NEXT STORY
How my mother got her man
RELATED STORIES
NEXT STORY
How my mother got her man
RELATED STORIES
Views | Duration | ||
---|---|---|---|
1. My father: The best fed person in his family | 756 | 01:24 | |
2. How my mother got her man | 478 | 01:07 | |
3. 'I had no idea if I was smart or not' | 1 | 565 | 01:40 |
4. Anti-Semitism in the USA | 587 | 01:08 | |
5. Moving to the Golden Ghetto | 423 | 01:00 | |
6. 'Public schools were dangerous' | 416 | 01:16 | |
7. Getting into sport | 338 | 00:45 | |
8. My interest in writing | 355 | 01:58 | |
9. No interest at all in maths or physics | 582 | 00:49 | |
10. My IQ | 1 | 915 | 01:19 |
Well, I was born in Rochester, New York. That's a moderate-sized town in upstate New York, a prosperous town which has… had at that time industries like Eastman Kodak, the Gleason Works and so on, a university.
On my father's side, they were Eastern European Jews. They came to the United States probably around the turn of the century, separately. I'm not quite sure how they met but my grandfather was a pedlar, basically, and he was peddling in eastern New York or western New York, and that's how he met my grandmother. They got married and my father was the eldest child.
According to him… I know they were poor... according to him, he got the best nutrition and everything, because they thought that if he could go to university and so on, he might bring all of them out of poverty. So he got his head up. He had two brothers. Now all three of them are dead.
Born in 1929, Jeremy Bernstein is an American physicist, educator and writer known for the clarity of his writing for the lay reader on the major issues of modern physics. After graduating from Harvard University, Bernstein worked at Harvard and at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. In 1962 he became an Associate Professor of Physics at New York University, and later a Professor of Physics at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, a position he continues to hold. He was also on the staff of The New Yorker magazine.
Title: My father: The best fed person in his family
Listeners: Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
Tags: Rochester, New York, Eastman Kodak, University of Rochester
Duration: 1 minute, 25 seconds
Date story recorded: 15th June 2011
Date story went live: 17 August 2011