With Niche Media's national account director Eden Williams and oenophile and contributor Todd Goergen at the NYC Food & Wine Festival. BELOW With Gigi Mortimer and Mark Gilbertson at a Museum of the City of New York event sponsored by J. Mendel.

"I" Is for International

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER I asked my dad why our family had never moved from the Upper East Side neighborhood where he and my mom had raised me, even though he'd come from Germany and had lived in more than 13 different cities, and my mother had come from Brazil.

His simple answer was rooted in what he valued: "Home."

My father's father died during World War II while serving as Germany's consul general in Sweden. He'd even been a delegate to the Versailles League of Nations talks after World War I. (In an interesting twist of fate, my mother's uncle was Brazil's ambassador to England; he and his uncle, who was president of Brazil, actually met my father's father at those meetings at Versailles.)

My father's family home had been leveled during the bombings of Berlin, so my grandmother and her four young children moved to Potsdam. That house was then confiscated, so they headed back to Berlin. Meanwhile, the war ended and a man named Wolfgang Greeven - who'd been assigned to rebuild the European energy and oil industry and was frequently in Berlin - fell in love with my grandmother. He wanted to take the family to Hamburg, but her part of Berlin was under occupation by the Russians, who'd closed its borders to keep Germans from fleeing. So Wolfgang smuggled my Oma out of Berlin wearing a WAC (Women's Army Corps) uniform, in a car with my little Aunt Veronica, who was stricken with typhoid fever, hiding under a blanket in the back. Wolfgang soon became director of Standard Oil's Esso (now Exxon). The family went on to live in many cities that as a kid I learned to find on a globe in our den: Munich, Malmo, Estoril.

Growing up, I'd listen to my dad's stories - like the time President Truman stayed in the family's home while he attended the Potsdam Conference with Stalin and Churchill, which divided up Europe after the war. Dinner conversations with my family could've been excerpts from a foreign affairs volume. My father, who came here in 1947 to attend Columbia Law School, has always agreed with Einstein that "Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind." He believed that it will gradually disappear because there are so many more important issues - war, overpopulation, pollution (and now, global warming and the threat of economic collapse) - that face everyone on the planet. With that in mind, my parents even took my sister and me along on international trips, so that by college age we'd been exposed to a dozen countries, learned multiple languages, and made many foreign friends.

And I thought this was all normal for an American family.

So, why would such a citizen of the world pick New York City to settle down in? I asked. "Because it's the whole world right here," he said.

I was lucky enough to grow up with parents who taught us that we should celebrate - rather than fear - the world, and to marry into a family that believes the same. Not long ago my father-in-law, former Governor Mario Cuomo, showed me an essay he was writing for a children's book describing America as a mosaic - not a bland, homogenized melting pot - of international colors and flavors ("City View: M is for Mosaico"). And of course, our home, my father's adopted home - New York City - is the full, harmonized expression of that truth.

So enjoy this Thanksgiving cornucopia of international offerings in this, our first International Issue, ranging from a "worldly" photo shoot and interview with uberartist Beyoncé ("World at Her Feet") to a rundown of NYC's most exciting ethnic neighborhoods ("Cracking the Code: International City"), and remember:

Provincialism is out; internationalism is in.

CRISTINA GREEVEN CUOMO

EDITOR IN CHIEF