In 1971 I began an anthropological study of "Ethnicity and Aging," part of a larger project entitled "Social Contexts of Aging." Funded in part by the National Science Foundation it concentrated on a community of very old immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe, the focus of whose social life was the Israel Levin Senior Adult Center in Venice, California. Throughout my work there a singular and dominant theme was apparent: the invisibility of older people in today's society.

Among very old people, deprived of natural intergenerational continuity and unable to transmit their ethnic culture or personal histories to their progeny, the problem of social inattention is especially serious. It became clear to me working among these elders that they were intent on presenting themselves to the world, being noticed, interpreting the meaning of their history and culture to a wider outside world that would remember them after they had died, and possibly transmitting something of their lives to younger people. Many of their struggles were intractable, but their invisibility was not inevitable.