THE FRIDAY PIC is an installation shot from “Amerika,” the wonderful new projection by Javier Téllez at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances, a two-year-old space in Greenwich Village in New York.

In today’s New York Times, I published a long feature explaining the genesis of the piece, for which Téllez hired eight recent migrants from Venezuela to collaborate with him on a Charlie Chaplin-inspired film, as both its scriptwriters and its actors.

Writing the piece, I realized that a lot of my own ancestors, although always described as “immigrants,” were really more like today’s asylum-seekers. In the mid-1920s, my paternal grandfather’s family were fleeing the first stages of Stalin’s oppressions, after barely surviving decades of pogroms. They barely squeaked-in before immigration to the U.S. got shut down by the Johnson-Reed Act.

Somehow, I’m glad they didn’t have to specify the horrors they were fleeing, the way today’s migrants are forced to do. They could just sail into a new nation, and start a new life.

They didn’t need a Téllez quite as badly as we do today. (Although they had Chaplin, in “The Immigrant” — which my parents used to screen for us many times a year, in Super-8.)