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Few wanted to engage with them, but some people tried to bridge that divide. One who tried, perhaps more persistently than anyone else, was a local librarian, a Long Island native with an ear for languages and a stubborn and particular love for Spanish.

CHAPTER 3
    WELCOME TO PATCHOGUE
    In 1997 Jean Kaleda became a reference librarian in the Patchogue-Medford Library. At thirty-eight she had finally found her dream job in a library that served a vast and diverse population in Suffolk County. Practically from childhood, Kaleda had trained precisely for this career.
    Kaleda was born and raised in Hicksville, a hamlet within the town of Oyster Bay, Nassau County, which became a bustling New York City suburb during the construction boom years after World War II. Her father, who was from Brooklyn, had two jobs: providing customer service for the then-thriving Eastern Airlines and cleaning offices at night. Her mother, who had been a flight attendant, stayed home after her first child was born. The couple had five children in seven years. Jean, their second-born, was the oldest of three girls.
    Growing up in a boisterous house and sharing a room with her sisters, Kaleda found her refuge in literature. She would spend hours in bed reading, mostly British mysteries. Her first job, when she was twelve, was delivering newspapers. Kaleda would peekat the headlines before throwing the bundles on her neighbors’ manicured front lawns. Though her paternal grandparents had been born in Lithuania and her mother’s father in Sicily, only English was spoken at home. Her ancestors, Kaleda understood, had wanted to assimilate quickly, put their unhappy memories behind them, and restart their lives in a new country.
    At home Kaleda’s parents stressed a sense of fairness, respect, and hard work. The “golden rule” was a teaching tool. Even as a child, the simple idea of treating others as she would like to be treated herself resonated with her. In ninth grade, the curriculum of the Catholic school she attended dictated that students take a foreign language, and she chose Spanish. Kaleda then studied English at Towson University in Maryland, and in the fall of 1979, her junior year of college, she decided on a whim to go to Spain. It was there, in the narrow streets and smoky bars of downtown Madrid, where Kaleda fell in love not only with the language but also with the bohemian culture of a country that felt electric and giddy with possibilities. General Francisco Franco, the strongman who had ruled Spain for thirty-six years, had died four years earlier, and Spain had transitioned to a democracy with a new constitution.
    Kaleda’s political sense heightened in Madrid, where she followed the Spanish media coverage regarding the fifty-two Americans taken hostage in Iran that year, and she was surprised and saddened to see that some Spaniards found joy in the suffering of Americans. She thought she understood the reasons for it. She remembered as a child reading the daily news coverage of the Vietnam War, with the photos of dead children and soldiers in caskets. If that’s the way the war had played in America’s living rooms, she could only imagine what the world had seen and how that had influenced how other countries viewed Americans.
    Upon graduation, with a major in Spanish and a minor in English, Kaleda stayed in Maryland, first working as a secretary in an accounting firm, and then for three years as a translatorfrom Spanish to English for the Defense Department. When her father became ill with emphysema, Kaleda moved back home and switched careers, enrolling in St. John’s University, in Queens, for a master’s degree in library science.
    Her first job after graduation was as a librarian in an investment bank in New York City, where she had done an internship during graduate school. She worked there for three years, though the job never fulfilled her. She wanted to be a librarian to share knowledge, not to be a facilitator of data