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The house evokes memories of youth, gaiety, music, a warm circle of family and friends, and the deepening involvement in what was to be a career. Oh, how I loved the old place!

We were now comfortably well off. Still, I realized that it would ease my father's financial problems if I could find a job, as I had promised. I did, an unusual teaching position.

The Isaiah Hellmen Settlement House in South San Francisco was a charitable institution, organized to help the immigrants who flooded into the United States after the First World War. Those in the Settlement House were mainly White Russians and Jews. They had fled the Russian Revolution and crossed the Pacific from Valdivostok and Shanghai. In one respect, by their example, they taught me something I could not teach them. Americans take liberty for granted. We are born to it. In those days, a cecade before the dictatorships, few of us ever stopped to realize that it is a priceless gift. Here I cam in contact with people to