My Memory of Ruth July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ruth, Testimonials , comments closedDr. Krystyna Domurat Warsaw, Poland
Ruth was my close friend for many years. We met in a sanatorium in Ciechocinek. She worked in the editor’s office of Polish Radio and I worked for the Polish Academy of Science. Beyond our friendship we translated together into English some research work. Thank goodness Ruth’s research was faultless and invaluable in the international scientific market.
During Ruth’s stay in Poland, we spent a few holidays together, mostly in the mountains. After her departure from Poland, I visited with her in Copenhagen, where I stayed for a month in 1971. Some time after she returned to the U.S., Ruth invited me to New York, where she came to live with her second husband, Ira Gollobin.
In spite of a huge distance, our friendship was still favorable and hearty and we were keeping up with correspondence and phone calls. It is very sad to me that Ruth is gone.
Lawyer’s Hero, Ladies’ Man July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Testimonials , comments closedJanet Higbie, Chelsea, NY
I came to know Ira and Ruth fairly recently, when I was in my last year at New York Law School, and he was a young man of 93. I was researching Kong Hai Chew v. Colding, one of Ira’s greatest cases, and I was fascinated to listen as he talked for hours about his life and work. One line in particular has stayed with me from those talks.
Ira, like others in the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and the Lawyers Guild, represented clients called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington and its New York State counterpart in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. There was a continuing debate among the lawyers about how to handle their clients’ predicament: If they testified that they had done nothing wrong, they would be jailed for perjury; if they refused to answer certain questions, they would be found in contempt; if they invoked the Fifth Amendment, they sounded like criminals.
Ira and some of his allies came up with a strategy that essentially turned the tables. Since the committee was ignoring the principle of relevance, they would too. At mock hearings, they prepared their clients to confront the committee members with questions about their voting records, lectures on the Constitution, and free-association riffs on any question they were asked. One client, asked to state his name for the record, answered, “My mother named me Patrick, because St. Patrick chased the snakes out of Ireland!” This would enrage the committee, and Ira would be asked to control his client; he would just shrug and try not to laugh. Eventually, the client would claim the Fifth, but not without lecturing the committee on its purpose, to protect people from false accusations.
Ira summarized the HUAC-baiting strategy with a wry rhetorical question. “It’s a game of cat-and-mouse,” he said, wagging his finger. “But who is the cat and who is the mouse?” I love that line, and find inspiration in it, because it encapsulates the determination, resourcefulness, and humor that carried him through dark times.
My other favorite memory is more recent. When Ruth fell ill, Ira, then 96, threw himself into caring for her, approaching the problem like a legal case — reviewing the options, researching the medical aspects, conferring with experts, and hiring a top-notch lieutenant, Wendy Clarke. Still, he found the energy to keep up his reputation as a ladies’ man, though in actual practice that involved nothing more than heavy-duty flirting and big hugs to friends of any gender. One day this January, I was at St. Vincent’s, where a small crowd, including Jocelyn McCalla, the long-time Haitian rights advocate, had gathered to try to help Ira help Ruth, who was barely conscious. After a half-hour, I headed down the hall with Jocelyn to go out for a bite to eat and some computer advice. Ira, feigning envy, waved his hands in the air and called after us, “Oh, to be 90 again!”
Highlights of My Uncle Ira July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Testimonials , comments closedLinda Lowenthal Lipschutz, Radnor, PA
“Highlights” because he was truly one of the two most radiant stars in my personal universe. The other is my husband, Mike, who has a planet, 2641 Lipschutz, named for him.
From My Childhood: My first recollection of my Uncle Ira was in his army uniform, in 1942, when he came home after being drafted. His hugs for me were huge, and they have been bear hugs ever since. Uncle Ira was my mother Beatrice’s (Basha’s) baby brother. She adored him — for his sweetness and for his intellect. When Ira and Ruth married, on June 11, 1994, it was Bea who walked Ira down the aisle to join his bride.
Bringing Up Three Sons in Indiana: Middle-school boys from the Midwest, visiting their Cousin Ruthie alone in the BIG city: this was ENORMOUS. As a parent, I knew that my Uncle Ira and Aunt Esther had raised two incredible daughters.
More Recently: When our oldest son, Josh, married Lisa Hines, in San Francisco, in 2000, Ira and Ruth came all the way across the country to be with us. In June of last year, they came to Indiana for a slew of family celebrations, including Ira’s ninety-sixth birthday. Ira told me at that time that he was taking his role as “family patriarch very seriously.” Mark, our second son, his wife Stephanie, and their twin children, Jackie and Sara, have come from San Diego, CA, to be here today because Uncle Ira was so important to them. Jonathan, our youngest son, and his wife have a new baby, or they would be here also. Jonathan loved Uncle Ira very much, too. As an audiologist, he was able to help Ira with his hearing aids.
The National Lawyers Guild NYC Chapter, 68th Anniversary Dinner, Honoring Ira Gollobin (and Saluting the Chapter’s Immigration Lawyers and Advocates), 2005: With perhaps, and I’m guessing, 500 people in attendance, including many in our family, it was a culmination of my Uncle Ira’s lifetime of brilliant legal work on behalf of immigrants, perhaps the most vulnerable sector of our American melting pot. I videotaped Ira’s entire keynote address to the Guild and guests. It was a magnificent address in which he presented his philosophical views of civil liberties, and of how “basic human values [tie in with] cherished national traditions.” Ira’s daughter, Ruth, has the video tape, and would gladly lend it for viewing.
Uncle Ira was the last of my parents’ generation: for me, an extraordinary and profoundly good group of human beings.
Uncle Ira July 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Ira, Testimonials , comments closedMichael Lipschutz, Radnor, PA
We had some wonderful interactions with Uncle Ira and his family over the years, but unfortunately fewer than we would have liked because we lived in Indiana for 43 years (plus Bern, Switzerland, and Tel Aviv) until May of this year. One of the most recent, and therefore the freshest in our recollection, occurred about two years ago, when he and Ruth visited us for almost a week in Indiana. The purpose of the trip was to go to Springfield, Illinois, to visit the new Lincoln Museum and Library, and see other sites there, associated with Abraham Lincoln.
As most of you may know, Ira was particularly passionate about Lincoln and his deeds. To be able to show Ira and Ruth the house and neighborhood where Lincoln lived, his law office, and his personal possessions was the greatest of privileges. It was fascinating and truly moving to hear Ira describe Lincoln’s actions and decisions, as we were surrounded by Lincoln’s physical and spiritual possessions.
When my wife Linda photographed Ira beside Lincoln’s life-sized statue, we almost felt that the two were meeting. And that would have been a meeting of two equally great minds.
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.