Like the fabled city into which the narrator is born, Cal is a phoenix: He’s born twice. Detroit becomes a beacon for the immigrant family; it’s defined as much against its home country as it is by it. Even in telling the city’s history, the narrator invokes its uniqueness: “Detroit was always made of wheels” (79). These spokes become important in light of the circular nature of the narrator’s story: He’ll return, a son who looks like his grandfather Lefty, a son who started as a daughter named after a Greek Muse. As Cal puts it, “What’s the reason for studying history? To understand the present or avoid it?” (80). Detroit symbolizes both impulses: Its foundations, which the narrator compares to Paris and Rome, resonate with the long arc of history. However, it’s also a modern new-world city, established on “stolen Indian land” (79) to fuel the engine of American ingenuity.

The city’s motto (in Latin, Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus) expresses what the Stephanides family, and especially Cal, come to recognize as integral to survival. In its English translation, “We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes” (80). This image, evoking the phoenix, suggests reinvention and is significant not only to the story of Lefty and Desdemona’s journey from their home, which burned during the war, but also to the story of immigration itself and to Cal in particular.