I went into the army shortly after we moved in Brooklyn from a small apartment on the corner of Thirty-Sixth Street and Flatbush Avenue to a more spacious house on Fifty-Ninth Street off King’s Highway and Remsen Avenue. This move accommodated my sister’s family who had recently emigrated from Israel to live with us. When I left the United States Army and my military pay ceased, and with my mother now a widow, I needed to find employment. I took my time looking for a job after mustering out from active duty in the early days of summer 1954. I felt unsettled and took aptitude tests offered by B’nai B’rith to identify paths to my future. These tests showed a distinct and significant predilection to music, although I never studied or played any instruments. I knew absolutely nothing about music except that I loved listening to it, especially symphonies, chamber music, and operas.
With the summer of 1954 approaching, my mother had the idea to manage a small grocery concession in a bungalow colony in Ellenville, New York, in the heart of the Catskills. My sister Anna rented a bungalow nearby for several weeks with daughter Evelyn, and Ada, Anna’s husband, would drive up from Brooklyn to visit on weekends. Thus, I became a grocer concessionaire by default and would go out to the local farmers’ market to purchase crates of perishables, mainly fruits, that we would sell in the little shop. I became a small businessman! I gained certain insight in shopping for the home, sufficient to motivate me to shun that type of employment in the future. Despite my two years in the army, I felt no angst about my return to civilian life and felt fairly secure about wanting to go back to chemistry.
I had been totally remote from chemistry during my two years in the army, except for the Christmas drinks we formulated in the hospital pharmacy, but then I applied for a position as a chemist with the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Thus, late in 1954, I was interviewed for a position as analytical chemist in the hot labs of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Congress established the US Atomic Energy Commission after World War II to foster and control the peacetime development of atomic science and technology. I was tested on my knowledge of the chemistry of various elements in the periodic table and I did surprisingly well; I remembered enough radiochemistry that I studied in my senior year. I was hired and learned new wet chemical and instrumental techniques for performing the analysis of uranium, bismuth, and several other metals from the liquid sodium reactor.
Several weeks later, I faced my maker closer than I ever wished. I was returning from a drive into Patchogue, the nearest metropolis for shops and entertainment in the center of Long Island, and as I was getting closer to the barracks of the labs, I accelerated on a snow-wet straightaway I had presumed relatively safe. Suddenly, I found myself skidding off the road through a white log-fenced yard. A log crashed in through the windshield finding a spot in the passenger seat right next to me, with the car ending up yards past the entrance of a wooded area wedged between two big trees. My exit through either of the two front doors was blocked because of those trees, so I crawled onto the back seat, out the rear right door and stumbled out onto the road. Traffic was light, but after a long while, a car stopped to assist and gave me a lift to the Brookhaven health unit where the doctor gave me a double shot of whiskey to allay my anguish and regain my composure after swabbing the few superficial cuts and scratches I had suffered. He then sent me home, fortunately safe and sound. Home meant the old army wooden barracks that were the billets of Camp Upton during the war. These were converted into single rooms modestly furnished, surprisingly comfortable, with a cot, table, chairs, clothing closet, dresser, and an electric table-top hot plate cooker. A tow truck was called to retrieve my car. It was repaired only to the extent that it could legally move and was operable on the road.
After several months at Brookhaven, I felt a need to further pursue my education, but as there were no appropriate educational facilities nearby, I resigned my position, moved back to Brooklyn, and enrolled in a master’s program at Brooklyn College.
The early 50s was also when my mother was advised by friends that like many other World War II refugees, she ought to sue the German government for miscellaneous damages. She filed a claim with a highly recommended attorney in Trier, a German Jew who survived the war and specialized in such cases. Actually, I completed the questionnaire on behalf of my mother and composed a brief history of about six pages of the family’s plight. To our great surprise, she also had to show proof that she was Jewish. My mother spoke only Russian and Yiddish fluently but could read and write only in Russian, so a local rabbi provided her with a certificate proving that she was Jewish. All the documents were assembled, registered, and mailed to the attorney in Trier and then we waited. Several months later, we were advised that our attorney had died and we had to seek other representation. I phoned my Brooklyn College friend Nathan, another survivor from Belgium, who practiced real estate law but who had some experience with similar claims with his own family and was willing to take the case over. Unfortunately, he also died relatively young, leaving the claim in limbo. Years after my mother passed, I filed a claim on behalf of my siblings and myself against Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland recalling that my father was covering the Zionist Convention and then became stranded in Geneva when the war began.
The claim filed by Nathan died with him. The claim that I filed was eventually resolved in our favor, after many years, through the German claim department.
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