The Saturday car ride between my paternal and maternal grandparents took approximately 15 minutes. In that span, I traveled from my Jamaican grandmother’s kitchen, fragrant with curry goat, fried porgy, and ginger beer, to my grandmère’s sitting parlor where Papa recounted childhood stories of hiding as an altar boy in Nazi-occupied France. Each weekend, I studied French, Jamaican Patois, and Hebrew from the backseat, eager to savor new morsels of my heritage.
Breakfasts of ackee and salt-fish were followed by dinners of brisket and beef bourguignon. I delighted in the cultural smorgasbord, never sensing that these identities were in conflict.
This sense of cohesion was shaped by stories told during those Saturday trips. As she ladled jerk chicken over rice and peas for my brother and me, my mother spoke of immigrating from Jamaica to the United States at 19, leaving behind the world she knew with little more than determination and faith that opportunity awaited her. My grandmother, Mireille Taub, shared fragments of a past she could not remember firsthand, stories passed down to her about fleeing Nazi-occupied Paris in 1940. She told me how her family boarded what her father later called “the last train out of Paris” as the city prepared to surrender, how the train was bombed en route, and how improbable acts of luck and kindness carried them, sometimes by foot, across France, into Spain and Portugal, and eventually to the United States. I listened as these narratives unfolded alongside one another, learning how survival, migration, and resilience shaped my family’s present.
In high school, I volunteered as a junior docent at the local Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center, sharing my grandparents’ experiences as hidden children in Nazi-occupied France. As an undergraduate, I pursued international affairs, writing about how frameworks like international law and transnational advocacy networks can uphold human rights, analyzing the impact of European colonial legacies on the legal codes of Caribbean states. Outside the classroom, I sought spaces to translate theory into practice. Founding and leading a diversity forum for the university’s largest pre-professional organization, I drew from my experiences as a young BIPOC woman to interview fashion industry leaders like André Leon Talley, Jasmine Tookes, and Leyna Bloom about racism and discrimination within the fashion industry.
In the spring before I began at Boston College Law School, I returned to the Holocaust center to moderate a discussion of J’ai Deux Amours, a film by my cousin Jeremy Rozen that examines the migration of African American artists to France after World War I in search of creative freedom. Preparing for that discussion, I became increasingly aware of how deeply legal frameworks shaped the stories I had grown up hearing, from immigration regimes and wartime refugee policies to racial discrimination and the absence of enforceable human rights protections.
Coming to law school, I sought to build a precise parlance for understanding how immigration law, international law, and civil rights structured both the historical moments depicted in the film and my own family’s journeys across borders. I wanted to develop the tools to translate history into advocacy and ensure that law serves as a means of protection, accountability, and possibility for those shaped by displacement and inequality. These stories of migration, survival, and resilience form the foundation of my decision to pursue a legal education at Boston College Law School. BC Law’s emphasis on service, ethical leadership, and commitment to the common good reflects the values embedded in my family’s history and is preparing me to honor the legacies entrusted to me through legal action grounded in empathy, rigor, and accountability.