About a year into the pandemic, I became a volunteer tutor, helping older immigrants from the former Soviet Union study for their citizenship test. After the turmoil of the pandemic and personal upheavals, here finally was something I was prepared for. I used to be a teacher, and I took that same exam as an 18-year-old—coming dangerously close to flunking on account of forgetting the first name of Francis Scott Key, the man who penned the National Anthem. This volunteer organization had helped my family when we arrived in America three decades earlier, nearly penniless, and our lives' possessions crammed...