Preface
All things having to do with Israel were a passion for my fa- ther and our family. I remember the tension leading up to the Six Day War, when I was ten, and our exuberance after Israel sur- vived this threat to its existence. My dad had many close friends in Israel, and he spoke to them on the phone and visited them, or they came to visit us. While I do not remember a lot of discus- sions about U.S. politics in our house, I do remember an intense focus on what was going on in Israel. My father would often talk about what a distinguished and re- spected man was his father, Baruch Golub, after whom I was named. He would describe in great detail his father’s businesses and his ac- tive support of the Tarbut School, the Zionist Jewish day school my father attended in Ludvipol, where he was raised. He told us with pride that my grandfather was one of the most prominent citizens of Ludvipol. Sometimes, we teased my father about being from the “aristocracy of Ludvipol,” caricaturing it as a primitive little town. Yet it left an impression on me when I heard two old women at a get-together of Ludvipol landtzmen refer to my father with respect as “Golub’s son.” More recently, my father was seated in a place of honor at a meeting of landtzmen that we attended in Israel. This intrigued me. My father was, and remains, a gifted storyteller. Somehow, whatever he described became interesting and exciting. This had two impacts. First, it made the world of Ludvipol, the shtetl he was born in, come alive for me. His reminiscences made other sto- ries, like Fiddler on the Roof , very meaningful, beyond the fact that he does an excellent rendition of Zero Mostel’s song, “If I Were a Rich Man.” His stories fascinated me and always made me want to know more. But they also brought it home that in some respects, my father was bom to a world of two centu- ries ago, a world very different from that of my contemporaries’ parents. Learning as much as I could about my father’s past became one of my major interests. My dad says he had trouble talking about his past, but I do not remember it that way. Perhaps he felt more
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