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Luca Di Donna
Dr. Wallerstein, in speaking with Virginia Hunter (1994), you said that you had come to the United States with your father from Germany at a very young age. Can you tell me about that period in your life?
Robert S. Wallerstein
Well, I was a two-year-old when I came to America. I was born in 1921, during the terrible post-World War I period when inflation destroyed Germany economically for several years. My father was a resident in medicine at the Charité Krankenhaus in Berlin and had intended to stay in Germany, but his money was wiped out by the inflation. He had two possibilities for work: to go to Persia and become the court physician to the governor of one of the provinces (who was a patient of his in Germany) and his family, who were related to the Shah, which my father declined because of travel difficulties—a several-day camel ride from Tehran to the provincial capital, which my father deemed too arduous for his wife and one-year-old son—or to try to come to the United States.
He decided to answer a New York Times newspaper ad for a physician's assistant in gastroenterology; and once hired, he moved to New York. Within a year, he had saved enough money to bring me and my mother to join him. Of course, German was my language at that time (I was two years old), and I continued to speak German at home until I entered kindergarten.