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As she transformed the drawing into a painting, Kahlo added visual images that were inspired by Isaac Berliner's book of Yiddish poems, City of Palaces, which Diego Rivera was illustrating in 1936. Berliner's opening poem is devoted to the immigrant experience. Each stanza begins with the line "On this side of the sea," stressing the division between the land and the sea. The final stanza culminates in an evocative symbol: "On this side of the sea, My tree trunk is already deeply rooted in the land." Kahlo depicts her own leg as a tree that is deeply rooted in her Mexican home. Her image of an extraordinary womblike cactus flower, fertilized by wind-carried seeds, is based on the introduction to Berliner's book by the Yiddish writer M. Rosenberg:
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