2011

Biographical

My four grandparents all immigrated as young adults to the United States from Eastern European Jewish towns and villages early in the twentieth century. This was a generation of poor but optimistic intellectuals, who expected that the newly rationalist world would use education and creativity to leave behind boundaries, borders, and religion to build a…

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Biographical

My grandfathers were both immigrants to the US, one from Estonia, then part of the Russian empire, and the other from England. The Estonian, William Morris Leiserson, was Jewish. He fled Estonia in 1890 at the age of seven, through a forest in the dark of night, with his mother and two brothers. The family…

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