In this chapter, I portray the origins of my scholarship in the broken narratives—braidings of silence and story—recounted by my parents, both Holocaust survivors. The chapter portrays my early years in Israel where my parents sought refuge, my immigration with my family to the United States, and our further migration through several South Texas towns during my childhood and adolescence. My family’s culture and language—amalgams of Yiddish and Hebrew, English, and Spanish—and our efforts, with words and without, to identify ourselves infused my own struggles to craft a self I wanted to be, holding fast to my Jewish and Yiddish origins while making something new. I sought out education, and especially higher education, to help me achieve this. Doing so was far from straightforward and rarely easy. Ultimately, it required that I sculpt a new epistemic angle for the study of college teaching that could help college teachers support learners, like my one-time self, to identify themselves in the present day of their lives, but in ways that expressed and strengthened identities they had forged long before. I offer implications for the study of democracy, learning, and teaching as central to the future of our field.