Miriam, an immigrant from Russia, decides to break her parents’ old-world tradition and goes to college against their wishes:

No, my parents did not want me to go to college at all. They felt that college was not necessary for a girl at all. A girl was going to get married and have kids, and so on, and if I hadn’t lived in New York City, and been able to go to a City University, I would never have been able to go to college, because they didn’t have the money, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have spent it. They wouldn’t have thought it was important.

Miriam talk about her father, a man with modest human capital, who made a living as a shoemaker:

My father was a shoemaker. He was in an old-fashioned European intern…no not an intern…he was an apprentice when he was 11 to a master shoemaker, and he learned his trade from them, you know. And he was the kind of shoemaker that…he could make a shoe and just say, ‘put your foot on a piece of paper,’ he’d draw it, and the next thing you know, you had shoes. I mean, he could make a shoe from beginning to end. And when we came here, there weren’t too many jobs in shoemakers, so he worked as a leather cutter in the pocketbook industry. In the expense of pocketbooks, you have to know how to cut the leather properly so that it fits together and looks right, and there are no damages and so on, so of course he was very knowledgeable about leather, so that’s what he did.