Ira was a true mentor July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Testimonials , comments closedSue Susman, New York, NY
Dear Ruth [Gollobin-Basta],
Ira was a true mentor to me — encouraging me to go into the field of immigration law, and requiring — as a condition of his tutoring me — that I learn to eat fish and tofu at a particular Chinese restaurant every Tuesday evening. I learned from him legally, politically, culinarily, and otherwise. I may still have his book on the Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born.
You may have heard the tale that he told. While he was having dinner with me each Tuesday evening for many months, your mother Esther was telling him she had met a terrific young man at the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association — my husband Sekhar; so we “double-dated” a few times for dinner. In the years after he married Ruth, he seemed content with her. We met them for dinner once or twice as well and sat next to them at Guild dinners.
I was sorry to hear of Ruth’s death, but was devastated to hear of Ira’s. I had somehow assumed that with all of his running, swimming, and healthy diet, he would live forever. You have had a wonderful father, mother, and stepmother for a wonderfully long time. I hope Ira left this world peacefully.
Ruthie was the prettiest little girl you ever saw July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ruth, Testimonials , comments closedBea Kelvin, New York, NY
I knew Ruthie from the time she was four years old, when she was the prettiest little girl you ever saw. Her mother was my stepfather’s cousin and a very good friend of my mother’s — in fact, my mother sewed a dress for Ruthie’s first date, when she was 16.
We remained close even when she was out of the country, and when she came back she stayed in my apartment until she found a place of her own. From then on, we were close until she died.
Ruth and Ira had an interesting and very close relationship for all the years they were together, and they made each other very happy. I miss them terribly and will until I depart this earth.
Impossible to believe my 35-year-long conversation with Ruth is over! July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Ruth, Testimonials , comments closedJudith Mahoney Pasternak, New York, NY
Ruth
Impossible to believe my 35-year-long conversation with Ruth is over! I was part of her extended family — my mother, Bea Kelvin, is her step-cousin and, though not related by blood, was close to her from Ruth’s childhood on. Ruth was out of the country in my youth, but from the time she returned in the early ’70s, we talked often and about almost everything, although always returning, in the end, to politics. Her fierce, wide-ranging curiosity made those discussions different from conversations with anyone else.
Ira
A great advocate who spent sixty-plus years defending the rights of immigrants and radicals, Ira was also a warm and gentle man, a serious thinker, and a good friend and relative. My family is glad for the years we knew him.
We’ll miss both of them.
Ira Meant a Lot to Dino and Me July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Testimonials , comments closedClaire Hirsch, Los Angeles, CA
Dear Ruth [Gollobin-Basta],
You asked me about the background of my husband Dino’s and Ira’s friendship and I told you it would take too long to tell you when I was in New York. I want to tell you again how much it meant to me to stay in his apartment; to be surrounded by the marvelous library that was the background to all the thinking, writing, and teaching that he did!
Dino was an “armchair Marxist” and went to jail for having committed a capitalist crime in the export business which he had learned from his father in Italy. When he came home after having served eleven months of a “year and a day” sentence, he was confronted with deportation proceedings. It was then that he met your Dad because of a referral from a bail bondsman.
It was a lucky circumstance that he found Ira to defend him. They became friends soon (more like teacher and student in the beginning). They met every month or so in a restaurant in Greenwich Village and would talk. I soon joined them and at first was in awe at the level of their discussions!
Ira suggested to Dino that his condition in this country was not about to change, so he might as well get involved in trying to change things. He soon became active in his union and remained an activist until the day he died. Your mother Esther and I became close friends through our activity in the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association.
After we moved to California we continued to stay in touch, at first with visits to New York and then their final visit to L.A. when we drove them to Mexico to seek a cure for your mom’s cancer. We were happy to welcome him to Aspen, Colorado, where we spent several of the most wonderful hiking vacations together, first with him alone and then joined by his [second] wife Ruth.
We talked by phone often and he managed to set into perspective whatever was going on in the world at the moment until a few months ago. I shall miss him sorely but am happy to have benefited from his friendship and knowledge for so many years!
An Indefatigable Man July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Testimonials , comments closedRuth Misheloff, New York, NY
I met Ira in the early ‘80s, I think. His book, Dialectical Materialism, which he’d been working on for over a quarter-century at that point, was still in manuscript, but the end was in sight and he needed a copy editor to help prepare it for publication. He was a very good writer, fluent, strong, precise, supple, yet even the best manuscript needs an outside eye to vet clarity and continuity, catch inconsistencies and typos, query possible citation errors, and mark up headings for the designer. I took on the job happily, figuring not only to make some money but to learn a lot in the process. So I started on what became at least a two-year gig, reading line by line, making marginal notes or attaching post-its, and providing additional sheets of queries. When he returned the first batch of manuscript so I could check the changes, I discovered that while responding to my queries, he’d had fresh thoughts, incarnated as new sentences, new paragraphs, and whole new pages.
And that’s what happened with every batch of manuscript I returned to him. It came back to me not only with fixes for the things I’d marked but with elaborations, augmentations, amplifications. I’d comment or query about the new material, of course rereading the old in the process — and then the revised sheets would come back to me amplified yet again!
Ira’s partner in producing these endless new versions was his heroic daughter Ruth, who typed every blessed page, over and over. (Remember typing? On a typewriter? And carbons? White-out? Manual cutting and pasting? It’s sobering to recall what it took to produce a good and careful book in those days, even with a Selectric! If Ira had had access to a computer, the book might have turned out twice as long, if indeed he would have ever been able to stop….)
Even while realizing how painful it probably was for Ira to separate from a project in which he’d invested so much, eventually I couldn’t help chaffing him that he needed a 12-step program to kick his book addiction, and once I may have even conjured up the image of myself and his daughter Ruth as Chaplins on a Modern Times assembly line! He responded goodnaturedly, of course, but was undaunted, and the iterations continued. I began to wonder (silently) if he would experience the authorial version of post-partum depression when he finally turned the manuscript over to the printer.
Ira was an amazing, indefatigable, stalwart, intense, bright-spirited, and dedicated man, and a multi-tasker before the term was invented. One example that has stuck in my mind: when he used to go out running — yes, he did that, too, possibly till he was in his late 80s — he carried index cards with passages of poetry to memorize. Once he “had” the lines, they were his forever. No senior moments for him, at least to my knowledge. He used every second of his time in this world. I can hardly imagine him gone.
Vignettes of Ira, Characteristic of Ruth July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Ruth, Testimonials , comments closedFreda Birnbaum, New York, NY
Vignettes of Ira
Ira was a man of many quotations. He would sprinkle them through a conversation to light up a subject or clarify a point in a rather impressive way. I relished the way he dipped into his memory bank and came up with an apropos quote.
Sometimes Ira would take off on a subject about which he was passionate and go on and on and on, little tuned in to the capacity of his listener to grasp what he was expatiating upon or promulgating. It was all so clear to him, and I could be left behind befuddled in the intellectual dust clouds he had bestirred.
Ira and I talked every day in the last couple of months of Ruth’s life. When I asked Ira one evening how he was doing with sleeping, he said that if he had any trouble falling asleep he recited the Gettysburg Address to himself. Before he reached the end of it, he’d be asleep.
A Characteristic of Ruth
People talk at funerals about “a woman of valor.” I think of Ruth as “a woman of fervor.” She was fervent about what she didn’t like as well as what she did like. Often her warm excitement about a musician or a political commentary was contagious so I’d find myself wanting to hear the artist play or to read the brilliant analysis of the admired thinker. Her eagerness to share her experience was intense.
Remembering Ira Gollobin July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Testimonials , comments closedPeter A. Schey, Los Angeles, CA
President & Executive Director, Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law
[The following was distributed widely via Peter’s email list.]
Ira Gollobin, a renowned civil rights and immigration lawyer, who practiced law in New York City for over 70 years, acting as attorney in many high-profile immigration and extradition cases from the 1950s to the 1980s, passed away peacefully this morning in New York, following several days of hospitalization for a staph infection. He was 96 years old.
Ira served on the Board of Directors of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law for 25 years. He was a long-time active member of the National Lawyers Guild. He will be deeply missed by those who were honored to meet and learn from him along his 96-year life journey.
Ira wrote numerous periodical articles on immigration policy, dialectics, East Asia, and Marxist theory. He is the author of Dialectical Materialism: Its Laws, Categories, and Practice (1986), and Winds of Change: An Immigration Lawyer’s Perspective of Fifty Years (1987).
Ira’s epic book on dialectical materialism is a comprehensive review of Marxist philosophy, integrated into subjects ranging from workers to politics to human consciousness. For those interested in the relationship between history, philosophy, politics, consciousness, and the struggle for freedom, this is a book you want to read. If you use a highlighter, forget it. You’ll want to highlight the whole book.
Ira served as general counsel to the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born throughout the McCarthy period. During the Cold War witch-hunt to identify and deport immigrant “communist sympathizers,” Ira and the American Committee coordinated the legal defense of immigrant workers, labor leaders, authors, and others for their real or perceived communist beliefs or associations.
In 1980 Ira put together a team of lawyers including Ira Kurzban, Rick Swartz, and me to work on the Haitian Refugee Center v. Smith case. Under his guidance, and with the help of many others, we won a major class-wide injunction that blocked an “expedited deportation program” initiated by the INS headquarters to quickly deport over 5,000 Haitian refugees deemed a “threat” to South Florida. After a class-wide permanent injunction that we won was upheld in the Court of Appeals (Haitian Refugee Center v. Smith, 676 F.2d 1023 [1982]), the first Haitian adjustment act (which Ira and Rick helped draft and get enacted) granted all class members permanent resident status. Ira was the architect of this victory. In the last chapter of his dialectics book, a chapter on wisdom, Ira wrote:
Class society places its imprint on wisdom. The musings of the sage. . . and the guile of the rulers. . . have been acclaimed as wellsprings of wisdom, while the masses’ hard-earned experience and insights, gained in labor and class struggle amid a multitude of afflictions, have been denigrated by oppressors as responses, sometimes docile, sometimes violent, of beings little above the level of brutes. On the contrary, as regards the oppressed, those with the most practical experience are the wisest and most capable. All wisdom comes from the masses. . . . The wisdom of tens of millions of creators creates something incomparably higher than the greatest prediction of genius. (Quotations and citations omitted.)
Ira was a unique intellectual adventurer and a lawyer whose passion for justice was easily matched by his clients’ love and affection for him. We will miss him, and his guidance, very deeply. We will always treasure what he brought to each of us and to humanity’s struggle for emancipation.
My Uncle Ira July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Ruth, Testimonials , comments closedHara Ann Bouganim Alexandria, VA
(daughter of Beatrice Gollobin Lowenthal & Milton Lowenthal)
My uncle Ira taught me values, by example.
JUSTICE: One family story is of Ira at three in a corner, saying “Ira bad boy.” Nobody knew why. He knew what was right, as he proved his whole life in his immigration work.
LOVE: Memories of Ira hugging and dancing with Esther in the kitchen at Rockaway in the ‘50s. Much later, we all marveled at his and Ruth’s poetic vows when they wed.
LOYALTY: On Ira’s visit to me in 1995, after my losses and gall bladder operation, he made me feel protected. Then, in 1997, Ira flew to Indiana to spend hours with his sister Bea on her last day; such a gift to her. Finally, in summer 2007 he and Ruth came to Indiana for Mike’s [Lipschutz] retirement, not an easy trip.
HEALTH: Ira told me I’d have health and long life when I desired food that was good for my body, advice he lived by. Another family story tells of Ira waylaid by blackberries on bike trips with his brother Bill in the ‘30’s. Into his eighties and nineties, he’d hug so strongly he’d pick me up, saying that’s why he worked out, to hug … and carry a suitcase, and he did.
While Ira could never convince me of the centrality of dialectical materialism, he taught me much more. He was the last of his generation in my family. I can only hope his legacy will be one of health, justice, loyalty, and love.
There was to be a memorial in honor of Ruth, but Ira died days before the service, so they’re together, appropriately so. Ruth was a wonderful “second life” partner for my Uncle Ira, sharing experiences, commitment, and love. Her life was fully experienced, with passion for justice, theater, photography, art. Her last years robbed her of options, but not of her sense of humor or dignity. She made me a stronger person, and I will miss and remember her.
Tribute to Ruth Baharas Gollobin and Ira Gollobin July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Ruth, Testimonials , comments closedGerald Sider
Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus,
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
New York, NY
I met Ruth in 1980, when we both lived in Park West Village. Ruth at that point was struggling to support herself — the price paid for a life on the left, and in exile, and a return to the U.S. with job experiences such as being a translator for the Polish State Radio. When I met her she owned two typewriters, one of which typed right-to-left, in Yiddish, for the Forward newspaper, and one of which typed left to right in English. She typed on both late into the night, piece-rate work. Little by little, with much encouragement from friends, she worked herself up out of this difficult spot. As she did, and her optimism increased, she met Ira, and the two fell — or better, ascended — in love.
This relationship, as it developed, was wonderful to behold. Ruth would tell me how much she loved Ira, but she couldn’t marry him because he admired Mao; and Ira, as I got to know this wonderful man, would tell me how much he loved Ruth, but he couldn’t marry her because of her commitments to Soviet versions of the future! My task was to tell Ira that many flowers bloom on the left — a variant of the old Maoist slogan — and remind Ruth about early internationalist forms of left struggle. I had very little work to do on this; they were increasingly committed to each other.
One of the very special features of their developing relationship was their morning run. I would see them, dressed up in nearly identical gray sweat suits, with thick blue wool watch caps on their heads, like dockworkers, and what looked on them like enormous running shoes. They were both so thin, so light, that the running shoes hardly bent when they moved — they were like two wonderfully impish children, each with their characteristic wry smile — in an adult version of the kind of flat-soled shoes that toddlers used to wear. But these dear souls, Ruth and Ira, side by side, very slowly and very surely ran the whole six miles around Central Park together, week after week, most of that winter and spring in the early 1980s. They only looked somewhat frail; they were actually as strong, and of course as strong-willed, as they come.
In recent years — to skip ahead in the stories — I had two engagements with Ira and Ruth. Ira and I talked frequently about the book he was writing on the rise of the state — the critique of the state, actually, in long-historical terms. Ira worked on this with special focus and intensity over the past several years, and his daughter Ruth, much to his appreciation, typed and retyped it into the computer, where it now resides, not quite finished. (If people are interested in helping me investigate the possibility of finishing this book, please contact me at gsider2@gmail.com.) Ruth and I for the past several years would go on Thursday mornings to the Philharmonic rehearsals at Lincoln Center. It was a chance to see wonderful music put together, as the conductor worked with the orchestra. Both of us liked this much more than the actual concerts. It was also a chance, in our pre-concert kaffee-klatsch, the intermission, and afterward, for Ruth to teach me about the history of the American left, for and with which she had worked so hard for so much of her life.
Ruth and Ira were, each in their own way and also together, activist intellectuals — the very best kind of activists, and the very best kind of intellectuals. In this, and more concretely in their lives as they made them daily, they stand as monuments to the best of the left, as ideals for us to follow, and most of all as people who it was wonder-full to know and to love. Rest peacefully in the struggle for justice and equality, dear special Ruth and dear special Ira.
A Meaningful Life Indeed! July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Ruth, Testimonials , comments closedJoseph Eger, Pompano Beach, FL
Conductor/Music Director, Symphony for the United Nations
Ruth was a wonderful woman in partnership with a most extraordinary man, a truly great man of any time. What a privilege it has been for me to know them, though in a limited way.
Ruth [Gollobin-Basta] dear, I’m of your family, of the human family Ira represented, for he was one of the most human, like Beethoven. Anyone who experiences either Beethoven or Ira becomes, ipso facto, more human, becomes more of what our species can be, the farthest reaches of our magical species-being. I recall discussing this aspect of music many times with Ira.
I first met Ira via my best friend, Ralph Dale, another giant who revered and respected an even greater giant, your father. Ralph too passed during this year. Now I must think for myself with Ira’s Dialectical Materialism in front of me.
I had the great good fortune of having Ira in my home as my guest less than a year ago, but visited him in his office many times, gaining wisdom as I struggled with my book and my unceasing, varied activities to make the world a little better. Ira’s wisdom knew no bounds, whether historical, literary, Marxist, or in everyday struggle.
I envy you having had such a father, and give you my love for all of him that is in you. The world is smaller without him.