I was born almost 78 years ago in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey. And I was raised in Newark and I stayed there until I went up to college. My mother, whose name was Bess, was a homemaker as they used to say in those days. She was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, of immigrant parents. My grandparents on both sides were immigrants. My mother's parents came from the region of Kiev in Russia [sic], beyond that I don't know anything. My father's parents were from... Austria-Hungary, the province of Galicia, a town called Koslov, which is about 25 miles or so from what was then Lemberg, is now Lviv.

My grandparents spoke Yiddish, of course. I didn't understand them so there was a… a strange distance between… between the kids of my generation and those immigrant grandparents, in that you felt all their feeling for you but you didn't know what they were saying, and so it increased the pathos really of the relationship because the feeling was strong. And my parents were American born as I've said. My father was born in Newark right next to Elizabeth and he was born 1901, my mother was born 1904. My father was educated only to the 8^th grade, my mother went to high school. In my father's day in Newark, the statistics are shocking, and that is that two out of three immigrant children – the children of immigrants – didn't go beyond the 8^th grade, two out of three. Where did they do? They went to the factory.