On July 3^rd, 2021, my father, Joseph Eisenstadt, would have turned one hundred years old.   He hasn’t been with us for over twenty years. He was a good dad. I am proud to have been his son. He did not have a terribly easy life, a life whose early years were dominated by the discontinuities between Jewish life in Eastern Europe and in the United States. I don’t know if it is quite a myth, but there is a widespread belief that when Eastern European Jews came to the United States, the transition was relatively easy. There are exceptions, and the Eisenstadts were exceptions. Dad was born in Manhattan, but his parents were newcomers to America, arriving around 1920. My dad’s older brother, Sol, was born a few years before in Slutsk in Belarus. His was also a hard life. He told the story, which I think in some ways epitomized his somewhat unhappy life, that when leaving from Slutsk to America in an ox-cart, when he was an infant, he fell out of the cart, and no one noticed that he wasn’t there until my grandparents had traveled a verst or so, and then they went back to retrieve him, finding him lying in the road.

My grandparents also did not have a happy life. The precise story of what happened to their marriage is not clear, but within a few years of their arrival in New York, Ralph and Paula Eisenstadt divorced. Paula’s life is difficult to trace, but it seems that after the divorce, she had little or no contact with her children, was institutionalized, and died, alone, sometime in the 1930s. I don’t know what caused my grandmother’s life to have been so broken, so interrupted, and so, it would seem, miserable, but there were many lives of Eastern European Jews, and very likely more women than men, who never really made the transition to life in the United States. As a historian, I should be interested in trying to fill in the details of this story, but something has always held me back from doing the research,   I guess there’s a part of me that feels that perhaps Paula deserves her privacy and I don’t want to know what happened. But this is cowardly, and Paula deserves better.

My father had a twin brother, Benjamin. (Joseph and Benjamin, get it?) And once Paula was no longer around, my grandfather, who by all accounts was a hard and difficult man—he died before I was born– felt he couldn’t take care of his children, and they spent most of their formative years in a variety of foster homes. Some of them, my father told us, were okay. Others were Dickensian; little to eat, terrible living conditions, and regular beatings. The impact this had on my father and uncle is hard to say, but there is this evidence from my uncle Ben. Both of them served in the Army in World War II, and both of them served in the occupation government in Germany after the war. (If you couldn’t speak German, the army figured that Yiddish was close enough.) Ben so much liked the authority that came with being the army that he decided to stay in Germany after the war. He married a German woman, and stayed in Germany for the rest of his life. Germany was not, needless to say, in 1946, a country that a lot of Jews were moving to. But he had hated his life in New York City so much. More than anything else, he wanted to put as much distance between himself and New York as possible.

So far, this has been a pretty depressing story. But I tell it for two reasons. First as bad as life was for Ralph, Paula, Sol, Ben, and Joe in America, if they had stayed in Europe, their lives would be immeasurably worse. I don’t know how they would have fared in the Soviet Union. But of course, the odds of them surviving the war in Nazi-occupied Belarus would have been slim. So if America was not the golden land for the Eisenstadts, it was a place of refuge. I would not have been born if my parents had stayed in Europe. But of course only a few years the United States Congress decided that there were too many Jews in the country, that they were lazy, dirty, unassimilable, shut the door, and in the hour of the greatest need of the Jewish people in their long history, kept it shut.   So with the Fourth of July in mind, all I can say is both “God Bless America” and “God Damn America.”

And the other point is that given how difficult my father’s life had been before the war, how normal it was afterwards. He returned to New York, and eventually met and married my mother, Betty, nee Cooperstein. And he was accepted into her large family. (My last name aside, I have always thought of myself as more a Cooperstein than an Eisenstadt.) Things weren’t totally normal, needless to say. My mother and father were both active in the Communist Party—that’s how they met—and by their accounts, the party dominated their lives and their social circles, until, like most American communists, they left after the 20^th Party Congress, in 1956. And though I grew up in a home with records by the Weavers, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Soviet classical music, and novels by Howard Fast, by the time I came of age—I was born in 1954—there was nothing dogmatic about my parents, and they rarely spoke of Communism. They did often speak of the civil rights movement, the movement against nuclear weapons, and of their opposition to the war in Vietnam. (They took us to demonstrations against the war as early as 1964.) If, like many of their generation, they were fooled by the promise of the Soviet Union, their politics, otherwise, was great. They encouraged us to read, to think for ourselves, and to lead our own lives. And to love America, but not uncritically.

My dad was always interested in art, and won an award in high school for his art. He loved going with us to art museums. I don’t know how many times he took us to see Picasso’s Guernica, during the years the painting was in New York City, explaining the details to us. He did some painting and drawing of his own, though he primarily worked as a commercial artist, preparing advertising copy, which, in those pre-computer days, meant hours spent with an exacto-knife, books of fonts, rulers, erasers, and glue. In my mind’s eye, I often see his very neat handwriting. He worked in small firms, which I guess was fairly normal, but I have always wondered about the impact the McCarthy inquisition might have had on his career. It was not a particularly well-paying profession.

Dad was a quiet man, not too demonstrative, someone who enjoyed life with his wife and his three sons. I don’t have a lot of anecdotes. The only image of him I have at hand is my Bar Mitzvah picture. My parents were a happy couple. Other than Eric, the grinning urchin, Mom, Dad, and my brother Freddy are gone. After my Dad’s early years, I think what he craved above all was stability, and in some ways I don’t think he ever quite believed his good fortune. If I spent too many years in my adolescence rebelling against him, I am not sure why, and I apologize, dad. I hope I have lived up to your expectations. I have tried to live a life as decent and as respectful to others as yours. And happy birthday.