Flight and Refuge: Reminiscences of a Motley Youth

Flight and Refuge. Reminiscences of A Motley Youth by Josef Eisinger After a calm, middle-class childhood, the author escapes, at fifteen, from Nazi-occupied Vienna to Britain. He finds work as a farm 'lad' in Yorkshire, and then, as a dish washer in a Brighton hotel. Following the fall of France, he is interned as an 'enemy alien' and is transported to Canada. Confined in a series of internment camps, he acquires new skills as lumberjack and carpenter, and is also able to resume his interrupted education thanks to an informal school run by fellow inmates, like himself, mostly Jewish refugees. Thanks to a benevolent sponsor he is released from internment and studies mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto. He joins the Canadian Army, and completes his undergraduate studies after the war ends. Wishing to visit his parents – they had found refuge in Palestine following a harrowing escape from Vienna – he joins the crew of a freighter bound for the Mediterranean. Following his return, he wins a gradute fellowship at MIT and obtain his PhD for elucidating the structure of atomic nuclei. He enters a richly varied research career in physics, molecular biology, and the history of science, marries and settles down. This is a very personal, generally up-beat account of one of the lucky ones – the refugees from Nazi persecution – and his attempts to find his way in a strange new environment. Along the way, the reader also learns about traditional methods of farming and prospecting for gold, as well, as gain new insights into the daily lives of soldiers and of merchant seamen. Four appendices deal with the authors' roots, a history of Moravian Jews, his parents' escape route, and his life in science. * * * Josef Eisinger, professor emeritus at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, is the author of more than 150 articles in scientific journals. His recent books, Einstein on the Road and Einstein at Home were published by Prometheus Books (2011, 2016).