4. My Life into Psychoanalysis

I was born in Berlin on January 28, 1921. My father, the descendent of a line of rabbinic scholars in Prague, came to Germany from Vienna at the beginning of World War I, leaving behind an unhappy, arranged first marriage and the beginning of a rabbinical career in order to seek out a new life as a student of medicine at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Universitat in Berlin. My mother came to Berlin from Galicia, part of Russian-occupied Poland, fleeing before the advancing Tsarist Russian army into the welcoming safety of Germany, also in the earliest days of the first world war. They met and were married in 1919 when my father was in his medical residency training at the Charite Krankenhaus in Berlin, within the defeated, war-ravaged, inflation-ridden, postwar Weimar Republic.

The postwar inflation destroyed the value of money and my father's carefully guarded savings, and this ended his residency training and drove my family from Germany. According to the story I was told, my father had two choices. One was to follow up on the favorable answer he had received to a letter he had written in response to a newspaper ad, to come to America, to New York City, and enter as an assistant into the medical practice of a Manhattan gastroenterologist. The other, by far more glamorous, was to follow the blandishments of a wealthy patient in his hospital, a foreign potentate, member of the Persian royal family, and the governor of one of that nation's provinces. The position would be that of court physician in the provincial capital. What apparently dissuaded my father, and led him to opt for the more conventional life of a New York doctor, was that the journey to the new home in Persia would have involved a train ride of several days from Berlin to Teheran, and then several more days by camel over wilderness roads to the provincial capital. This he felt to be too difficult and risky for my mother and me, and so when I was one year old, he left for New York, his money totally dep