Page 55 - WhyAsInY
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Chapter Four
Who Are These People? (Part 2)
ALSO FROM LATE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Wherein the author attempts to tell what little more he knows of his father’s antecedents and describes his father as he experienced him when he was his child.
Born on September 8, 1911, Dad graduated from Boys High School in Brooklyn in 1928 and City College in Manhattan in 1932. He then studied medicine in Switzerland because it was nearly impossible
for a Jew to get into medical school in the United States at that time. Dad was originally going to study medicine in, I believe, Ireland and was on a ship heading there when he and other prospective medical students learned that New York State would no longer accept for licen- sure students who trained at a medical school in Ireland or in any of a number of other European countries. Thus, mid-voyage, he was com- pelled to apply to the University of Geneva’s Medical School, which was accredited in New York. Somehow, he was admitted. As a result, he spent the next four years studying medicine, a difficult enough subject to study in English, in a foreign language. Fortunately, my father’s French was reasonably proficient and only got better as time went by.
His notebooks are a wonder to behold.
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