A Happy Childhood
I was born in 1928 on the second day of the Jewish holiday Shavuot, which fell that year on May 26. Jews often had names in more than one language; my parents named me Leibel, but everyone called me Arieh. Leibel is Yiddish for lion, and Arieh is lion in Hebrew. Later in life, my name appeared on documents as Aharon, but to this day, the people from my hometown call me Arieh. My father, Baruch (Baruch in Yiddish and Hebrew, Boris in Polish) was a handsome young man, a modern thinker for those days and a successful businessman who had a thriving lumber mill and granary. 1 My mother, Gittel (Gittel in Yiddish, Genia in Polish) used to tell me that when my father came by on horseback, all the girls would flirt with him. When she met my father, my mother was already a graduate of a two-year Russian college in a town called Gorodnisa, where she was born and grew up. This was an unusually distin- guished education for a woman. She was an intellectual, sophisti- cated lady and a skilled photographer who ran her own studio. My parents married in 1924 when she was about twenty years old and my father was twenty-seven. My father promised my mother that she could continue to work in her profession, though the family did not need her income, and she always maintained her photography studio. She was a progressive career woman, both a housewife and a photographer. My father was the eldest of five children. To my sorrow, I did not know my paternal grandparents because they had already emigrat- ed to the United States by the time I was born. Most of my father’s family had left Poland, his parents in 1918 and his three younger
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