeding them in class.